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Several details of this story stuck out to me: An engineer who lives across the street from the CEO and carpools with him. Not so common anymore, though I seem
by microtherion 6y ago
Several details of this story stuck out to me:
An engineer who lives across the street from the CEO and carpools with him. Not so common anymore, though I seem to recall that Java started with an engineer who played hockey with Scott McNealy.
The CEO having a consulting company do a market survey and the deciding "ah, whatever, I want one of these, let's go ahead".
I think especially the latter story seems typical for Hewlett, in that he was neither a by-the-book corporate drone, nor an utterly reckless damn-the-torpedoes type, but somebody who was willing to trust his instincts and take calculated risks at times.
- acqq 6y agoThe story continues with one later CEO who did enough low level stuff (even if together with a partner who was a genius exactly for these topics) to be able to understand the products on all levels, who as a boy cold called Bill Hewlett: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/how-steve-jobs-cold-called-his-way-to-an-internship-at-hewlett-packard.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/how-steve-jobs-cold-called-h... Note: Steve Jobs, employed as a "technician fixing up and tweaking circuit board designs" even sold as his the improvement of the hardware implementation of the Pong successor bringing Wozniak to "help" him: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_Employee_Number_40.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_... Jobs started his career with working on the pure hardware. Later, he had many opportunities to learn about all hardware and software aspects of the projects he lead.