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How Steve Jobs' Legacy Has Changed
On the anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, reader SternisheFan sends in a story from CNN about how the Apple co-founder's legacy has changed since then.
"... in the 12 months since, as high-profile books have probed Jobs' life and career, that reputation has evolved somewhat. Nobody has questioned Jobs' seismic impact on computing and our communication culture. But as writers have documented Jobs' often callous, controlling personality, a fuller portrait of the mercurial Apple CEO has emerged. 'Everyone knows that Steve had his "rough" side. That's partially because he really did have a rough side and partially because the rough Steve was a better news story than the human Steve,' said Ken Segall, author of Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success.' ... In Steve Jobs, Isaacson crafted a compelling narrative of how Jobs' co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak, got pushed out of the struggling company a decade later and then returned in the late 1990s to begin one of the most triumphant second acts in the annals of American business. But he also spent many pages chronicling the arrogant, cruel behavior of a complicated figure who could inspire people one minute and demean them the next. According to the book, Jobs would often berate employees whose work he didn't like. He was notoriously difficult to please and viewed people and products in black and white terms. They were either brilliant or 'sh-t.' 'Among Apple employees, I'd say his reputation hasn't changed one bit. If anything, it's probably grown because they've realized how central his contributions were,' Lashinsky said. 'History tends to forgive people's foibles and recognize their accomplishments. When Jobs died, he was compared to Edison and Henry Ford and to Disney. I don't know what his place will be in history 30, 40, 50 years from now. And one year is certainly not enough time (to judge).'"
Apple has posted a tribute video on their homepage today.
Since Steve Jobs has been in the headlines every freaking day since he died, I would never have guess it happened a whole year ago.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
"And one year is certainly not enough time (to judge)."
So what's the point of this article then?
And this insignificant choade is still clogging up my newsfeed.
What did he really do, other than be a CEO?
I'd much rather hear about Woz and his technical brilliance as it is what Apple was really marketing in the early days.
Just curious how much apple is getting on royalties for caskets with rounded corners.
But I think he is some kind of statis on his way to LV-223 to tell his creators about how shitty their liver designs are.
You can get a lot done in this world if you don't care about people and give yourself free reign to push, abuse, over-praise, or cajole them to get where you want them to go. Its too bad you have to be horrible person to bring out the best in people.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Since we couldn't find the road to Hell with our iPhone 5.
I can't believe how misled Apple customers and fanboys are. They just see the device and get obsessed with that "I'm better than all my friends" marketing campaign that Apple pushed for years. Apple propped up their egos and now Steve Jobs in a god apparently.
Back in reality, he was a rude, overcontrolling guy and that showed in his products. They control EVERYTHING like tech nazis and abuse a pretend monopoly whether it exists or not for every product they make. They treat everyone from their customers to their app writers like crap, block out anyone making competing products, control pricing of their products with nonstop threats to vendors, etc. They're a terrible company and Steve Jobs is responsible for them operating that way. Apple fans need to wake up to reality and see that and STOP BUYING APPLE PRODUCTS!
Time certainly flies.
You can't handle the truth.
Um, so he hated Jewish people?
It reminds me of those cads who seek the affection of women by peppering them with subtle criticism to manipulate a woman's low self-esteem. It's a tactic employed by the callow, the desperate, and the lazy. Jobs was kind of a turd .
He was notoriously difficult to please and viewed people and products in black and white terms.
Black and white thinking is the thinking of someone who's in adolescence or an alcoholic.
This explains quite a bit about his personality and his treatment of people.
He may have been a fantastic businessman but he pretty much failed at everything else in his life - especially at things that I think a much more important than consumer gadgets; like being a loving father.
I still remember Dennis Ritchie, not a marketeer who sold stolen things.
Really? Nobody has questioned such a broad overstatement of importance? Ever? Anywhere? Seismic impact... please...
When Jobs died, he was compared to Edison and Henry Ford and to Disney
These guys became popular because they provided something GOOD AND CHEAP to the masses - light, cars, culture. They weren't elitists, not did they try to create new churches (well maybe Disney). Jobs legacy will not endure as well as Gates, for he was never one to compromise in order to touch everybody. He created his own bubble and died within it. Had he had the clout to push his excellent design antics along with a all-american bargain price, then maybe he would have changed the world in a durable fashion. He just changed computer's GUIs.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
"Nobody has questioned Jobs' seismic impact on computing and our communication culture"
Challenge accepted.
Did he really change how many people use computers or how much influence those computers have in their lives or did he just change which brand of computer they purchased?
As many have pointed out, Steve Jobs has been in the headlines so often it's almost like he never left. Meanwhile a far more humble man who made a much larger contribution to computing died nearly 12 months ago: Dennis Ritchie.
Jobs has been dead for a year and I don't care. His being dead was news, but this is no news and totally uninteresting.
