5 ms·

Pixar's comment on the passing of Steve Jobs.

137 points by brackin 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago
I'd been hitting refresh on that URL for awhile now waiting for that.
- brackin 15y ago
  As have I, was interested to see their response. Love the photo they used.
  - cdh 15y ago
    Check out what an amazing job they did of restoring what is, as far as I can tell, the original: http://i.imgur.com/s2uRg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/s2uRg.jpg
    - peterb 15y ago
      IMO, the original is better.
      - tricolon 15y ago
        That's a pretty well-executed photo, though a bit stretched.
    - cowmix 15y ago
      If PIXAR can't resort a photo, no one can. In fact, I sure they re-rendered it.
bennesvig 15y ago
If anyone hasn't seen it, the documentary The Pixar Story is on Netflix Instant. It's a great documentary that features a few interviews with Steve Jobs and tells of the rise of Pixar.
channelmeter 15y ago
From the Marin Independent Journal, the paper of the Ed Catmull's home: "Some people put marketing at the top of ... the success for the business," Catmull added. "What he did was he made the quality of what he was working on the most important thing." http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_19051009?source=most_viewed http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_19051009?source=most_vie...
- davvid 15y ago
  This is completely true. When Pixar bought Disney for -7 billion it completely changed the atmosphere at the Disney Animation studio. The first thing Ed and John did was fire all of the executives who were making story decisions and let the storytellers go back to telling stories. There's still a lot of work to be done but things are finally back on the right track. "Quality is the best business plan" -- John Lasseter
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > When Pixar bought Disney for -7 billion it completely changed the atmosphere at the Disney Animation studio. This sounds strangely reminiscent of Apple's acquisition by NeXT.
Produce 15y ago
Why are you all paying so much attention to this man? He did nothing good with his life, just distracted a lot of people with shiny stuff while reaching into their pockets. He did so in a creative way, but this is hardly someone to be praised for his accomplishments.
- danssig 15y ago
  I don't understand why this troll post hasn't been down voted into the background by now. What Steve did that was so important was he finally started forcing technology to bend to our whims instead of the other way around. I remember when I finally bought my first Apple anything: a unibody MBP. I had played around with the new mouse pad for hours in various stores before I finally decided I was going to make the switch. For the development I do at home Windows was always the worst platform anyway, so why not. I took the thing home and had everything set up in a way I could use in less than an hour. After never having touched OSX before. When I contrast that with the ~2 days of screwing around I always had with each new windows installation (which had to be repeated per machine for every upgrade and sometimes as normal maintenance!) it was really eye opening. Then the iPad came out and pushed that even further. Now instead of having a dedicated room with a desktop setting in it, most people can have a magazine sitting on their coffee table that happens to also do everything they needed a computer for. That's a huge step forward and I honestly don't know when we would have ever saw it if Steve didn't show us the way. He didn't cure cancer but he was a hacker like us who had effects far outside his domain.
  - Produce 15y ago
    These ideas were always obvious in our culture. Slick, touch screen devices were in films long before the iPhone. I applaud him for the execution and marketing but that's it. There is nothing exciting about locking a platform down and having a reliable end product either. Linux - completely flexible, unpopular as a desktop OS; Windows - partially locked down, popular but not loved; Mac OS - completely locked down, not widespread but loved. Controlling a tight environment is an order of magnitude easier. Someone was going to take that corner of the market and it just happened to be him. I would call someone like this an anti-hacker for he lived with a philosophy which was distinctly against the grain of hacker culture and his own technical ability was sub-par. He was an entrepreneur, a great one at that. The issue I have is that this is considered to be such important news when people who have made more than a superficial impact on the world (innovating luxury goods is about as far from that as I can imagine) are completely ignored here when they perish.

137 points by brackin 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

I'd been hitting refresh on that URL for awhile now waiting for that.

brackin 15y ago
As have I, was interested to see their response. Love the photo they used.
- cdh 15y ago
  Check out what an amazing job they did of restoring what is, as far as I can tell, the original: http://i.imgur.com/s2uRg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/s2uRg.jpg
  - peterb 15y ago
    IMO, the original is better.
    - tricolon 15y ago
      That's a pretty well-executed photo, though a bit stretched.
  - cowmix 15y ago
    If PIXAR can't resort a photo, no one can. In fact, I sure they re-rendered it.

bennesvig 15y ago

If anyone hasn't seen it, the documentary The Pixar Story is on Netflix Instant. It's a great documentary that features a few interviews with Steve Jobs and tells of the rise of Pixar.

channelmeter 15y ago

From the Marin Independent Journal, the paper of the Ed Catmull's home: "Some people put marketing at the top of ... the success for the business," Catmull added. "What he did was he made the quality of what he was working on the most important thing." http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_19051009?source=most_viewed http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_19051009?source=most_vie...

davvid 15y ago
This is completely true. When Pixar bought Disney for -7 billion it completely changed the atmosphere at the Disney Animation studio. The first thing Ed and John did was fire all of the executives who were making story decisions and let the storytellers go back to telling stories. There's still a lot of work to be done but things are finally back on the right track. "Quality is the best business plan" -- John Lasseter
- masklinn 15y ago
  > When Pixar bought Disney for -7 billion it completely changed the atmosphere at the Disney Animation studio. This sounds strangely reminiscent of Apple's acquisition by NeXT.

Produce 15y ago

Why are you all paying so much attention to this man? He did nothing good with his life, just distracted a lot of people with shiny stuff while reaching into their pockets. He did so in a creative way, but this is hardly someone to be praised for his accomplishments.

danssig 15y ago
I don't understand why this troll post hasn't been down voted into the background by now. What Steve did that was so important was he finally started forcing technology to bend to our whims instead of the other way around. I remember when I finally bought my first Apple anything: a unibody MBP. I had played around with the new mouse pad for hours in various stores before I finally decided I was going to make the switch. For the development I do at home Windows was always the worst platform anyway, so why not. I took the thing home and had everything set up in a way I could use in less than an hour. After never having touched OSX before. When I contrast that with the ~2 days of screwing around I always had with each new windows installation (which had to be repeated per machine for every upgrade and sometimes as normal maintenance!) it was really eye opening. Then the iPad came out and pushed that even further. Now instead of having a dedicated room with a desktop setting in it, most people can have a magazine sitting on their coffee table that happens to also do everything they needed a computer for. That's a huge step forward and I honestly don't know when we would have ever saw it if Steve didn't show us the way. He didn't cure cancer but he was a hacker like us who had effects far outside his domain.
- Produce 15y ago
  These ideas were always obvious in our culture. Slick, touch screen devices were in films long before the iPhone. I applaud him for the execution and marketing but that's it. There is nothing exciting about locking a platform down and having a reliable end product either. Linux - completely flexible, unpopular as a desktop OS; Windows - partially locked down, popular but not loved; Mac OS - completely locked down, not widespread but loved. Controlling a tight environment is an order of magnitude easier. Someone was going to take that corner of the market and it just happened to be him. I would call someone like this an anti-hacker for he lived with a philosophy which was distinctly against the grain of hacker culture and his own technical ability was sub-par. He was an entrepreneur, a great one at that. The issue I have is that this is considered to be such important news when people who have made more than a superficial impact on the world (innovating luxury goods is about as far from that as I can imagine) are completely ignored here when they perish.