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Steve Jobs' Grand Vision
ejungle writes "The Toronto Star has an excellent article on Steve Jobs and his increasingly interesting role as head of both Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios. The article goes into the market pressures surrounding both companies, and goes a long way to explain their recent moves."
but I kind of wanted to stop reading after this:
"The late Walt Disney built his empire with a mouse. The same can be said about Steve Jobs"
Dial a cliche...
Jobs, who is worth $1.7 billion (U.S.), according to Forbes magazine last year, routinely declines interview requests and could not be reached for comment for this story.
What does Steve Jobs not wanting to do an interview for the San Francisco Chronicle have to do with how much money he is worth?
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
They gotta fix the anti-aliasing around his eyes. The jaggies are creating things that look like wrinkles...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Judge: Let me get this straight Mickey, you want a divorce from Minnie because you say she is crazy.
Mickey: No, I never said Minnie was crazy, I said she was fucking Goofy!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Only on /. can you find a comment relating an article on the business moves of the CEO of an animation studio and a computer company related back to needing more advocation for Linux.
And then it gets modded up??? Puh-Leeese
Steve Jobs DOES have vision, and a profound understanding of the principles of technological innovation, no matter what some people might think. For example, he wrote that famous text himself: http://www.apple.com/thinkdifferent/
I think Jobs was probably referring to just the movie animation industry in which case it is not too far fetched as sweeping statements go.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Best Buy can have you arrested
On Intel Xeons, noless. That said, they built it signficantly before the G5 Desktop and the G5 XServe were available. No offense, but much as I want a G5 and like the look-and-feel of Mac OS X, you have to admit that a bunch of overheating 1GHz G4's were significantly less cost effective than a similar bunch of P4 Xeons at the time the render farm was built.
That's exactly what Comcast is wondering: Disney isn't just a movie studio, radio station, tv channel, theme park, touring ice skating show, toy brand, ocean cruise line, hotel chain, or marketing monster. It's all of these things.
Pixar doesn't have to beat any of these to be *more* successful than Disney : It merely has to have better ROI, better employee retention, more creative output, and freedom to break the Disney Oversight in all things they do publicly. This is what they suffered from.
Jobs is a smart man to break out now. The crowds will show up for 2 movies past a crap release (proof: Matrix) and Pixar has released blockbusters so far. The Point: Pixar is now a Name Brand.
No need to have foam-headed characters dance around a plaster castle giving out happy meals to sell this stuff; it's good all on its own.
Ah, but he talks about animation - not family entertainment, not amusement parks, not television programming. In the field of animation, it has been quite some time since Disney last did anything worthwile.
That said, in animation, I would put at least Studio Ghibli right up there with Pixar as well.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The article fails to mention that Jobs can also play an increasingly large role in the proposed Disney/Comcast merger. Comcast's CEO, Brian Roberts, is trying to pursuade Steve Jobs to join ranks with Comcast. Since Pixar has been directly responsible for a very large portion of Disney's recent success, and since Pixar will be severing ties with Disney, if Steve Jobs endorses the merger and decides to renew the contract with Disney (because of the Comcast deal), stockholders will be significantly more inclined to approve the merger.
That means what to the point a made?
As a side note, i don't watch TV either or drink "sickly sodas", they are both detrimental to the human condition, looks like Jobs is being a reponsible father, I would do the same.
Besides its not like he could do the rest of the population the sam favour is it? Big money and power comes from feeding kids crap foodstuffs and having them watch TV all day long.
Jonathanjk.com
One might argue that Google has greatly surpassed Yahoo as a search engine, and try to argue against that on the grounds that Yahoo has great email, a comprehensive customizable news service, etc. Well, sure, it's a great portal, but it isn't the leading directory service people switched to first back in '95.
Pixar certainly seem to have developed a name for themselves. It's quite possible to believe that as Disney have allowed their animation side to fester and decay, Pixar and others have stepped in to take Disney's place.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Dude's been a Unix-head for a long time. c.f. NeXT in the late-80s/early-90s... It's zero suprise that not long after he comes back to Apple, OS X is announced, a unix-based OS (and at that, one *strongly* derived from NeXTSTEP). I don't know what he thinks of Linux in particular, but it's obvious he likes Unix in general.
What really bad ones? You say there were a lot...
And NeXT was fucking fantastic, it amazed me that even in '99 the rest of the computing world hadn't caught up to how far along NeXTSTEP was when it came to providing a useful, coherent, sane computing environment.
