Slashdot Mirror
The Press Reacts To Steve Jobs' Departure — in 1985
harrymcc writes "After reading a ton of stories about Steve Jobs' decision to step down as Apple's CEO, I turned the clock back and read a bunch about the first time he did so — unwillingly — in 1985. Some observers thought his departure would have little impact on Apple; others seemed to believe it was a great idea. And the Washington Post's T.R. Reid figured out that an Apple that chose to eject Jobs would be a profoundly lesser place."
Apple, not Jobs.
(I really hope for the best for this guy.)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
The quote from Nolan Bushnell at the end pretty much sums up the truth.
“Where is Apple’s inspiration going to come from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new brand of Pepsi?”
LOL
I would say he is unwillingly stepping down this time too.
I hate what Apple represents now, and how they oversell their draconian un-upgradeable Intel/unix hardware to hipsters in order to spend billions on lawsuits and silly patents (and some innovation). But I don't wish ill on Steve Jobs.
They should bring in some new CEO from a 'traditional' big company, like Coke. They could use some more stable strategizing. Maybe Bill Gates? RIP Steve, I loved the Newton, your greatest creation.
The Steve Jobs who was forced to leave Apple in the 1980s is not the same Jobs who returned to Apple in the 1990s. By the time of his return he was a much more experienced businessman, having not just Apple under his belt but NeXT and Pixar.
We should also remember that the 1990s were a very tough time for Apple, even with Jobs as the CEO. He undoubtedly had acquired a lot more experience during that phase. He also had a fair bit of luck on his side. (IIRC, the iMac was basically handed to him from the previous guard and no one saw the iPod for what it would become when it was introduced.)
The tone of the article seems to be that the departure of Jobs was the downfall of Apple, but it may have been the saviour of Apple. And even though we can probably agree that Jobs brought Apple back from the dead, he certainly had some helping hands.
Who cares about this Jobs fellow? Cmdr Taco has resigned!!
R.I.P. Apple, not Jobs. (I really hope for the best for this guy.)
Most people are familiar with Jobs' skill with respect to product design and marketing. However he possess a less publicized skill that is at least as important than the preceding, probably more important. He assembles teams of really exceptional people to implement his ideas. Once upon a time that would have been the Mac design team. Today that would be Apple's executive leadership. He is handing things off to an extremely capable senior management team.
He is not handing Apple over to a sugar water salesman brought on board to provide adult supervision, he is handing Apple over to his hand pick proteges.
R.I.P. - Apple, not Jobs.
Help me figure out what this means.
Because far from being ejected from Apple, Jobs is "leaving" Apple to be "only" a board member, after totally and utterly filling every corner of Apple with his personal product philosophy.
I mean, Tim Cook has only been essentially running the thing for a few years now anyway and Apple does not seem to have suffered....
Not to mention Jonathan Ive is still there, the guy actually responsible for the literal shape of Apple as we know it.
So the only interpretation of R.I.P. that doesn't make any sense would be anything starting with "Rest", since Apple has been kicking ass and taking names for a while now and there's no sign that will let up soon.
Sadly the market doesn't feel as you do, I was really hoping at a last chance to pick up Apple stock on the cheap.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He might not have the umph left to go and run the company day-to-day but he will be Chairman of the Board and will be the man behind the man, guiding, advising, teaching, mentoring and unless the guy drops dead in the next few weeks Apple will continue to be the innovator that it has been with him at the helm and perhaps even if he does it will still be.
When Steve dies, there will be a marble statue of him at the front door of Apple and Woz will put it up.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
People said that slashdot couldn't survive without his inspiration. Boy, were they wrong. It wasn't a week after he left that OneSpot was brought on board, and with it's "Patented community ranking surfaces the best content for your audience" slashdot had "Increased revenue by 5 - 10% increased traffic".
Next thing you knew it, we were able to click through and buy all of our favorite products, right from the slashdot home page. Things like tips on trimming belly fat, and mortgages and student loans to online Military History PHD programs. It was like the shackles were finally taken off, and slashdot could really become what it was meant to be all along - a tech industry juggernaut!
Shareholders were so pleased, that the applauded the new CEO in a 10 minute standing ovation at the annual convention. Next came the integration with facebook, and the doing away with this whole 'anonymity' thing - long a bastion behind which trolls and troublemakers hid their identity in order to make pointless First Posts and disgusting comments about popular actresses. Facebooks 'real name' policy greatly increased the level of discourse on slashdot. Noted journalists from well respected networks like G4 were then able to come on slashdot without fearing a mass wave of heckling from the anonymous coward crowd.
