7 ms·

Kind of OT, but a little sad thing I noticed in the "Jobs" movie trailer (at least the version they are showing in Brazil) is that while the images are clearly

• angersock 13y ago
  It's part of the mythos--nevermind the engineers that actually built anything.
• Sagat 13y ago
  This is probably just a side effect of the legacy that led to this film being made in the first place... the mythology surrounding Jobs.
• danso 13y ago
  That's just sad, and something that inspires an all too common megalomania among wanna-be CEOs who think that, if they have the same ego as Steve Jobs, that their vision and passion shall too drive a revolution. Woz was the critical factor to Apple's early success, and the momentum the Apple ][ bequeathed gave Jobs the significant runway to make real his vision. And vice versa, being a stellar engineer alone won't necessarily lead you to success...Woz readily admits at he'd still be at HP, making calculators, if it weren't for Jobs (though Woz would be content either way because, well, he's the Woz)
  • michaelwww 13y ago
    This is the most balanced comment on this thread I've read so far. Woz and Jobs were the Yin and Yang of Apple's success. Comparing the two misses the bigger picture. I don't really get the reason for the argument: I never hear people arguing about Ben and Jerry, Gates and Allen, or Hewlett and Packard. The only reason I can think of is that for some people Jobs has ascended to heaven where he reigns as a god with no equal.
• antimagic 13y ago
  Well, the quote is about just starting the revolution, not finishing it. If it helps, consider this - Jobs could probably have found another brilliant engineer to fill the role of Wozniak in the startup of Apple. I don't think Wozniak could have found another Jobs (or would even have tried - after all it was Jobs that found Wozniak, and not the other way round).
  • pmelendez 13y ago
    >" If it helps, consider this - Jobs could probably have found another brilliant engineer to fill the role of Wozniak in the startup of Apple" I disagree, if he would never met Wozniak, Jobs wouldn't have any product at all (hence he wouldn't have an engineering role to fill at all). As for Wosniak, he would eventually find an executive guy inside HP with the guts to produce it (Woz mildly tried that when he was forced to go full time to Apple) To put you in context, Apple I was the first personal computer that resembles the ones that we have today, before that there was just the Altair which was a kit to build a computer unit with switches as input and leds as output)
    • goatforce5 13y ago
      Even if Woz had found support to build a microcomputer within HP, it almost inevitably would have been watered down or corrupted as some sort of 'design by committee' took over. Sacrifices made to meet budgetary or time constraints, etc. The purity of his vision would have been lost, and the Apple I wouldn't have been an Apple I.
      • Goronmon 13y ago
        The purity of his vision would have been lost, and the Apple I wouldn't have been an Apple I. Maybe it would have been better?
        • jasonwocky 13y ago
          Better for whom? HP was an organization designed to make money in a certain way at the time, from certain kinds of customers, and most likely the Apple I's design would have been influenced by that business model (to its detriment, revolution-wise).
• pmelendez 13y ago
  Actually it was one person who "started" the revolution, but at least one more person (with money and business skills) was needed to make that product accessible to the masses. By the way, Jobs was not any of those two people. The real revolutionary guy was Wozniak and the business man who turned the Apple I into the Apple II (with money and business skills was Mike Markkula) I would highly recommend you to read Accidental Empires and iWoz if you are curious about those stories.
  • mr_luc 13y ago
    I have to say, Isaacson's book definitely did a good job of highlighting the importance of Mike Markkula in Apple's story. It's amazing how 'right' Markkula was, at least in the bits cited by Isaacson.
    • kamaal 13y ago
      After reading Isaacson's book, I lost all respect I had for Steve Jobs. It felt he continually found some one whom he could exploit to keep his career going.
      • vasilipupkin 13y ago
        I am sorry you sort of missed the forest for the trees. I think the book is quite a bit nuanced with respect to Steve Jobs and I came away from it with an entirely different feeling.
        • kamaal 13y ago
          I did get the forest though. I understand Jobs had a exceptional understanding of one thing- 'Aesthetics'. This one thing is what separates him from rest of the pack. I don't know if it was because of his Buddhist faith- but he did understand beauty and simplicity in a unique winning combination. This explains why nearly everything he touched turned to gold. Because you are now delivering very beautiful products which are also at the same very simple to use. But that is besides the point. They are repeated instances on how he was anti-loyalty. The whole book had stories how he screwed his friends regularly. But the point you see here is totally ridiculous. Steve Jobs did by no means start 'The revolution'. Revolution is what I call TCP/IP, Internet, Unix and things like that. I look at Job's awesome products as Toys. I've seen brilliant toys out there. They are awesome in their own right. But this hero worship, and things like 'one man revolution' is going a bit too far.
