Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Press Reacts To Steve Jobs' Departure — in 1985

Posted by timothy on from the didn't-know-what-they-were-missing dept.

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."

36 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. R.I.P. by Lisias · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apple, not Jobs.

    (I really hope for the best for this guy.)

    --
    Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
  2. A few people had it right by backslashdot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  3. Brilliant idea! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Brilliant idea! by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Under Tim Cook, pinch hitting for Jobs, Apple did very very well.

      Look people, this is not 1985 any more. The bean counters that had control of the company back then are no longer in control, (one has to ask who put them in control in the first place back then...).

      This a different Apple, and one that does not rely on Jobs.

      Its time for him to move out of the day to day control.

      In spite of the rampant fanboyism Jobs is hurting Apple more than he is helping it these days. The ever tightening lock down, the clutching greed to get 30% of everything that comes on to the device, the total restructuring of the Ebook industry to serve Apple's interest and kill off the First Sale Doctrine, and the total paranoia about petty patent claims is seriously damaging Apple's brand. They have become what they sought to destroy in their Iconic Superbowl Commercial. All of that was Jobs.

      Under Cook significant new features were added to IOS, long blocked by Jobs until he had to have his "hormonal imbalance" operated upon. New application models (like in-app purchases) were allowed into the App store, since shut down by Jobs.

      Frankly this all things to Chairman Mao nonsense is getting a little tiresome. Cult figures are so over done. All we are missing here is the Che Guevara tee shirt of Steve. Oh, wait, too late.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    2. Re:Brilliant idea! by unixisc · · Score: 2

      RIP Steve, I loved the Newton, your greatest creation.

      I thought NeXT was his greatest creation. Had they had more powerful CPUs, that thing may even have been a success.

    3. Re:Brilliant idea! by bledri · · Score: 5, Informative

      ...

      I thought NeXT was his greatest creation. Had they had more powerful CPUs, that thing may even have been a success.

      NeXT is the core of OS X and iOS, so it's actually been insanely successful.

      --
      Some privacy policy Slashdot.
    4. Re:Brilliant idea! by R3d+M3rcury · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually, I'm going to take the opposite tack.

      Apple was far more litigious when Steve Jobs left. It was a Jobs-less Apple that sued Microsoft over the "look-and-feel" of Windows 2.0. There were spats throughout the '90s over QuickTime and TrueType (some valid). When Jobs came back, one of the first things he did was sign a patent cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft to get rid of all the lawsuits between the companies and get on with the task of coming up with the next big thing.

      One could argue that since Steve has been gone on medical leaves, we've seen Apple litigating instead of innovating. Most of the new and notable features of iOS 5 bring it to parity with Android. Where's the "skating to where the puck will be?"

    5. Re:Brilliant idea! by Lisias · · Score: 2

      It worked, did't?

      --
      Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
  4. Let's not forget ... by MacTO · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Let's not forget ... by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, and I'm sure I'll get hate for saying this, it was Gates who saved his ass. Of course we know Gates didn't do it out of the goodness of his heart, he did it to keep from being the only OS company and thus a big ass target to regulators but he did save his ass.

      Not only did Gates cut a big fat check for Apple stock which at the time really wasn't doing squat, but also there was serious fears that nobody was gonna waste money developing for a "dying" platform. Having the head of one of the largest software companies on the planet come out and say 'I think the Mac has a great future and we at Microsoft are committed to supporting the Mac with our software" and then announcing a long term deal to supply MS Office really killed a lot of the skittishness. After that at the next MacWorld you saw tons of companies jump on board because if MSFT thought there was money to be made? Maybe there was.

      Don't get me wrong, once Jobs had the money he was fricking brilliant, killing all the huge lines of confusing plastic crap and making a small line of sleek and sexy products, one hit after another. But when Jobs first came back there was serious talk that Apple was a "dead" system (I know, funny now right?) and that Jobs didn't have a prayer of stopping the death spiral. Gates may be a ruthless bastard but if he hadn't helped out Apple at the right time and gave Jobs the funds and breathing room he needed to rebuild the line things could have turned out VERY differently.

      I just wonder how well Cook is gonna be able to break balls and steer the ship, because from everything I've read he has been more of a supply chain guy. Apple under Jobs has always been Steve's vision of perfection, like it or not, so we'll just have to see if after the products that were already in the pipeline have come and gone if Cook can come up with new markets to slaughter like Jobs did.

      Either way Via Con Dios Steve, you truly deserve to be in that tiny room of visionaries that can say "I changed the way things are done".

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:Let's not forget ... by MacTO · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Huh. Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 were both released under Jobs' guard. Apple was able to sell slick looking hardware with it. (The iMac G3 may look dated today, but it was something out of this world in the late 1990s.)

