Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The Life and Career of Steve Jobs, from Next Media Animation in Tapei. Enjoy.
Regardless of what you think of Mr. Jobs' company's products, you must admit the man had an almost unparalleled vision for the future.
In a hyper-connected world of ethics-free corporate drones apathetic about anything past this quarter's profits and stock price, Jobs stood apart by having a 5, 10, perhaps even 20 year plan for Apple that he ruthlessly pursued at the expense of anything standing in the way (be it under-performing employees or products). As a commenter last week put it, he set out to make a dent in the universe, and actually did it.
Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Jobs, you've bloody well earned it.
He did what he wanted and he had good ideas. He didn't compromise. He was kind of a dick at times but he was generally right and he knew it, and stuck to his ideals.
He had the luxury of being in a position to do that. It was only when he lost that ability that he got fired. He left. Apple sank. When he went back it was on his terms.
I think he was in the right place at the right time with some damn good ideas about how to build computers and products. But without the initial products to launch everything, courtesy of Steve Wozniak, Jobs would have been all dressed up with nowhere to go without getting even luckier.
Perhaps Jobs just prefers to donate anonymously, as many of us do.
I feel kind of uncomfortable judging anyone about what they may have/have not done for charity. Jobs is a relatively private person when it comes to his personal life and a pretty deep thinker. Yes, he has no public record of philanthropy. Who's to say he doesn't do it privately or hasn't set up his will for postmortem charitable contributions?
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet bank on their reputations as front men for their charitable organizations. That's their right and they do a lot of good work. But that's not the only way to do it.
That's right â" Steve Jobs, worth $5.1 billion, has no public record of philanthropy.
I am all for encouraging charitable giving, but this is not a respectful way to do it. This is attempting to impose a value judgment ("People should have a public record of philanthropy") rather than talking about why charitable giving is a good idea and why the potential donor might be interested.
Regardless of whether he has given or not, Steve Jobs has served the public admirably. He has created wonderful products that people are willing to pay for, so obviously his service must have been valuable to some people. We live in a Jetsons age thanks to Steve Jobs. I haven't even bought an Apple product in eight years, but I'm still benefiting from the impact his company's designs have had on the industry.
I think it would be spectacular if Steve's billions were now spent looking for a cure for the medical conditions that are plaguing him. Doing so might seem "selfish," but would in fact serve the public yet again. Extending Jobs' lifespan would be a wonderfully fitting reward for the valuable service he has already provided for the world.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
This.
Steve Jobs has a publicity problem. It's basically at the point where the news goes wild everytime he breathes. His every action is scrutinized and criticized and commented and such 10 times over.
Now imagine how it applies should he not give anonymously. If he gave to a pro-gay-rights group, he'd have half the US population cheering him, half the population jeering him (and death threats). Ditto if it was a religious organization. Or minority group. Or whatever he honestly believes in. The act of donation would basically bring on such a wrath of coverage and commentary that really, I doubt even the charity itself would want that sort of scrutiny (especially since it often takes away from whatever goal they want to accomplish).
He gives anonymously, the charities respect that (and thankful the media doesn't go over their charity) and life goes on.
Hell, given his Spartan lifestyle (does he have a couch yet?), he may be giving a ton away - he certainly doesn't have a need for money.
Personally I don't believe in charity. You can't just throw money on social problems and have them magically disappear. History has shown that time and time again. It's feels more like an American cultural phenomenon where people expects celebrities to make shallow statements on how "world peace is great" and donate some money "to the cause". I'm not a big fan of Steve Jobs but the fact that he hasn't thrown away his money on some temporary Africa projects and rather invested them in the economy (the real eradicator of poverty) doesn't affect my view on him negatively the slightest bit.
Inheritance tax is not theft. It is a very progressive tax in that it serves to prevent the perpetuation of wealth, free of tax, in wealthy families and are “a certain corrective against the development of a race of idle rich”.
A business leader should be judged by how well he led his business (shocking I know). What other CEO brought a company from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most valuable company in the world (based on market cap)?
Wow, you should really get laid or something.
Are you offering to help? Else it's something like telling a burning man, "You really ought to put that out."
Our society it predicated on making a mark on the universe. We are obsessed with painting the scenery with our big fat egos. Its kind of sad and pathetic.
I don't see your concern here. Humans are, among other things, capable of changing the universe profoundly, not merely making a mark on it. It's not magical. Any intelligent, self-reproducing machine could do the same.
You don't see astronomers with ego issues for the most part, because they have a fair sense of man's importance in the big picture.
They don't. Ask them where humanity will be in a billion years. The question is unanswerable.
Until we get over ourselves (as individual selves), our focus won't be contributing to a future worth living in for human beings, and with 7,000,000,000 on the planet now, perhaps its a good time to make this shift while there still is a future left for human beings.