It was good to see more actual tech reviews on slashdot. Instead of the political stuff - I mean do we really need another hipster whining about how corporations are responsible for everything from child malnutrition to global warming? - we got actual information about the latest products, like the Olympus PEN E-PM1 Mini or the Xbox 360 ESPN app. That is what I had always wanted in a tech site, and that is what we got more of when Malda left.
Things went great for a while. Profits were up, complaints were down. The site was harmonious, a word I picked up from a Chinese friend. You could finally browse slashdot for a whole day without seeing a single pointless flamewar. vi vs emacs? Who cares - we had all moved on to Eclipse and MSVC, hadn't we? These sort of 'beyond the pale' discussions got put right back where they belonged. Back in the pale.
Those were slashdots 'golden years'. Then Malda won the lottery in 2015 and came back. Oh the horror. It devolved back, back into the same tired old arguments and debates. People disagreeing with each other. Who wants to read that? All I want to know is which new plastic glowing box I am supposed to buy. Is that too much to ask from a website that advertises itself as News for Nerds?
I know Slashdot doesn't quite have the reputation of posting articles in a timely fashion, but this is just ridiculous: this article was written _16_ years ago!
Steve Jobs ! I miss you.
Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs has earned a retirement. The amount he has contributed in the way businesses are run and how things are designed and marketed far surpasses the contributions in the same areas as anyone in this internet backwater. He's in poor health and he needs to enjoy what time he has left. I wish him all the best.
The game.
Schindler: There's no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I can see now it wasn't me that had failed. Something was missing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it, because you can't create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure.
Emilie: Luck.
Schindler: War.
Steve was ahead of his time in the 1980s. He was a trendy gadget maker stuck in the PC business. His early attempts to gadgify the PC mostly lead to vanity art, and vanity will only get you 10% of the market, unless you can pull it out of your pocket in public display.
On his HID aesthetic, it turns out the mouse had a correct solution: one button for selecting, a second button to summon a menu of actions (where your eyes are already looking), and a wheel for scrolling in between the two buttons. This is simpler than your telephone, simpler than your steering wheel, simpler than your stereo/VCR/TV/digital alarm clock/wrist watch. Hardly anyone who wasn't suffering post-traumatic Luddite syndrome would have found such a mouse difficult to operate, even in 1985. He directed his wrath at the mouse, when he should have directed his wrath at the worthless scroll-bars, which mostly take up valuable space to little effect, though we have a lot more of that now. He was always catering to "out of box" comfort zone, rather the comfort zone people grow into when they finally figure out how to make the hay fly. Just what everyone in the 1980s really needed: a good $4000 in-store experience for ten minutes, followed by three years of window thrashing.
Way back, I had an opportunity to visit Parc and sit in front of what I recall as a Xerox Dorado (which I vaguely recall as consisting of $50,000 of ECL circuitry--I've recently done some LVPECL design work, and I *know* what that implies on the global warming front). The mouse had three buttons and was hideously complicated during my first ten minutes of grokage. I can understand why Apple didn't replicate a three-button Jack-in-the-Box for your average consumer.
But for Jobs, far enough was never far enough until it was too far. Step two: defend the decision as if moral rectitude and reproductive fitness hangs in the balance. The winning conditions for Steve Jobs was a device that fits in your pocket which costs roughly $1000/year to operate. This was the business he was really building in the first place, long before this model was right for the world.
Jobs paced himself more or less the same way as Andre Agassi's father. Andre had a rough patch, but seems to have recovered, for the most part, and there was much success along with the hardship. Jobs never wanted the PC to have a healthy adolescence, in which order arises from chaos. Which is fine, but he scorned the people getting on with what needed to happen, which is far less OK.
In the larger view, perhaps it takes twenty years of demanding too much too soon to suddenly discover you're the man of the decade. Jobs did a fair amount of damage to common sense with his premature vision of appliancehood. But like Schindler, when the winning conditions finally arrived he acquitted himself at a level rarely achieved in life.
I'm no fan of his bullshit years, though I admire his crowning achievement (which I'm tempted to cite as clang/LLVM, but that's just me).
Apple headquarters, main boardroom. It is full of executives in suits and ties.
John Sculley: Right, all those in favor, say 'aye'.
(all hands go up)
Everyone: Aye!!
(Steve enters, wearing jeans, sneakers, and a denim shirt. His hands are full.)
