Cringely's Lost Jobs Interview: Coming To a Theater Near You

A few weeks ago, Robert X. Cringely revealed that a long-lost, hour-long interview he conducted of Steve Jobs in 1995 had been found. Now, it seems the lost tape has found its calling: the movies. Says the linked Economic Times story: "The interview will be shown at Landmark theaters in 19 cities around the country beginning Nov 16."

Comments

New idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple stores show it in solo booths with tissue dispensers

Re:New idea

[syousef]

Apple stores show it in solo booths with tissue dispensers

The tissues have rounded corners and cost $2 each.

Please

[93 Escort Wagon]

Just let the guy rest in peace. Everyone needs to move on.

Restored VHS—for real?!

[neoguri]

Any cinema of repute would refuse to show material sourced from a VHS.

Re:Boring.

[Gaygirlie]

At least we won't have to suffer post death album.

Oh, you just wait.

Innovation in perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wish there were stories that put his innovation into perspective: he didn't do anything other than latch onto others creations and sell it.

Steve Jobs was nothing more than a salesmen. A very good salesmen, but a salesmen never the less. True innovators usually go unnoticed because they're not good at self promotion and sales - usually.

If he were to have settled somewhere else other than Silicon Valley, he would probably have a successful used car dealership or would have been a mortgage broker that contributed to this past real estate meltdown. Or maybe a timeshare salesmen. You know he could have sold ski resort timeshares in the South West desert.

Re:Innovation in perspective

[CrackedButter]

Even really good salesmen can't redesign a user interface for iDVD over a room full of designers and technicians.

http://lunchpail.knotice.com/2011/10/07/paying-tribute-to-steve-jobs/

He was more than what you're trying to reduce him down to.

Re:Innovation in perspective

[tibit]

I think this is selling him short a bit. His contribution was entirely in what to sell, his insight was about why the products should be designed in a certain way. Yes, Apple got ideas from Xerox about basics of the GUI, but Xerox did not manage to fully realize the potential of the technology they had. Xerox's products were a flop, because they didn't understand what was it about them that could make them good, and thus never took advantage of their own innovation. It's no good if you have figured out something cool if you have no clue how to actually use it in a product.

Never mind that Apple pretty much reimplemented all of Xerox's ideas from scratch. It's not like they went to Xerox, ripped some code, then tweaked it and sold it on. The original Mac and Apple II were quite revolutionary products. There was nothing quite like them on the market. Of course there were other "similar" products, but nothing that was designed with similar attention to detail and usability. Even "silly" stuff like Apple II's switching power supply was quite a breakthrough in an age where most computers had a transfomer, rectifier, and a linear regulator that ran pretty hot.

Of course both Tek and HP sold oscilloscopes with such power supplies at the time, and probably some workstations and mainframes had switching supplies, but no consumer/hobbyist products at the time had that. Look, for example, at ABC-80, circa 1978. See the black radiator in the back? That's what the linear regulators were bolted to. It added to the cost and made for an unwieldy-looking thing. Perhaps in Swedish climate it made sense, though :)

All those "little" things count, and that's why "quite like it" doesn't count.

Re:Innovation in perspective

[schnell]

he was very good at combining other people's ideas and making something unique out of it.

That's partly true but misses the big picture. If you read the biography - and I strongly recommend you do, it isn't just "Jobs is an a**hole" anecdotes, there's some really fascinating stuff in there - you see that Isaacson portrays Jobs as having two key strengths.

The first was that Jobs had a strong intuition about what people wanted (e.g. a mass-market GUI computer with the Mac or a fully licensed, easy-to-use music download store with iTunes, etc.) so he pushed for Apple to build those things where they previously didn't exist. That's why he's cited as "innovative" even though other people did the actual work. The second was that he was a perfectionist - to the point of near-insanity actually - so he pushed people really hard to build stuff that it was so good that people didn't just like it, (some) people LOVED it... hence the Cult of Mac, etc. Very few if any big companies these days have perfectionists at the helm who insist they make things "insanely great" or don't make them at all, and that's why he was unique.

The flipside to this is that, as Isaacson repeatedly shows, Jobs was more or less a complete fail as a human being. The book is pretty clear that his infantile and sociopathic behavior was tolerated throughout his life precisely because he was so good at the other two things, and it built his legacy at the expense of his ever "growing up" into a decent person. So it's a really nuanced picture of the guy and very very much worth a read if you're interested in a more sophisticated view of Jobs than "he didn't do anything but market shiny things and yell at people."

Re:Boring.

[arielsom]

Noooo! I'm going to get in line 2 days ahead so I can be the first in the theater!

Promises, promises

[Zubinix]

Cringely reached his peak during the making of "Triumph of the Nerds" and the follow up series "Nerds 2.0.1". They were both some of the best historical documentaries ever done on the PC and Internet revolutions. Since then he has failed to deliver on subsequent projects.

Here's hoping there is one more great documentary series left in the old Cringe!

A call to all Slashdotters

[martas]

If you are as sick of Apple/Steve Jobs stories as I am, there is only one thing you can do -- vote with your clicks! Resist the temptation to click on the stories and post comments, even if your comment is going to be "I am sick of Apple/Steve Jobs stories." Yes, I know, I'm violating my own advice right now, but I though it was worth it to get this message out. From now on, I will in no way interact with any Slashdot story about Apple or Jobs, unless it is truly interesting.

A brick and mortar theater?

[paiute]

If only we had a way to distribute audiovisual files to people. Oh well, maybe in the 21st century.

Re:Boring.

[mutube]

I think you mean 'neither'.

Most people are just not that interesting.

Nonsense. Read the biography for the big picture

[guidryp]

I just wish there were stories that put his innovation into perspective: he didn't do anything other than latch onto others creations and sell it.

Read the Biography. Jobs was much more than a salesman. He was intimately involved with the design of products from the Mac forward. Starting with the Mac he was constantly insisting on changes to the radius of curves in the plastic, he made so many suggestions about the design of the Mac Calculator that the engineer wrote a Calculator Construction kit, so Jobs could tweak the design until it was just right (which he did and this was the calculator for the next decade).

These are just a couple of anecdotes, and there are many out there, but it isn't the anecdotes that bring this home. You really need to read the biography to really understand the bigger picture of Steve Jobs.

Calling him just a salesman, is pure ignorance in action. Jobs was more intimately involved in product design than any CEO of his generation.