Installed base is a much more useful number than market share, unless you really think real computing advancement comes from the hundreds of mid to low end machines typically deployed in corporations (hint: it doesn't). Emacs don't cost near 2k, iMacs do and they are poor sellers because of it. The G5 machines are priced well if you do a serious comparison of what you get for the money... and more importantly they are priced great since Apple sells them as fast they make them (the single 1.6 excluded).
I realize you are doing the anti-popular opinion troll for mod points but unfortunately for me I can't help but reply.
--- I do not moderate.
the market share thing is really strange... I keep seeing more and more and more macs out there (especially powerbooks).. most of the linux market share has to be in servers. I'm at RIT and I think about half the people I see now have apple laptops, its really insane. even the members of the Computer Science House (special interest housing) about half have mac laptops, despite most also having desktops running windows or linux or windows and linux.. Apple's market share definitely is not decreasing at least.
If the Pixar modeling/rendering software ran on MacOS X, then there'd be an army of Joe Sixpacks out there competing with Pixar, with a few thousand dollars worth of computers.
I read statements like this with a bit of bemusement. Here's a clue to all you movie makers of the future: it isn't about which software have, or which computer you are running. Movie making is hard because most people don't tell very interesting stories.Let's look at it this way: Steve Jobs runs both Apple and Pixar Animation Studios. One could imagine that if a move to MacOS X allowed such a dramatic reduction in costs for movie development that perhaps Pixar would go ahead and take advantage of it themselves. Or perhaps you think Pixar works hard to spend millions of dollars on salaries and equipment when it cut expenses and expand profits by the simple process of porting software?
Get real.
"He might be surprised to find that Hollywood closes it ranks to rebels," said Kay, the IDC analyst. "By aspiring too high, too quickly, that could be his downfall. But that story's not told yet.''
Certainly not. People want to see Pixar movies and that is guaranteed money. I can see Hollywood closing its rank to rebels when it comes to cash. Right.
Well,
:) I will tell you why I (a 10+ year vet of the computer field) went to it, and why I like Steve Jobs.
.Apps. Seriously. These things rock. I like the whole framework. I can drag them around to install them, delete them to uninstall them, launch them from the CLI, copy them, back them up, etc. It is great.
Since you asked so nice, and aren't AC
1) Apple makes systems with a tight verticle integration. The same reasoning behind AIX, RS/6000 and Shark storage holds for a G4/G5. It is designed and optimized like a console, but allows for upgrades. (The whitebox upgrades are even supported by the warranty. I can add RAM or vid myself under warranty. Can I do that with a Dell?)
2) Apple really understands the customers. It has a really good idea of what people expect from Apple Computers, and usually does a pretty good job of delivering that.
3) Apple has a three year warranty that is only the price of a low-end vid card. It is around 150, if I remember correctly.
4) Apple support is composed of some of the nicest people I have ever talked to, and I even have some friends now who work there. They are willing to patiently explain that something a user did was dumb, and explain how to fix it. Without making even a grandmother (who WASHED her mac) feel stupid. My wife even likes talking to them.
5) Apple has really top-notch driver integration. I have only installed one driver on a Mac. Ever. Dozens of hardware add-ons and accessories, and I only had to install a driver for an ancient Wacom tablet. Everything else was perfect plug and play. It just doesn't happen with Windows. REALLY doesn't happen on Linux.
6) Full media ships with the computer. No crippled OS versions. It is the whole enchilada.
7) Safe system restore. Fix the problem in about 15 minutes, without losing a single byte of your data. It rocks! I've only had to use it once, but it was amazing.
8) Well-laid out keyboards. Personal preference.
9) Fantastic engineering. Again, personal preference. I happen to like a 6 lb 1" laptop with the power and battery life of something much larger. And a DVD burner. And the ability to run 2 external screens at the same time as the internal screen. I frequently use mine in dual screen mode at work.
10) iLife. A simple suite of cheap/free apps that really cover the bases. They work together nicely, too.
11) Safari. Really nice, fully integrated mostly STANDARDS COMPLIANT browser.
12)
13) Free dev environment. Full on IDE that is actually pretty nice. Works for Java, Perl, AppleScript, and C/C++/ObjC.
14) Finder. Finder is a very smooth way to navigate a computer. It has some issues, and I will certainly bitch about them.
15) Unix based. I like this. I've been on Unix since the mid 80's, and I love it. I'm glad Apple went that way.
Now, as for what I like about Jobs? He's a really charismatic person who is willing to tell people to go fly a kite. He goes in really weird directions, does really weird things, and they even sometimes work. What I really like, though, is that Apple seems to suck without him.