• wslh 13y ago
  I know it sounds bad, but some "penalty" (adding a rating system for lies?) should exist for plain lies and fake revisionism in films. The extreme of this in another context are the laws against Holocaust denial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial we can't obviously compare the Steve Jobs film with it, but the cinema has a long tradition of modifying historical facts without the typical disclaimer.
  • alexjeffrey 13y ago
    a recent example of this taken to extremes would be the film "Mermaid: the body found" - pretending to be a documentary claiming evidence of the existence of mermaids, until the credits roll and reveal that the whole film and most of the evidence was a fiction. Granted the subject matter is unlikely, but the deception comes off as very unethical.
  • pmelendez 13y ago
    Well... it is fiction "inspired" by real facts. The point is that people should be aware but that is not the case for the most part.
  • throwit1979 13y ago
    Offtopic. That link is incredibly scary. On what basis does Europe justify making an incorrect opinion illegal? And why that opinion, specifically? Why not criminalize a belief in God, or alien visitation?
    • widdershins 13y ago
      Because that incorrect belief tries to erase and cover up the murder of millions of people. I'm not sure if that's right, but that is the motivation.
    • jbooth 13y ago
      At a specific time and place in 1945 this law makes a ton of sense, and it's actually done a lot of good. Compare german - european relations with japanese - chinese/korean/filipino relations. Maybe it should have a sunset provision for the sake of free speech, although I don't think you'll find many MPs signing up to sponsor that bill.
• vidarh 13y ago
  If you're going to nitpick about that, then Apple didn't start any revolutions either until the iPod. They were one of a range of companies starting to mass produce "proper" home computers with keyboards and support for proper displays around the same time, and consistently in the third place in sales numbers of the three (Apple, Tandy, Commodore) that launched their computers on the West Coast Computer Faire in '77If you're going to nitpick about that, then Apple didn't start any revolutions either until the iPod. EDIT: Of course the Apple I was out before that show, but it was produced in miniscule quantities - about 200 -, and just a board, and competed with a number of other small production runs of other home computers including ones that were out well before the Apple I, like the Altair; the Apple I had some firsts that made it significant, such as being the first pre-assembled board to come with support for proper displays (but display hardware had become available for other machines like the Altair as well). But pretty much every new computer from well before the Apple I and to well after it had some significant first.
  • abecedarius 13y ago
    IIRC out of the big 3, the Apple ][ was first on the market available to consumers; the other two were thrown together after the Apple got shopped to Tandy and Commodore. (I'm not completely sure of this memory.) It was clearly a much better computer than the other two; I doubt the PET and TRS-80 would have succeeded for long if Apple weren't already fond of high margins.
    • vidarh 13y ago
      The Apple II started shipping in volume a couple of months earlier, but they were all introduced to the US market at the same time (in fact the PET had been demonstrated publicly earlier - in January 1977 at the Hannover Fair). A timeline claiming Commodore talked to Apple first, doesn't work. Chuck Peddle, who ended up doing the PET, was at MOS Technologies when he started planning it, and had presented it to the board at MOS. When their board rejected the idea, he was considering leaving for another job when Commodore acquired MOS and got him to stay by entering into an agreement with him to build the Pet after Peddle presented his Pet idea to Commodore. Then, after assembling a team at Commodore to build a computer, he approached Apple (whom he knew because they were of course one of the early customers of MOS, and Peddle designed the 6502) with the intent of considering an acquisition of the company as a quick way of getting a prototype done. There are disputes about who did what to whom in terms of rejecting the deal. What is clear is that Commodore did see it as one option of serveral to get a prototype out the door quickly, but at the same time they had already assembled their own design team before talking to Apple, as well as talked Microsoft into doing a BASIC for them (despite Gates apparently demonstrating deep disdain for the 6502 CPU). The reason for talking to Apple in the first place was explicitly that Commodore would be using the 6502 which it now owned, and so it was natural to talk to them to short circuit the development cycle. So both Commodore (and Tandy, who started even later) are quite good demonstrations at the pace the industry was taking with or without Apple: Commodore went from nothing to a working machine in 5 months, and to mass production in about 10 months. Tandy went from nothing to presenting a machine at the West Coast Computer Faire in three months. In terms of margins, I don't think Apple had high margins at the time. Their production volumes were tiny, and contrary to e.g. Commodore, they lacked vertical integration - Commodore stayed on the verge of collapse for years despite owning the company (MOS) that manufactured both the CPU, graphics chip, keyboards and many other critical parts of the Pet and shipping far higher volumes than Apple could dream of.
• theycallmemorty 13y ago
  Would it have been easier for Woz to find a different Jobs or Jobs to find a different Woz?