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"I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been..." I just. Wow. Jobs was maybe more successful than anyone else in the history of the ind

by abalone 13y ago

"I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been..." I just. Wow. Jobs was maybe more successful than anyone else in the history of the industry, ever, plus there was that movie studio thing.

justin66 13y ago
I'm not the one who voted you down, although "I just. Wow." isn't what I'd call a thoughtful response. To reiterate: visualize a computing world where Jobs managed to make his peace with Sculley and the board and used all the resources of Apple to make the NeXT technology happen a lot more swiftly and completely. He might then have brought Mach kernel people into Apple and high-end workstation tech might have began being commoditized and non-suckified and merged with the PC space in the late eighties. If you don't see how that might have made him quite a bit more successful (and changed the shape of the world to come pretty drastically) I'm not sure what else to say about it.
abalone 13y ago
Pardon my momentary astonishment there, but you are talking about one of the most successful people in the industry. That alone should give you cause for pause in your analysis, which you seem especially confident of ("totally correct"). You seem to discount the possibility that Sculley et al were the problem. Let's look at the history: While they may have temporarily boosted revenues at first, uncontroversially the "sales guys" ran Apple into the ground in the 90s. Drove it almost bankrupt. Jobs came back and indisputably saved the company from the brink of disaster, not by trying to play the same game as Microsoft, but again by pursuing visionary projects. Jobs' refusal to compromise and "work with" the sales guys who ran Apple into the ground... is maybe, just possibly, one of the reasons he ended up being one of the most successful guys in the history of the computing industry.

by abalone 13y ago

justin66 13y ago

I'm not the one who voted you down, although "I just. Wow." isn't what I'd call a thoughtful response. To reiterate: visualize a computing world where Jobs managed to make his peace with Sculley and the board and used all the resources of Apple to make the NeXT technology happen a lot more swiftly and completely. He might then have brought Mach kernel people into Apple and high-end workstation tech might have began being commoditized and non-suckified and merged with the PC space in the late eighties. If you don't see how that might have made him quite a bit more successful (and changed the shape of the world to come pretty drastically) I'm not sure what else to say about it.

abalone 13y ago

Pardon my momentary astonishment there, but you are talking about one of the most successful people in the industry. That alone should give you cause for pause in your analysis, which you seem especially confident of ("totally correct"). You seem to discount the possibility that Sculley et al were the problem. Let's look at the history: While they may have temporarily boosted revenues at first, uncontroversially the "sales guys" ran Apple into the ground in the 90s. Drove it almost bankrupt. Jobs came back and indisputably saved the company from the brink of disaster, not by trying to play the same game as Microsoft, but again by pursuing visionary projects. Jobs' refusal to compromise and "work with" the sales guys who ran Apple into the ground... is maybe, just possibly, one of the reasons he ended up being one of the most successful guys in the history of the computing industry.