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."
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
...
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.
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?"
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.