Jobs biography

[Carrie Cobol]

So I'm reading the new biography of Steve jobs.  Im no fanboy of him, but have grown to love the apple products.  The book is interesting in the frame of reference of my twenty years as a corporate slave.  Jobs was a dirty, smelly, counter culture hippie with no social graces and an overweening sense of pride and greatness.  He was a total asshole.  By corporate standards, he was unhirable.  But look at what he accomplished.  Impressive.

[John Masterson]

Carrie,

I have read a bit of the book, and listened to people talk about the rest of it.  Overall, there was just something really disconcerting to me about Jobs and the way he treated people in his life.

His skills apparently meshed really well with the Apple corporate mission. And really good products emerged as a result.  But boy, I would not have wanted to work with him...from what I gather from the book.

[Carrie Cobol]

I agree, me neither.  I commented to my husband that I'd be like "fuuuuck youuuu!" and walk out.  I have no tolerance for arrogant rudeness like that.  There was a very brief mention early in the book that he was routinely rude to restaurant waiters and such.  That's one of my red flags for considering anybody worth respecting.  Date, friend, or boss - if the treat servers or janitorial staff like crap, they don't get the time of day from me.

[John Masterson]

I'm with you: how a person treats a waiter or waitress is a HUGE indicator to me, of their essential personality and character.

[The Gorn]

I'm with you: how a person treats a waiter or waitress is a HUGE indicator to me, of their essential personality and character.

I'm generally very nice to the service person (assuming that they have done nothing to piss me off) and mercilessly ruthless toward owners and managers from whom I believe that bad service emanates. I don't know what that makes me. 

[Carrie Cobol]

I'm up to the point where he's started NeXT and Pixar.  The chapter about starting NeXt was very telling and surprising.  He was purely a child in a candy store - money to play with, but not a lick of common sense or even business sense.  Demanding that the product have 90 degree angles even if it increases production costs to exhorbitant levels, demanding that the factory machinery be painted bright pretty colors.  He did that at the Macintosh factory too, but the other execs over-ruled him a bit.  At NeXT, there wasn't anybody to tell him he was being stupid.  It sounds like the NeXT factory looked like Disneyland.  Oh, and gutting and lavishly redesigning the hq office for NeXT.  This was all before there was even a single product to sell.

You look at that and wonder how in the world the man was EVER successful.  But then contrast it with when he and Woz started Apple.  For Apple, they had no money, so they had to do the traditional bootstrap of building and selling a little, then a little more, then more.  For NeXT, he had no constraints and his utter lack of business sense really shone.

I find this very fascinating.

[John Masterson]

Carrie,

I am enjoying reading your synopses.

I had this thought: how much better would Apple and NeXt have succeeded if Jobs had not had some of the more eccentric quirks that harmed morale and drained the budget?

It was probably a "package deal": you don't get the brilliant ideas without the silly things he demanded.

[The Gorn]

Re: NeXT. I remember when it came out. Everything about it seemed irrational in an OCD way. Everything was different, from-scratch and oddball.

There are several Youtube videos around of people burning the magnesium cases from old NeXTs.

[John Masterson]

Re: NeXT. I remember when it came out. Everything about it seemed irrational in an OCD way. Everything was different, from-scratch and oddball.

There are several Youtube videos around of people burning the magnesium cases from old NeXTs.

That's really interesting about the irrational, obsessive quality to the NeXT code. Objective-C came from NeXT, and I find it somewhat "wordy" and tedious compared with coding C# in .Net.

[The Gorn]

Well, everything I heard or read about NeXT was like they were trying to create an entire computer culture (language, platform, hardware) from scratch and shove it down your throat. Which Jobs was actually trying to do.

[Walter Mitty]

John,

That's spot on.  I've met two or three people that I would genuinely classify as geniuses.  They generate several very novel ideas per day.  Most of those ideas are klunkers.  The few good ideas make up for all the rest.  You have to take the bad with the good.

I think Woz needed Jobs just as much as Jobs needed Woz.  Together they made a team.  And it was about making a new culture right from the Apple I.  I was never a part of that culture, nor did I want to be.  But the culture was part of what Apple gave the world. 

What was the great innovation in the Apple I?  The fact that it came in a plastic case, with all the electronics hidden.  That is what distinguished it from the Altair, or the various kits peolpe were selling.  It turns out that you can't sell "user friendly" without the plastic case.    There's no explaining this to people who think Apple was dumb.  There's no need to explain it to Appleheads.

PS:  I also am glad that I never worked for Jobs.

[The Gorn]

What was the great innovation in the Apple I?  The fact that it came in a plastic case, with all the electronics hidden.  That is what distinguished it from the Altair, or the various kits peolpe were selling.  It turns out that you can't sell "user friendly" without the plastic case.    There's no explaining this to people who think Apple was dumb.  There's no need to explain it to Appleheads.

I worked in a couple of the first personal computer stores in the late 1970s.  We sold everything *but* Apple. We tended to sell computer brands like Southwest Technical Products, IMSAI, and Cromemco that demanded a lot of user knowledge and intervention. In other words they were primarily kits but for an "added fee" we would build them for the customer. But there was no real documentation beyond schematics.

I suspect that this was because the owner of the store was a EE and believed that users should also be enthusiasts and adopters.

The key marketing innovation of Apple computers is that they transformed what was a messy electronics hobby niche into a simplified, easy to comprehend package. You had business people back in that time period buying Apple IIs and then throwing Visicalc onto them. With our store's stuff every business need required custom hardware or a consultation to determine which package would fit the customer's needs.

Many customers would enter our store, we would spend a ton of time with them explaining how things would work, and they would walk out with a look of terror in their eyes. Especially when it was married couples coming in - the women would axe the whole idea even if the husband wanted the system.

But the other store in town that sold Apple II's had fantastic prosperity compared to us and gangbuster business.

I never really got all of this and the geek centric nature of our "customer profile" that killed the store's chances, until a few years ago. I think the owner was too wrapped up in being a geek to get it.

So Jobs understood this 5 years before everyone else in the PC industry did.

[datagirl]

I've often wondered, after encounters with Apple enthusiasts, if there is not some subliminal something going on.  They all get this same enraptured look on their faces whenever they talk about their computers. 

The Woz / Jobs model of business startups is not unique, and is the geek equivalent of attaining musical success via a garage band.  There has to be genuine *talent* in order to go far.

Good thread, Carrie.  Thanks.

-DG

[Walter Mitty]

But the other store in town that sold Apple II's had fantastic prosperity compared to us and gangbuster business.


So Jobs understood this 5 years before everyone else in the PC industry did.

And that's what Steve Jobs understood.  And that's why the Apple came in a plastic case.  And that's why he insisted on those colors in the manufacturing plant. 

I never really got this, either at the time.   The first time I saw a Mac, I thought it was for stupid people.  But the guy who bought it loved that machine.  He wanted to write.  Every computer he had used before the Mac forced him to think about the computer.  The Mac let him think about his writing.  Jobs built stuff that made people glad they had bought it.

Creating a culture is integral to creating this success.  And I say that as an outsider to the Apple culture.  But I understand the role that culture plays in human motivation and adapted behavior. 


I tell you, if the Bolsheviks had managed to create a "communist culture", they would have had to build a wall to keep people out instead of building one to keep people in. 

[Walter Mitty]

It's interesting to compare the Mac and the Alto.  The Alto was probably the better machine.  But the Mac was built for the market that was emerging.  The Alto was made with the idea that somebody else would figure out how to sell it.  Jobs made products that he could sell  himself.