      Incidentally, Apple was already working on a replacement (Copland). Even though it was ultimately deemed a failure, Apple worked on it for roughly 2 years. In contrast, it took nearly 4 years to get Mac OS X out the door and most Mac users wouldn't even touch that until 10.2 came out. Would Copland have saved the day if it was released? I don't know, but it may have.

      And what is it with people's inabilities to distinguish between non-multitasking and cooperative multitasking these days?

    3. Re:Let's not forget ... by tlhIngan · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, that $150M Microsoft invested in Apple was purely a confidence move. It basically told investors "Apple is here to stay".

      Apple didn't the money ($150M? They still had at least $10B in the bank). But the public needed to see that Microsoft was investing in a "dying platform". They tossed money in (and got double back a few years later when they cashed out), but more importantly, they committed development resources.

      Investors saw the cash as "Apple can't be dying if Microsoft was willing to put up money", and developers saw the Office and IE commitment as "the two biggest apps on the planet - for Mac!".

      Really a brilliant business maneuver - the money was a lot to most people, but for Apple it barely even registered on the stockholder's reports and was barely needed.

      Business is a confidence game, and Apple wasn't inspiring any. By getting Microsoft to make a trivial investment, the confidence in Apple skyrocketed.

    4. Re:Let's not forget ... by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Would Copland have saved the day if it was released?

      Definitely not. Copland was an interesting piece of software, and certainly much more modern than the 8 nanokernel (and it might even have been more modern than parts of Mac OS X, even—I'm not really sure), but the OS itself is not the whole story. In fact, it's arguably the least important part of the story.

      Mac OS X wasn't just a replacement for Mac OS. It was also a usable UNIX. Copland certainly wouldn't have drawn the Linux/UNIX crowd the way NeXT did, and I think that had a real impact on the perception of Apple in the enterprise.

      This, in turn, drove the intense popularity of Apple's laptops among the geek crowd (when other manufacturers' laptops weren't doing nearly as well). In an era when Apple was only three or four percent of the market, you could walk into a UNIX/Linux conference and half of the laptops would be Macs. Why? Because geeks wanted a usable laptop running some sort of UNIX variant, and running a laptop in Linux generally sucked at the time.

      That popularity, in turn, caused all those geeks to recommend these things to their friends and families, which played a significant part in the rapid decline of desktop computing in favor of mobile computing in the first part of the last decade. The rapid shift towards laptops, in turn, was the reason Apple gave up on PowerPC and transitioned to Intel hardware—a transition that made Apple's computers immensely more popular almost overnight. How much of this was actually driven by Mac OS X being UNIX, I couldn't begin to guess, but I'm certain it was nonzero.

      Also, NeXT brought with it functioning code for i386, and a functional set of developer tools (the GNU toolchain). The Intel transition would have been a lot harder with Copland, not to mention the whole ARM thing on iOS. Can you imagine if Apple were building iOS using CodeWarrior?

      Finally, NeXT brought with it a lot of new blood. Apple doesn't usually acquire companies for technology. It acquires companies because it wants their employees. From what I hear from people who worked at Apple in that era, the NeXT merger created all sorts of culture clash initially, but in the end, it resulted in a much stronger company than either company could have become on its own.

      And, of course, the merger brought back Steve Jobs. You can argue all you want about whether Steve actually made decisions that no one else could have or would have made, but ultimately that's not what matters. What matters is that one of the guys who founded the company was back at the helm. Psychologically speaking, I think that did more to get Apple back on its feet than anything else, including the NeXT merger, including any single decision that Steve made, including even the advent of the iPhone.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  5. Steve who? by wronski · · Score: 3, Funny

    Who cares about this Jobs fellow? Cmdr Taco has resigned!!

  6. Jobs' less publicized skill ... by perpenso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He is not handing Apple over to a sugar water salesman brought on board to provide adult supervision

      LOL. Too right. And that's what their (retarded) board thought they needed, circa (IIRC) 1985ish. I remember reading the preface to a Playboy interview of him from that era, where the author was warned, "Be prepared, you're about to be hyped by the best". And he was/is. Karl fucking Rove wakes up in the middle of the night sobbing, wishing he could spin a story the way Steve Jobs can.

      He assembles teams of really exceptional people to implement his ideas

      He assembles teams of really exceptional people to brutalize into doing exactly what he wants; luckily, he's usually 98% correct.
      FTFY

      Fact is, Steve must be dying (and KNOWS it) or he wouldn't be letting go of the reins, because he's THAT much of a control freak. Apple without him is going to become Ford without Henry, IBM without a Watson. NOT, not, not, a Microsoft without a Gates; Bill has never been a visionary, just a sharky cutthroat businessman. Steve, much as people can hate on him, is the real deal, he can look into the future, like an Edwin Land, (if you don't know who he is, shame on you, turn in your geek card) and CREATE a market around a new idea of his of a product/market that never existed before he dreamed it up. Sure, the haters will claim the Lisa was really the Xerox Star, but can they hand-wave away the iPod, the iPhone? No, I didn't think so. Much as the whole industry wants to hate on him, Steve has done more than Woz, Gates, Bushnell and Kay together to make the world we live in happen.