Steve: Alrighty, folks, I got pizzas and Shastas. Now let's get this meeting started! (silence.) What?
Front of the building.
(Steve is bum-rushed out the front doors. Lying on the ground, a large duffel bag is tossed to him. )
John Sculley: Just take your 400 million dollars and get out of our sight!
(The doors close as the executives walk away inside. Steve gets up, brushes himself off, picks up the bag.)
Steve: (yelling at the doors) Fine! I don't need you guys anyway! I'm gonna start another computer company that'll knock Apple on its ASS! It'll have PostScript-driven grayscale displays! Magnesium casings! I'll sell 'em to colleges for $10,000 each! AND THEY'LL BE GLAD TO PAY IT!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
to be the only country capable of mourning the loss of a multi-billion dollar CEO for a multinational corporation.
There was a time in history when the passing of a CEO was the changing of the guard; no more amazing than the passing
of a fart.
If steve were truly the messiah of CEO's, kind and wise as only we see him, it would be an exception to the longstanding CEO rule of law.
the facts stand that steve is rich beyond measure, lives in a mansion, and quite likely as you mourn his loss does not give two shits about you
regardless of how diligent and loyal a brand-aware consumer you are.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The board has lots of leverage over a company since they can remove the chief officer...
It also means he'll be kept up to date, and able to give feedback on new products, just as he has been doing for a few years now as he reduced his workload.
As for it being the same as last time... last time he was replaced by people who didn't care what he thought, with someone who didn't care what he thought. He not only had no insight as to products but zero ability to say anything at all about anything and have him listen.
Now he could literally call anyone at the company if he were displeased about something and have a whole division turn on a bad leader if he felt like - although since he hand-picked AND hand trained the whole executive team there's only going to be small deviations from the way he would have done things, not totally wrong turns (or at least not any wrong turns he himself would not take).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, it's the oohs and aahs of the distortion field that keeps these iPosts comin. I keep hearin how bad the PC world would be if Jobs didn't set things straight and fix it all. Well, I don't own any Apple products and I swear aloud whenever I have to fix one. You can keep all your what ifs and if he hadn'ts. I'll never load iTunes on any of my PCs. Open a iMuseum with iWax figures so all the iHoles have someplace to go when he eats dirt. Get it over with already.
Except that Apple's mouse was famous for having only one button, because two buttons were considered to be too complicated ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Apple under Jobs was a totalitarian regime with really good PR. The cult of personality Jobs built around himself and the trendy image they associated with their products made people ignore that Apple was doing the same things for which we all hate Microsoft and more.
Maybe time to make the other Steve the head of the company, and see where it goes
He is also still chairman of the board of directors. Steve Jobs has the power to fire the CEO if he pleases as well as other board members too. That is what is different. It is more akin to someone managing the company for him while still being the owner.
http://saveie6.com/
Hear that whooshing noise? That was his point going over your head...
I thought December 2012 was supposed to be the end of the world?
Steve Jobs should be made into a cyborg, so Apple can always keep him.
I was a bit shocked to hear that Steve Jobs resigned from Apple. What shocked me moreso is that I heard from a coworker that I wouldnt necessarily consider tech savvy. Jobs is the face of Apple; the personality. I can probably count on one hand the number of CEOs that are the public face of their company. Steve Jobs wasnt a corporate suit. In fact, he didnt wear a suit. His attire is often the butt of a joke. I guess the bottom line here is that Joe and Jane Public have heard of Steve Jobs.
Will the change of power change the company image as well? Will Apple become dull, grey and boring?
It wasn't even about the portable music player. It was about the overall infrastructure. When iTunes was released, the commercial music players sucked (think adware/spyware from Real) and the free music players were all about bling bling (think WinAmp) which chased away users like myself. (And I paid the $10 for WinAmp).
He turned Apple into a music center... then, instead of treating iTunes as an accessory to a music player, he treated the music player as an accessory to this free program which he released not only for Mac, but also for PC... for free. Then, instead of focusing on marketing this music player accessory to his normal audience of Apple cultists (and if you consider Jobs to be anything less than an insanely successful cult leader, you'd be insulting him), he decided to target the general consumer. He went after the most lucrative music market in the world... the teenaged-mid 20s girl. By extension, he went after the mothers who do things like buy shoes and purses to feel prettier. The iPod was NOT about the music. It wasn't about being an electronic device. It was completely about the fashion involved.