What shift? To a humbler, unambitious useless creature which will die off in time, leaving no trace? What reason is there for you to issue this call to seven billion people, if you're intent on being so humble? Maybe you should practice what you preach? Or maybe you should eat your words.
Ten Times the man Bill Gates is. Bill Gates is now trying to buy his way to people liking him.
You realize Steve Jobs isn't going to sleep with you, right? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Bill Gates never fathered an illegitimate child and then refused to acknowledge it was his. People already like Bill Gates for the fact that he was essentially responsible for bringing personal computers into homes, regardless of how you may feel about his business practices.
If you want to talk about "likability", talk to people like Wozniak, John Sculley, or anyone else that worked directly with Jobs.
That's not to suggest that he ever became easy to work for. Jobs is even known to yell at company directors. Asked how she dealt with her boss, former Apple PR chief Laurence Clavere once told a colleague that before heading into a meeting with Jobs, she embraced the mindset of a bullfighter entering the ring: "I pretend I'm already dead." (Clavere says today that she doesn't recall making the comparison but notes that "working with Steve is incredibly challenging, incredibly interesting. It was also sometimes incredibly difficult.")
Often Jobs would suddenly "flip," taking an idea that he'd mocked (maybe your idea) and embracing it passionately - and as his own - without ever acknowledging that his view had changed. "He has this ability to change his mind and completely forget his old opinion about something," says a former close colleague who asked not to be named. "It's weird. He can say, 'I love white; white is the best.' And then three months later say, 'Black is the best; white is not the best.'"
I challenge you to find a single account from someone who personally knows Bill Gates who claims that the man is unlikeable.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I see you failed American History of the 20th century.
Progressivism as a political movement emerged in reference to a more general response to the vast changes brought by industrialization: an alternative to both the traditional conservative response to social and economic issues and to the various more radical streams of socialism and anarchism which opposed them.
Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR and LBJ are noted Progressives.
I believe that the Estate Tax system, even if the Bush cuts are repealed, will not lead to all of an estate's wealth going to the government, at the same time with an Estate Tax, it does not create a noble class of ultra wealthy land owners. I don't see government spending and welfare as an evil.
Reasonable tax regimes don't lead to the abolishment of private property, the 1950s saw the highest post-WW2 tax rates in the United States and also the lowest unemployment rates.
A progressive tax is a tax by which the tax rate increases as the taxable base amount increases. Income taxes are progressive as are Estate Taxes, sales taxes are regressive in that everyone pays the same percentage, leading to the poor paying a greater share of their disposable income.
So in no way does "progressive", either in politics or tax systems mean theft.
If you use a smartphone or tablet with anything better than PalmOS5, then yes, Apple HAS made your life better....indirectly, at least. Competition with Apple's progress spurred other manufacturers to up the ante in the products you probably enjoy today.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
You call people thieves and hacks, but then tell others THEY won't be polite?
you Hypocritical ass.
Government spend has ALWAYS created jobs. It is the only way ever to get us out of any recession.
"As to lowest unemployment past WWII, well of-course, government finally stopped spending after the war was over and it allowed the depression to stop and since 1947 there was growth helped by USA's virtual monopoly on labor (on production, because USA had intact infrastructure and others didn't)."
this is factually wrong.. and stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Charity doesn't fix underlying problems any more than antibiotics fix underlying systemic failure that lead to life threatening infections. However, if you don't provide the antibiotics, the patient dies. Hundreds of millions of people are alive today because of people who were generous enough to help those who could not help themselves, and that help includes money, time, labor, and the essentials of life. To be clear, I'm not talking about cultural failures, I'm talking about disasters (some natural, many man-made.) From Catrina to the Indonesian Tsunami, from Haiti to the devastating earthquakes in China and Japan, we've helped those who were in no position to help themselves, and these are true acts of charity. This is distinct from assuaging a guilty conscience by giving a bum a buck, who will promptly drink a dollars worth of rot-gut. That buck honors neither giver nor the receiver.
So if you are saying that saving those in need is pointless because it doesn't address the real problem, I would counter, save the people in need, then by all means, address the real problem. That doesn't mean let millions die a horrible unnecessary death. Of course you might be more of the mind "If [the poor] would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population" -- Ebenezer Scrooge.
Steve's lack of philanthropic endeavor paints a picture of a man more interested in himself than others. Absolutely not a crime, its not even evil per se'. Its just small.
Astronomers sent a probe out into the universe with a gold disk because they feel aliens would want to know about are species. How is that not a big fat ego?
And you know what? it's that big fat ego that builds huge bridge, building covered in glass that touch the sky., It's that ego that put us on the moon, and sent rovers to mars, it's that ego that allows us to make better vaccines, and better cars.
Ar ego is awesome, inspiring and makes us the greatest species on this rock.
The problem is the few psychopaths that run large corporation, or any large body of people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Poverty, AFAIC, is created by government spending (and regulating/taxing/subsidizing) and wealth is created by the private sector investment. Government is not (or shouldn't be) here to invest. It's here with a specific spending function - protect liberties. That's all that all of the government must be concerned with."