There you have it. Feel free to complain or flame, but understand that I really couldn't care less. I love my Macs, and I am not a PC Gamer. I play NWN on them. I do not buy computers to be game consoles, so I couldn't care less if $game supports it. I probably wouldn't own that game for windows, if I owned it.
Of course, there is also no guarantee that my next 4 computers will be Macs like my last 4. It is highly likely, though.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
but a lot of really bad ones.In the meantime, the Mac's marketshare fell below 2% and has been overtaken by Linux Desktop's share.
That's not Jobs' fault. That's Sculley's, and that's the dispute that caused Steve to leave Apple. Steve and Steve started Apple to make computers For the Rest of Us. Computers that people could use; not room-size boxes hidden away in an industrial building.
Sculley had a vision of using Apple's superior technology to make products with high margins and turn Apple into a billion dollar company. And he did. And he gave up marketshare for that.
Lots of people agree that the real reason of the Mac slow but sure descent into Hell is Job's elitist vision and its results, overpriced hardware, rumor cult(ure) at Apple, etc.
Lots of people are uninformed, but that doesn't make them right. Macs aren't overpriced; they're worth every penny you spend on them, the only problem is that you don't have the choice to spend less for things you don't want because Apple doesn't offer those products (like an iMac without the flat panel display and built-in Bluetooth but in an ATX case).
On the same token, Apple can't charge the same prices that Dell does in order to gain market share; they need to fund their R & D divisions. Dell makes money on volume (quanitity). People buy Macs for quality. Apple has to make higher priced units that will yeild larger profits due to the price, not because of a markup. The reason that Apple can't make money on quantity is Sculley's fault, not Jobs. Apple computers were affordable before Jobs left.
Steve's company brought the first personal computer (that could plug into a TV screen, with colour graphics and sound) to the masses. Also the first consumer floppy drive (tapes were the thing before that). The first computer with a GUI, and the first laser printers (along with Canon). And again, when Jobs came back, he brought the iMac, the iPod, and the entire iLife suite to the masses (iDVD, iMovie, etc). Those things wouldn't exist without Jobs; the PC industry was declared dead with no future until Jobs announced the iMac and the digital hub.
Why do so many people worship this one guy?
He's one of the very few people in the consumer-oriented computer industry that moves it forward. Enterprise computing has their own heros (Oracle and Sun come to mind).
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
I don't think so, it's more like finding out the president of Chrysler's landscapers drive Ford trucks
Geekleak.com - Silly name, serious geeks
If any of you are still wondering, just sit down and watch Lion King 1 1/2. Then compare it to Finding Nemo. Ask yourself: which is the better movie? Then ask yourself: How would Walt have felt about the character Poomba in the Lion King, whose defining characteristic is that he passes gas? (A LOT of gas). Methinks old Walt would not have approved of fart jokes, and furthermore that when you have to resort to scatalogical humor to intertain kids, it's a symptom that you've completely run out of good ideas. Shrek and Lilo and Stitch weren't as bad, but they too seemed to need to resort to scatalogical humor. The closest Pixar ever comes to scatalogical is in Monsters Inc, where I really cannot figure out where in the middle of the Himalayas the Abominable Snowman is getting lemon juice with which to make yellow snowcones...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If the Pixar modeling/rendering software ran on MacOS X, then there'd be an army of Joe Sixpacks out there competing with Pixar, with a few thousand dollars worth of computers.
... and the talented people who know how to organize all of the above.
Steve JObs wants to keep this business obscure enough to keep the bar raised to where Pixar offers a unique and valuable service.
yeah, sure. It's not the machines, it's not the software. It's the talented people who know what to do with the software, and know how to work around all the things that it can't do.
and the talented people who can write a good script, design good characters, and act. Without them, the people who know how to push the buttons don't have anything to do.
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Why?
1) He helped popularize the personal computer;
2) He helped popularize the user interface that the majority of those computers now use;
3) He helped revolutionize the computer, industrial and product design industries with the iMac (and made USB truly "universal");
4) He helped revolutionize the way people acquire, manipulate and experience music (and stopped Microsoft's bid for domination dead in its tracks);
5) He heads an animation studio that is the undisputed leader of what is becoming a new "Golden Age" in animation;
6) He financed the most successful television commercial ever produced;
7) He brought Apple back from the brink of extinction...
And each of the organizations he heads is obsessed with producing the best quality products possible. There's a lot of crowing here in Slashdot and elsewhere when Apple slips, but the people there put more time, effort, intelligence and care into what they do than just about any organization you could name.
And, yes, I worked there.
Or even worse, a Bill Gates theme park. There they regularly have to reinstall the same rides, shuffle everyone out of the park for five minutes so they can turn the power off then on again, and charge everyone's admission through car manufacturers assuming that you want to go anyway. They also regularly report to the media that they are taking the defective rides (and associate deaths) seriously and are making it their top priority to fix them...any day now.
Then there is always the Linus Torvalds theme park, but not many people go there. Although the rides are rock solid, they are a lot less fun and harder to figure out.
Boom Shanka
Second back when I had my NeXT it came with Renderman which was I beleive the Pixar developed shader for 3-d rendering. It was very slick and blow-your-socks off fast on a 486 computer.
NeXT also came with Zilla, the predecessor to all grid computing that let the Zilla project steal unused cycles on all volunteer NeXT computers in the world. Among its feats was part of the four-color-map theorem proof (an exhaustive proof), and the early CGI movie rendering.
So the convergence of Jobs computer platforms and Pixar in not a new thing. The fact that its running on Intel hardware is also no suprise since NeXTstep and Renderman ran on INTEL hardware.
but it seems that with pixlet, Xgrid, Xraid, and the new rackmount G5 all the peices are in place to go back to an all apple platform if he chooses too. But circumstantially they probably will wait till their next movie is done. But presumably with Pixlet, and finalcut pro they can do all the desktop work on apples now.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
16) Apple made a computer that doesn't crash, one that I can use, and I'm just some guy.
17) Apple gets that while functional is good, functional and stylish is better.
18) Apple made a computer that I'm proud to bring with me.
Example: The other night I was at a screening of a foreign movie on some sort of esoteric VCD format that the language lab computer (running XP pro) couldn't play under RealOne, WMP9 or the other DVD software installed. Soooo, just as the professor was about to send everyone home, I offered to try it out on my ibook.
I put in the disc, "DVD Player" started up, the movie started, I plugged in the projector cable, the controller faded away subtly and seemlessly and we watched the movie. I sat back with a grin, as if it was me who did something right... As if I was the one who fixed the movie player with my Apple.
So what's my point again?
Apple is great because it makes my life easier, my computer does the work I want it to when I want it to and I'm proud when it does so.
Nope. It's still $1 per year.
Plus options.
And a jet.
If the big bad cable company trying to take you over wants content, killing value by dropping an agreement with a major content provider (Pixar) might just be the way to go.
Anyone else think Eisner would do that to fend off Comcast and keep the keys to the Kingdom to himself?
No, if anything I think it was done by Steve to force Eisner out. Disney loses Pixar, Roy Disney is up in arms about Eisner ruining Disney ( savedisney.com ), and an election of the CEO coming up. Roy says that Eisner is killing Disney and Pixar leaves then board votes. With two films left to go, it seems early for a splitting of the ways (perhaps not as I don't know what they have planned or how long it takes to put it out). We'll see if Eisner gets the boot by shareholders and if Disney and Pixar kiss and make up afterwards.
What are Steve's plans for Apple? I think he's stickign with the killer app theory and moving into various nitches. He doesn't have to be the best computer all round. he simply has to be the best computer for graphics and video. IF apple puts out the best, that's what people will buy. An extra thousand or so really doesn't matter when it can save you ten thousand in time. Combined with the video apps that Apple has bought and is now making, this seems a the way it's going. The Xserve seems made from day one for cheap render farms. It doesn't matter what Apple's market share is because if Apple can just maintain these two markets, there's plenty of money to keep a computer company afloat.
From there, it's just a matter of picking another niche and moving into it. They've got some with the ease of use home segment using OS X as a killer app and at the same time sucking in *nix people in the laptops.
Music seems the next killer app they're moving into. They've bought and are producing apps for music production. They bought Emagic and Logic and have put out music apps from Garageband on up. Eventually they'll be the standard in music as they are in video (and already are depending on who you ask).
What will Apple do next? Who knows. Look to see what Apple buys next because the problem hasn't been that Apple didn't license out clones but that Apple stopped publishing their own apps. People will use what ever computer does the job. What computer does the job is dependant on the Killer App. From now on, I expect Apple to make both the computer and the Killer App.
No, it's kind of like finding out that a company uses the best tools for the jobs it needs to do. Apple doesn't run on all Mac OS X boxes, either. And I'll bet that SGI workstations aren't powering the SGI website, either. Oh the horrors and hypocrisy!
I read that book cover to cover and have absolutly no recolection of his talking about OS X...especialy considering that OS X was not even in public Beta yet when that book went to press.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Linux is outpacing Mac because it is out cheaping MS on cheap boxes.
anyone who would say Linux is a better Desktop system than OS X are crack heads....and this is coming from a Linux desktop user.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
What Apple borrowed from PARC and others before them they improved and innovated. For example, pull-down menus (Mac) are simpler to use then pop-up (pre-Mac) because they're always visible. Previous systems did bit-blits only of rectangular regions, Apple introduced non-rectangular, non-contiguous region blits. Etc.