This proved so successful that Mac, iPad, iPod, iPhone are ALL ABOUT FASHION. They cost more... so does Prada. They lack the features of the competitors... so does Louis Vuitton. They are far more restrictive and often less functional than the competitors... so is Jimmy Choo. But they shine. They provide status. They are pretty.
Apple tried making servers... the XServe was BEAUTIFUL... FASHIONALBLE. Any data center using these things would stand out as being sexy... but that wasn't enough. The product just didn't take off.
Apple continued trying to make big video editing computers like the Mac Pro. Well... look at what Apple's done to Final Cut X and Mac OS X Server. I assure you. The lifespan of the Mac Pro is limited. In fact, the latest Mac Book Pro has just as much CPU power as most post production video editors have in their studio systems. Using accessories from Blackmagic, Promise and others that connect via Thunderbolt, a Mac Book Pro or iMac is a far more ideal post production video editing system than a Mac Pro. After all, you can bring your projects on the road with you when you don't need the editing decks and mixing boards. The Mac Pro is soon a goner. Costs too much to produce and it doesn't really give you much more than you get from a notebook these days. Apple seems to be yielding the high end pro market to Avid and being happy with the average mom and pop shop. Final Cut will help them sell more notebooks for $299. In the past, the price of Final Cut was so high that people would buy PCs with Vegas if they couldn't afford the Apple stuff.
Apple is about fashion... Being part of something bigger by making a purchase... you too can be special.
Let's also point out that in a world where :
"Nerds do their best to be perceived as normal and geeks do their best to be perceived as nerds"
Apple allows geeks to present themselves as nerds a little easier to the common individual because by learning the specs of Apple machines and the boot commands to boot from different devices and how to install boot camp etc... they can pretend to be nerds. And being an Apple nerd by extension is more fashionable than being just a geek. Therefore, when the average consumer goes to the geekiest person they know, incorrectly thinking they are nerds by extension, the geek will spew out specs and geek crap about Windows and Mac and convince the people who came to them that in their informed expert opinion, the Mac is by far a much better solution.
It's about being more. And Apple gives people that. Windows is what those other losers who refuse to spend $400 on a pair of shoes get. Apple is fashion baby. As an example... the first thing most people think of when they hear the name Steve Jobs isn't Apple... but it's "Black Turtleneck"
So... unless Apple can continue to produce an mystic of approachable high fashion.... it'll be an issue. I think Steve has laid a great foundation for the future of Apple. He's not leaving and he's not bad mouthing them on the way out. Instead, he'll stick around and help continue the fashion.
Doesn't matters if Jobs is leaving or "being leaved".
The fact, at least to me, is that what Jobs did for Apple is not a mechanical routine that can be easily delegated to third parties, not matter how faithful they are.
In My Humble Opinion, the Apple that we know today is going to slowly vanish, being replaced by a PMI style corporation.
It's perfectly possible that this ends up being good for the shareholders, but the Apple I learnt to admire and respect will be, at some point, past.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
This is true, but I heard a rare bit on insight from a cable news pundit today, in essence: Steve Jobs is very particular attention to details. He dwells on things like color and whether headphones should have a small clasp to help keep them neat. Steve Jobs is the kind of person who knows when to veto cost savings in favor of design. Tim Cook is a numbers guy. He's surely a capable business leader, but will he have that extra talent an the guts that Steve Jobs had...
My understanding is that Cook's background is as an operations guy. So its not numbers in the purely accounting sense. His operations background may come into play more in the sense of lets not repeat the confusing product line of the 90s. On the other hand an operations guy might have said the white iPhone 4 was too much trouble and canceled it. However in the last few years he has been running things off and on and has been getting mentored by Jobs for even longer than that.
Besides, Jobs may still be around as the "chief visionary". Being CEO of one of the worlds largest corporation is very time consuming and very stressful before one decides to also get involved in product design and similar "distractions". Hopefully he is just trying to get more rest and have less stress, ditching the traditional CEO duties should help greatly there. Lets hope he can still hang out with the designers/developers and focus on that sort of stuff, stuff he probably enjoys doing.
i agree, it is important to find someone who can stay awake for 14 hours a day, doesn't care if their wages are kept low purposely by their own government to stop inflation (and instead, those wages go to buy bonds from US companies like Fannie and Freddie, which are glorified ponzi schemes), isn't going to kill himself, and won't leak the shape of an iPad to the media... yeah.
it is hard to find good help.
by several times. not 3 percent here or there. everyone gets a raise. like some kind of capitalist Oprah, the janitors got so much money they could dream of affording to buy Ford's products. Nobody on an iPad factory line can dream of buying an iPad.
i dont know if its 'stupidity', but i would call it 'ignorance' and 'lack of education'.
thats what allows best buy to scam so many and defraud so many. and it is wrong.
the objection to the iPod is somewhere along those lines. the main thing it did was integrate with iTunes ---- well, we had this site called mp3.com way, way before itunes,, and it got shut down by legal and corporate assholes for no good reason, based on the fraudulent legal system that doesn't allow you to claim that you own the music that you rightly bought and payed for (but somehow allows record industry executives to claim the own music that they stole and robbed from the artists who created it).