Have you read the United States Constitution?
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html
Article 1, Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
General Welfare means social programs, they aren't theft, and the US began taxation programs during the Washington administration.
As for the statement that no one paid income tax in the 1950s, that is just ridiculous, there were accountants, there were ledgers and people went to prison for tax evasion.
http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-018.pdf
1952-53 - 22.2% on income above $4000.
92% at $400,000.
Average income was $4011
And the bulk of US households made more than $4000 a year.
If welfare is evil, does the US military-industrial complex strike you as evil? Lockheed Martin for example makes the vast majority of it's income from US government contracts, as does Northrop Grumman, General Dynamic Land Systems, TRW and many others.
The 16th Amendment made Income Tax constitutional, as did Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 and Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
If there is a Constitutional Amendment, then it's not unconstitutional.
As for the "effective taxes", there are not historical documents or data sets to support that claim.
Income Tax in the US dates to 1861, not 1913.
In order to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil War, the United States government imposed its first personal income tax, on August 5, 1861, as part of the Revenue Act of 1861.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1861
Well, this is the web we are talking about, invented by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT machine...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You seem to think charities exist only to help the poor. With that in mind, many, many people will fall upon hard times at some point in their life and need assistance from others. Apparently you would rather they die off than help them out for a while until they get back on their feet.
Aside from helping the poor, charities also exist to:
The connector doesn't 'HAVE' to support video out. A second connector could have been added for that.
Yes you're right. They could have followed your idea and made the device worse.
http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml
The dock connector allows a dumb,cheap device to control the iPod (volume, next song, previous song) just by sending the correct electrical signal to the correct pins and has pins for line level sound in/sound out and video. How do you propose you cheaply make accessories that work with the iPod by using USB? It would be a lot more expensive for an accessory maker to implement the functionality through USB.
SMB support has been built in since 10.3
I have firewire ports on both my Dell and Sony. Firewire is not "Apple's" standard, it is an IEEE standard and Apple is part of the licensing pool. Just as there is a licensing pool for USB.
What is a DPort? Do you mean DisplayPort? The mini-DisplayPort that Apple uses was accepted by VESA.
So what "standard" is there that is able to duplicate this functionality cheaply?
http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml
Or do you expect a $20 boom box to implement a USB host controller?
The Mac Mini has an HDMI port. All other Macs have DisplayPort. DisplayPort is not an Apple proprietary connector. Dell and other manufacturrers have been selling monitors with DisplayPorts for years.
You mean "headaches" such as using a DVI to VGA connector? In fact it has just been recently that at least Mac Minis didn't come bundled with DVI to DisplayPort adapters.
Only a few Macs had optional Zip Disk support. All Macs came with 3.5" disk drives up until the iMacs.
2007 Macs still did not have +/- DVD writers (they choked on -R blank DVD's)
According to this site:
http://apple-history.com/
Every Mac introduced in 2007 had built in DVD +/- drives
Apple is part of the licensing pool for Firewire. The licensing pool and operates under FRAND. Just like most other standards (mpeg, mp3, H.264, etc,).
Thunderbolt was created by Intel.
Well both my Dell and Sony have firewire. There is also a fee to use USB.
If you want to legally use a DVD Player there is a licensing fee....
You're not exactly batting a hundred....
For years they pushed AppleTalk over TCP/IP, even after OS X.
No, the primary networking for OS X always was TCP/IP. AppleTalk was there for compatibility.
Firewire is an open standard, developed by a few companies, but mainly Apple.
Apple contributed their mini-display port connector to the display port standard, and it was adopted. That's contributing to a standard, not proprietary.
iWhatever doesn't have a proprietary USB connector. It has a proprietary dock connector which carries USB signals along with other signals that USB, and no other connector of the time supported. If USB supported video signals, then they would have used it. Apple quite rightly creates their own thing when there isn't anything currently out there that provides the features they want in their products. That's one of the reasons they stay ahead of the rest of the industry.
MacBooks don't need HDMI and VGA ports when they have a DisplayPort connector. Having multiple obsolete ports is a PC laptop thing. It's one of the reasons PCs are bigger and heavier. But that's nothing to do with rejecting open standards. HDMI is supported on the Mac Mini. And of course DisplayPort itself is an open standard.
You mention ZipDisks as if bundling some third party large removable storage is a crime. Again there was no open standard with high capacity at the time. You say "when everyone else was using floppy disks", neglecting to mention the fact that Apple pioneered the use of 3.5" disks and the rest of the industry followed. And they were the first to dispense with floppies as standard, which again the rest of the industry followed. Apple tends to lead with technologies, others often follow.
If you check out definitions of "open standard", you'll discover that there is no consensus that there must be no cost for licensing. Only that such costs should be reasonable and non-discriminatory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard