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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 accessibl
by 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 agoI 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 agoAfter 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.
- OafTobark 13y agoI agree with some of your latter comments but disagree on some of the former. I genuinely hope you give Jobs credit far more than merely his aesthetic sense. He was a skilled negotiator, marketer, and many other day to day details that we are unfamiliar with and to take away only just that one thing and credit that as the reason things turned to gold is a bit much.
- nawitus 13y agoPretty interesting to note that even the "business guy" did some coding for Apple II. Wikipedia: "In addition to providing "adult supervision" to the younger Jobs and Wozniak, as a trained engineer Markkula also possessed technical skills. He wrote several early Apple II programs, served as a beta tester for Apple hardware and software, and Wozniak designed the Disk II floppy disk drive system after Markkula found that a checkbook-balancing program he had written loaded too slowly from a data cassette."