Jobs was somehow able to convince the corrupt music industry executives to let him send content over the internet. That's what the Ipod was about. Great for him... but many geeks view that as a consequence of his ability to schmooze and do smoke-filled-room negotiations... not as any kind of product innovation.
Most people are familiar with Jobs' skill with respect to product design and marketing. However he possess a less publicized skill that is at least as important than the preceding, probably more important. He assembles teams of really exceptional people to implement his ideas.
Well fuck me, I got that wrong. I thought it was that he could walk on water and turn water to wine.
Gates and Jobs are both arseholes. Read how they treat staff. Their real skill is using others, and keeping the profits. And they were lucky. Some brains yes, but much smarter people have wound up destitute because they had a moral core. Do not overplay their intellect and charisma and underplay pure Darwinian chance and their ability to be dicks. And I don't give a shit how much charity they then do with their ill gotten gains. It's time to grow the fuck up and stop hero worshipping arseholes.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
i agree, it is important to find someone who can stay awake for 14 hours a day, doesn't care if their wages are kept low purposely by their own government to stop inflation ... yeah. it is hard to find good help.
Not really. Android phone/tablet manufacturers are equally skilled at finding such individuals.
In My Humble Opinion, the Apple that we know today is going to slowly vanish, being replaced by a PMI style corporation.
What is the basis for this idea though?
Jobs will still be around in a major advisory role for a while yet, and would certainly nix this.
But more than any oversight from Jobs, the real reason this is unlikely is that each and every person on the exec team was picked by Jobs, trained by Jobs, and knows how to think like Jobs. So why would what you say happen? Cook has ALREADY been running things for the past few years and there is no sign of this. So what is the reason for the fear?
A lot of stuff is different about Apple as company; Jobs was just one of those things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I feel bad for Steve, as my first computer was a Mac. But this event reinforces my recent decision to start learning Android development....unless the "new" Apple loosens the reigns a bit on iOS dev.
-UH
Exactly my point. Cook is RUNNING things, not CREATING things.
Nor was Jobs. There are MANY people who create things at Apple. Jobs sorted and refined them. Possibly Cook will not be quite as good at this as Jobs was, but the important thing is that the teams creating are at this point self-filtering as far as what they send up. That is why it is so important that Jobs infused his philosophy throughout Apple, because his mindset has essentially been programmed into how people at Apple work.
That may unravel over time, but we are talking at least ten years before we could start to discern an effect - if it comes undone at all. Some cultures are easily self-perpetuating, and Jobs philosophy on product design is pretty solid - along with having people still there like Ive who of course is basically like Jobs II in terms of total grasp of the philosophy. Ive leaving would be far more an issue.
But Jobs wiil not be there to gong prototypes and ditch products AT HIS DISCRETION.
Actually that is wrong, from his position on the board he'll still do that, just not as often.
But Ive will be there to do that same rejection day to day, even if Cook cannot be quite as effective in that way (and frankly, I think you are selling Cook short here). Don't forget that while Ive is in the design space, at Apple there's really no separation between hardware and software design teams working on a product.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can think of no greater expose of the weaknesses of the MBA bean counter management methodology than the comparison of Steve Jobs with John Sculley
MBAs might not be what you think. I've been to business school recently. About 1/3 of my class were engineers. Even those with accounting backgrounds did not think as you suggest and were quite interested in some of the lessons that Apple and Jobs has taught the business world.
MBAs are stereotyped and portrayed in the media about as accurately as engineers/scientists are stereotyped and portrayed in the media. I once had an arrogant engineers attitude towards MBAs and all things business and marketing. Part of what made business school so much fun for me was learning just how ignorant and misinformed I was.
Surely there are bad schools and bad students who graduate from good schools. This is true for both engineers and MBAs. You should no more assume all MBAs are equivalent than assume all engineers are equivalent.