    2. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by antifoidulus · · Score: 2

      And yet again that is something that really separates him from Ballmer. Ballmers problem is that not only does he have even a remote interest in technology, he is also a really shitty manager. He has no control over what goes on in Microsoft, nor does he seem particularly interested. As such every major manager there is stuck in the late 90s mindset that their only "real" competition comes from within Microsoft and are constantly attacking other divisions and defending their own from what they perceive are encroachments on their territory. The result is a jumbled mess, both across product lines(2 different, incompatible DRM systems, 3...THREE! different phone OS systems!) and even inside individual products itself. The Windows GUI is just an absolute inconsistent mish-mash of an interface with settings strewn randomly across the OS, often times the same functionality can be controlled with 2 or 3 different settings controlled from different programs. Not to mention it doesnt really mesh with the Office GUI etc. As a result of Ballmer's mismanagement a lot of really good ideas developed at Microsoft go nowhere and a lot of really smart people waste away there. MSFT stock has gone nowhere(yeah I know they pay a dividend, but the dividend they pay is about what I get from my savings account). If the Republicans hadnt ensured that shareholders essentially have no rights, I believe the shareholders would have rebelled against Ballmer years ago.

      --
      Monstar L
    3. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by adamofgreyskull · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Fact check. Sorry if this makes me a "hater" or a "hand-waver" but there *was* a market, however small, for portable mp3 players before the iPod. The Diamond Rio and the Creative NOMAD are the most memorable fore-runners. Similarly, there was already an almost 10 year-old market for "smart" phones before the iPhone came along, satisfied by offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Or didn't you know that? Maybe you need to turn in your geek card? ;)

      Jobs steered Apple in the right direction; he recognised areas where they could excel and perhaps because of that you can claim he's a visionary, but he didn't invent (or even "dream up" the concept of) portable mp3 players or smart-phones, just directed his employees to produce marketably "better" ones.

    4. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yup. And there was a market for "horseless carriages" before Henry Ford standardized them and started mass-producing them. And Maxwell had a pretty good handle on electromagnetic propagation before Marconi got involved. If you can't accept the notion that Jobs had a revolutionary, not (just) evolutionary, effect on mp3 players and cell phones, then you simply haven't been paying attention. I'm hardly one to be worshiping at the "Steve Jobs is our god, lead us where thou wilt" altar, I, at least, am willing to give credit where it's due. I'm not necessarily a fan of his, but I have to admit, "Steve, he's a visionary; Woz, he's an engineer".

    5. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by Grygus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I was an early adopter in the mp3 player scene and I don't think it's at all an exaggeration to say that iPod revolutionized the market. I owned a Rio PMP 300 and later upgraded to a Creative Nomad Jukebox, but it wasn't until I got one of the earlier iPod models that I thought mp3 players had really arrived. The others were first, yes, and they did work, but very few people were all that interested until the iPod combined a small form factor and a large capacity. The interface was pretty cool at the time, too. Shame they were so expensive, but it didn't keep them from changing the way most people (and some manufacturers) thought about portable music.

      Again, you're right that smartphones do not owe their existence to the iPhone, but when the iPhone released there was nothing else quite like it; now virtually the entire market resembles the Apple product. You need a special sort of denial to say that the device wasn't highly influential. Smartphones as they exist today very obviously owe a great deal to the iPhone. Android in particular seems unlikely ever to have been designed had the iPhone not been released and been such a market success.

    6. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by Anonymus · · Score: 2

      Except Apple didn't in any way improve them (maybe the user interface if you're going by the average device on the market, but even that surely wasn't the best). The iPod has been one of the most overpriced player on the market, with the fewest features, ever since the first one was released. I remember at the time (around 2001-2002) that you could get a competing mp3 player with the same features for literally less than half the price of an ipod. A player that also let you copy your files OFF OF the device, or copy your friends files ONTO the device, without wiping the entire thing.

      The only thing Apple/Jobs did was see that it was the right time for selling overpriced technology as a fashion statement and status symbol, which I just can't see as a really visionary thing. To compare them to Ford is ridiculous, Ford was about as far away from that as you can get.

    7. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by konohitowa · · Score: 2

      Steve Jobs is very particular attention to details.

      Exactly! If you don't think Steve has been MIA, give Lion a whirl. I can't imagine Steve ever letting it get out the door. The attention to detail just isn't there.

