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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
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.
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.
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.
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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.