MS, on the other hand, has slavishly followed and usually dis-improved. Or been way late to the party. For example, Apple added Quartz Extreme a couple of years ago: use OpenGL and the today's opwerful graphics cards to improve and accelerate the Mac UI. MS will bring this to Longhorn in a couple of years.
Heck, MS so copies Apple that they even use the same color schemes and desktop patterns for their advanced UI previews. They can't even come up with their own.
And THAT is the difference between Jobs and Gates.
Not that Gates hasn't innovated. He has. But in the business/marketing realm, not design or technology. Most of us geeks admire tech/design innovators over marketing innovators.
Why do so many people worship this one guy? Is this because he is such an egomaniacal elitist control freak?
Yes! He has the balls to do what some people dream of. He's a guy who will go ALL IN on a 4-5 off-suit because he KNOWS that he'll make a straight on the flop. (Yes, i'm a Hold-em fan). He can push USB and FireWire and make it mainstream. He can push a UNIX-based OS and have people use it.
Since 1984 he has done some good things (NeXT, the first iMac, OS X), but a lot of really bad ones.
Thanks for making my job easier and naming the good things, but you failed to mention the bad things! Like what, killing the Newton? The Cube was a technological marvel, but was overpriced... Name a few more! C'mon!
In the meantime, the Mac's marketshare fell below 2% and has been overtaken by Linux Desktop's share.
MARKET SHARE is not the same as INSTALLED BASE. Market Share is a percentage of computers sold in a quarter / year. i.e. of every 100 computers sold, 2 are Macs. Installed Base is just that, how many computers are Macs? The numbers float around 11-13 percent.
As for Linux overtaking the Mac, you word it in such a way that Linux users are switching from Mac, whereas Linux and the Mac are about even when it comes to market share. The word "overtaking" is deceptive. Just because I "overtake" you in traffic doesn't mean you're driving slower than you already were. It just means i'm driving faster. Just because Linux has a larger market share, it doesn't mean the Mac is losing ground to Linux.
Lots of people agree that the real reason of the Mac slow but sure descent into Hell is Job's elitist vision and its results, overpriced hardware, rumor cult(ure) at Apple, etc.
Let me take a minute and digest what you said....wait..not done...okay.
What people? If anything Jobs' vision has made the Mac what it is today (compared to 3, 5, even 7 years ago). Think of it this way. You're not paying for overpriced hardware. You're paying up-front for some incredible software that is already pre-loaded onto the Mac (Simple, junk-filtering threaded eMail, pop-up blocking Safari, vCal-reading iCal, System-wide Address Book, iLife++)
Today the guy seems more interested in selling online muzak than selling less-than-$2000 computers. iMac's and eMac 's used to be nice
He's selling music to sell iPods! There's no money in selling music online.
As for your comment about $2000 computers, Apple currently has 5 product lines, and a total of 16 "stock" machines within those lines. Of those 16, *5* are over $2,000 (7 if you count the ones at $1,999).
Only ONE consumer-based product is over $2,000: the 20" iMac. ALL iBooks and eMacs are under $1,500. Hell the eMacs START AT $800.
Wow. That was fun. My first troll-rebuttal!
I disagree. As the president of Pixar, his job is to do what's in the best interests of the company. If his admins came to him and said they wanted to make a render farm using a bunch of xeons running linux and he told them to use Apple products instead, just because he's in charge at apple, he wouldnt be doing what is in the best interest of Pixar. He'd be doing what's in the best interest of Apple, and that's not his job at Pixar.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Someone that has done "some good things (NeXT, the first iMac, OS X)" in their career gets my respect.
Most of the negative tales about Jobs probably have some grounding in truth -- it was almost amusing watching him berate the stage people before a show for glitches in the prop moving systems: "What the hell is this??? Did you guys pick up these parts at Home Depot???". However, he did always listen when I was talking about a technical issue, even when I was saying something that didn't sit with his current understanding of graphics cards / APIs / gaming.
When I was considering setting up to demo Doom 3 at macworld, all of the Apple people were going on about how we needed to sanitize it because "Steve won't let there be any blood or killing". I finally went to him directly, and he replied "If you think you can make it great, then let's do it. I trust you, so you'll have to decide." Not quite the overbearing micromanager he is sometimes portrayed as.
I'm not a regular mac user, but I'm glad Steve Jobs is still around.
John Carmack