The Man Behind Apple And Pixar

Ant writes "Steve Jobs is the chief executive of two of the most powerful technology brands in the world: Apple and Pixar. But what motivates him? And how does he choose a new washing machine? An article in the Independent explores this much loved and much hated man." From the article: "Alan Deutschmann, a journalist who researched Jobs's middle years for a biography called The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, believes he displays two personalities in his dealings with people: Good Steve and Bad Steve. The Good side is charming, and can make people believe almost anything; that's the side on public view at the rock-star product launches. He's been said to have a 'reality distortion field' - by a mixture of charm and exaggeration, he can make you believe pretty much anything."

Comments

ok Jobs is getting way too much credit here

[Edmund Blackadder]

I usually like the independent, but it is unfortunate that in this occasion they lost their better judgement and got swept up in the whole ridiculous Jobs worhip fest.

Just in order to preserve history I must repeat some things for the thousandth time:

Apple did not invent the windowing system
Apple did not invent the mouse
(the article was quite misleading in saying apple "introduced" those things giving the suggestion that they invented them, which is not true. Of course apple may take some credit for popularizing them, but then again Microsoft did a much better job at popularizing the mouse and the windowing environment)

Jobs was not a visionary ... It is really nice that he gave an interview in 96 sayying that the internet was going to be huge, but then again by '96 every single college kid had an internet connection, and would have said the same thing. Even gates had amended his "road ahead" book to include a chapter about the internet by that time.

And the biggest reason why Jobs is not a visionary is that Apple had the opportunity to win the PC market ... they could easily have been Microsoft+Dell+HP(personal computing) all rolled into one, but Jobs f***ed it all up. Sorry he is no visionary.

Jobs is just a guy that has a decent eye for design (according to many people) who also quite fortuitously happened to be rich. As a result he runs a company that pays a lot of attention to design (which is rare in the US, for some reason). This is all very nice, but do not expect the next new thing in technology to come from him.

Re:hatchet job

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Steve Jobs is worse than Bill Gates. Everyone goes off on How microsoft is evil, yet no one gives a fuck when Apple ran all the clone-makers out of business, giving THEM a monopoly with their arch. (Fuck you mods, I dont need karma on this commie-board.)