A Look Back At the Career of Steve Jobs

Zothecula writes with a rather extensive piece in Gizmag about Steve Jobs's various business endeavors. From the article: "Revered by many, hated by some, but respected by most, the indisputable fact remains that Steve Jobs is the most successful business leader of his generation and quite possibly of all time. The numbers are impressive in themselves but the most remarkable aspect of his success is how it was achieved. Though he remains at Apple, the end of his tenure as CEO is the end of an era and an opportunity to try and grasp just exactly what it is he did and what lessons there are for all of us 'trying to make a dent in the universe.'"

Comments

Biggest tight wad of all time

[dave562]

http://news.change.org/stories/the-600-billion-challenge-time-for-steve-jobs-to-start-donating

You can't take it with you Steve.

Re:Biggest tight wad of all time

[roman_mir]

The correct fix to the money in political speech of-course is to stop government from dictating to the businesses, from counterfeiting fiat, setting interest rates, starting illegal wars, etc. That's the way to get money out of the political process - don't let the government do anything that deals with wealth redistribution and there will be no reason to give money to government if you just want your specific business agenda to be subsidized and competition destroyed.

As long as government regulates/taxes/subsidizes business, basically controls outcomes in business, some of that business will be government.

You really have no idea what you are talking about

[mjwx]

Apple has generally been a good corporate citizen in terms of supporting open standards where they have no value-added differentiation--that's about all you could hope for out of a business

That's an odd way of writing "Apple have generally tried to push their proprietary standards above open standards and even when they used the same standards as everyone else they made proprietary plugs so they would not work with off the shelf components from other manufacturers without having to buy an expensive converter".

For years they pushed AppleTalk over TCP/IP, even after OS X.
Firewire over USB.
They have a custom Dport connector (proprietary connector on open standard)
iWhatever has a proprietary USB connector.

Apple's been actively rejecting the standards other people use, open or otherwise. There is no HDMI on Mac products, No VGA ports (every projector has a VGA port, mac users just couldn't connect to them without headaches), tried forcing ZipDisks when everyone was using floppy disks, 2007 Macs still did not have +/- DVD writers (they choked on -R blank DVD's) and just this year, Apple have made the hard drives in 2011 Imacs non-upgradable.

Firewire is a standard, so is Thunderbolt

Firewire and Thunderbolt are not open standards, they are proprietary and Apple charge a fee for their use. That's why everyone uses USB and the laptop I just bought does not have a IEEE 1394 connector. If you want to legally sell something with an Ipod connector (I.E. a car stereo or Ipod dock), you need to pay Apple a licensing fee. So not open, in fact, that's almost as far from open as you can get.

I think you need to start taking your medication again, you're clearly seeing things that aren't there.