    8. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by SenseiLeNoir · · Score: 2

      Need to correct you about Android. Having been involved with Android for a very long time (well before it was actually released, and even before the iPhone was released or even announced).

      In those very early days, the idea was to have a minimal approach (with only one or two buttons). It was in fact the hardware manufacturers who insisted on having more buttons. Multi Touch was envisioned as part of the system, but then hurridly disabled once the iphone came out, as Eric Schmid was at the time on Apple's board, and they didnt want to upset Apple.

      There was an app store concept too.

      Apple just released the damn thing first (credit to them).

      --
      Have a nice day!
    9. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by CapuchinSeven · · Score: 2

      Except Apple didn't in any way improve them.

      Sure sure. I mean, it didn't have as many features, right? That's what makes something better, features. Gotta get more and more of those features, that'll make it better.

    10. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by Hatta · · Score: 2

      at some point you have to wonder: what is more likely that those >100 million people who bought iPods are idiots or that you might be wrong ?

      If the idea that 100 million people could be wrong strikes you as unlikely in the least bit, you simply haven't been paying attention.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    11. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      PROTIP: Everyone in Germany had a smartphone with more functionality that the iPhone ever had (like the ability to run Java, or to replace the battery) before any iDevice was a glimmer in Jobs's eyes. And I don't even need to mention Japan.
      We listened to MP3s on them, and we still do. So what's the point of a separate player? More memory? My phone got *infinite* memory. With the help of teeny-tiny 8+GB cards that can be taken out of the slot and are so small that 20-30 of them are smaller than a single pack of gum.

      It's just that the US was so depraved of new technology because the dominant players in your "free market" (aka. law of the jungle) tried to lock everything away and ask a premium for it, that in *comparison* the iPhone looked like something awesome to you.
      Despite it being the worst smartphone on the market here in Germany. (And I'm not saying that out of some irrational fanboyism. I compared all phones back then, read tests and everything. I was completely open. It just was a piece of shit, *compared* to what else I could get. That's all.)

    12. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by Rakarra · · Score: 2

      Fact check. Sorry if this makes me a "hater" or a "hand-waver" but there *was* a market, however small, for portable mp3 players before the iPod. The Diamond Rio and the Creative NOMAD are the most memorable fore-runners. Similarly, there was already an almost 10 year-old market for "smart" phones before the iPhone came along, satisfied by offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Or didn't you know that? Maybe you need to turn in your geek card? ;)

      I think the grandparent was correct. sjobs had a big part of creating the market -- not necessarily creating new types of products. His strength was always in taking existing products and refining their designs and usability in a way where everyone actually wanted to use them. Looking back too, the choices just -look- so easy, easy enough so that you wonder why Creative hadn't done it. Or Nokia, or Palm (but we already know why Blackberry didn't, sadly).

    13. Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ... by __aazsst3756 · · Score: 2

      And there were Microsoft tablets around 10 years prior to the iPad. It doesn't really matter. Most things Jobs invented already existed, but were terribly implemented. He had the vision and resources to build something people actually wanted. Your point is mute.

      (I personally do not own any apple products, but my family has several).

  7. Rise In Power? Roll Into Position? by SuperKendall · · Score: 2

    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
  8. I remember the first time CmdrTaco stepped down by decora · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  9. Re:Let's not forget ... Schindler's List by epine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  10. Departure scene by RevWaldo · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!
  11. Re:American can be said by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do you even remember how Apple was viewed before 1997?

    I brought a Mac magazine to school and was teased and laughed at. I was excited about the PowerPC processor and mentioned it was twice as fast. Basically the view was Apple sucked PCS RULE Apple was DYING bla bla. Only losers used macs. Cool kids used Windows and Compaqs etc. Here on slashdot I clearly remember Apple being made fun of as a DYING company using a DYing FreeBSD OS with the BSD is dying trolls reposted being modded up.

    Steve Jobs created the iMac and changed that. He was very ballsy in creating MacOSX when it was so hurt on cash. He created the IPOD and almost created an mp3 player and music store monopoly overnight!

    Today cool kids in highschool and college use Macs and the poor ones use wintels. Seriously Apple was a bad name for all but art majors in the 1990s. It was so opposite of today and no one could fix this.

    Sure most CEO's are useless and stroke their egos and play golf and read email all day for waaaayyyy too much money. Steve Jobs is the only one I can think of who is well worth his salary. Apple went through 5 CEO's as it died slowly to all unstoppable Microsoft. Steve Jobs is a great CEO and is one of a kind.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  12. Jobs still around as the "chief visionary" by perpenso · · Score: 2

    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.

  13. Ford also raised the wages of all his workers by decora · · Score: 2

    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.

  14. look at people buying kaspersky at best buy by decora · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.