4 ms·
You're writing like Jobs kept Woz out of the spotlight. 1. Woz didn't obviously try to be a leader. He got very rich at Apple then went back to college in 1981
by gilgoomesh 6y ago
You're writing like Jobs kept Woz out of the spotlight.
1. Woz didn't obviously try to be a leader. He got very rich at Apple then went back to college in 1981 and eventually left Apple to work in education and small ventures.
2. Steve Jobs himself was sidelined at Apple and ended up on the Mac after getting kicked out of the mainstream projects at the company and was fired in 1985.
The sad story about early Apple is that their marketing, management and board didn't seem to understand product design or engineering at all and were downright poisonous to their best performing employees. Jobs, Woz, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Rod Holt were all gone by early 1986.
Rod Holt described early Apple like this: "after working what seemed to be sixteen-hour days and seven day weeks, I was exiled by new management — the fourth member out of five of the original Apple team to be retired or pushed out".
- colejohnson66 6y agoThe idea/claim that Jobs forced Woz out of the spotlight is a common one. It’s based in the idea that Apple wouldn’t’ve become anything without Woz, but that’s equally true about Jobs. Woz was the brains, but Jobs was the vision and marketing; he knew what to build, how to convince people to build it, and how to make people want something they didn’t know they wanted.
- antattack 6y agoIt could be because Jobs did get a job at Atari pretending that Woze'es work was his (or at the least not correct Atari's assumption) Also, Jobs lied to Woz, pocketing most of the money he made from Woz work optimizing a circuit board.
- colejohnson66 6y agoJobs isn’t benevolent by any stretch of the imagination. He was an egotistical jerk quite often, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t part of what built Apple at the beginning. Woz alone never would’ve gotten there alone.
- nitrogen 6y agoAre there examples of companies where a Woz-like figure maintained the lead, and were quietly supportes by a business savvy second-in-command, instead of the other way around? Both roles still present, but the visibility reversed?
- yesbabyyes 6y agoI wouldn't claim Gates and Wozniak are very similar in every way (and even less so Jobs and Ballmer), but for the sake of argument: Gates / Ballmer? And even though Schmidt was CEO, it seems to me like Brin & Page were very much in control, with Schmidt working for them rather than the other way around. Moore Noyce, and later Grove, seem to have kept the reins at Intel for a long time. I'm sure there are other examples.
- zepto 6y agoSeems like a very unrealistic view of Gates. It’s true that he was highly technical, but any research into early Microsoft casts him as just as aggressive and cutthroat as Jobs. The Brin/Page example seems more realistic to me. It’s not at all obvious that they were ‘in control’ though. Google today seems like a function of corporate managers like Schmidt and very little like the force for good that early Page and Brin seemed to envision.
- 908B64B197 6y ago> but any research into early Microsoft casts him as just as aggressive and cutthroat as Jobs. Only difference is, he knew what he was talking about. [0] https://lowendmac.com/2015/apple-iii-chaos-apples-first-failure/ https://lowendmac.com/2015/apple-iii-chaos-apples-first-fail... [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=PC_Board_Esthetics.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=Steve+Jobs https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
- deleted 6y ago