Has any new line of text popped up in his biography? No.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
It was his complete sociopathic disregard for even those in his non-work life that was the problem. This was a guy who tried to deny his daughter's paternity, had an almost pathological hatred of charity (even ending all of Apple's charitable programs when he came back in the 90's), and routinely screwed over even friends and family for money.
His problem wasn't that he was demanding or brutally honest at work. I can respect that. His problem is that he was a complete and total heartless asshole in every aspect of his life. And, if Marley was right, I imagine he's wearing a very ponderous chain indeed right now, made of tons of electronic junk that will be forgotten within a matter of years.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
This comment is a good illustration of people's high opinion about Jobs.
But no, we would absolutely not have floppy drives or serial connectors. And we would still have touchscreen UIs. And rounded corners.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The Commodore 64 and Jack Tramiel will be remembered for making the computer cheap enough to turn the masses into geeks.
FTFY
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Gosh, I happen to like the program QI and Edison I learned from that program was a thief. Jeremy Clackson described Ford as someone about who nothing good could be said with Ford being an outright nazi and Disney is not much better.
If that is supposed to be Jobs GOOD legacy bit, I hate to see what his BAD legacy is going to look like.
The real legacy of these people is now after all that they didn't real do what they did, that what they did had already been done and that their personalities sucked.
Jobs didn't invent the smartphone, he didn't invent the computer and if he had never been, tech would still have happened just with different logo's. There is a lesson in there, humanity is more then just a handful of names. And our advances happened at multiple times in multiple locations, it doesn't depend on ONE person. The one person type people are the ones who like to think in thousand year empires. I actually find it quite comforting that if X didn't introduce the phone, Y would have. I don't need fake heroes to look up to. Jobs was a prick and his legacy will either be that he made such a terror of himself that Apple failed immediately without him OR he made such a terror and when he died Apple did just fine without him.
Either ending, he is still a prick. And what did it all get him? An early grave. If you wonder why I hate him? He sought out alternative medicine at the end, lending credibility to that evil which has seen the death of many.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Intel has done far more to push outdated technologies out the door that Apple ever has.... albeit so you have to buy the next thing... but still it wasn't apple
Yes he did a lot of things, but personally I've always been much more interested in what he did at NeXT. In some ways, after his return to Apple I would say that the old Apple died and was replaced by a rebranded NeXT.
This for example is pure gold to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb7foG1rtlA
It's from the late 80's and describe the process used to build the logic board in a NeXT workstation. From what I understand this is something that involved Steve Jobs much more than for example iPod. After he returned to Apple the number of people around him increased so much that it's not really that simple to say that he made the MP3 player mainstream. His team did that, and he was a big part of it but very little of what he did at Apple was something that came entirely from him.
If you know so little about the road computers and GUI's have taken you really shouldn't be the one to accept challenges like this. Jobs, and the team working for him did change computers and GUI's for the better.
All cunts...
He was great at directing design as well as being a CEO. Even if he was copying a lot of the time, he's still the one that put this stuff into the mainstream, and ensured that everything was done to a pretty good standard.
Running a successful business isn't always about being genuinely unique. Most of it is execution which is something successful companies are really good at. For an example look at Coca-Cola. Nothing particularly unique these days about a cola soft drink, and Coke was by no means the first fizzy sugary drink, but they execute the details of their business brilliantly. In some ways Apple is the same. They rarely are first with any single component of their products but when Apple has been successful they have executed the entire product better than pretty much anyone else. The whole becomes something more than the parts. The iDevices weren't the first of their kind but each of them was the the first to get the whole package (for lack of a better term) "correct" in a way that the public found appealing. The iPhone redefined the smartphone market in much the same way that Tolkien redefined the fantasy novel genre. Every successful smartphone since clearly has cribbed some of its DNA from the design of the iPhone. Whether you like Apple or not, one has to admit that Apple has executed their business model extremely well and with great discipline for the last decade or so and they have the financial results to show for their efforts.
Damned right.
Growing up, I never met a single person with an Apple computer in the UK. Even in the US, the Apple II seemed to have occupied the same niche as Britain's BBC Micro - a "respectable" computer for the slightly-to-very wealthy, and agencies like schools answerable to the political elite.
The men who actually worked to get computers into the hands of the masses are people like Tramiel, Bushnell, and Sinclair. The computers that built the revolution were the Commodore 64, Atari X[LE], the Sinclair Spectrum, et al. Those were the machines you'd find if you skydived into a random neighborhood and broke into the first house you saw. Those were the computers we used.
I'm not dissing Jobs here but I think Apple's contribution to the revolution is severely overrated. With the PET coming out within a month of the Apple II, it's obvious there was a drive in the late seventies from multiple corners to create this market. But it's also obvious that without Apple, the revolution would have happened anyway. Without Tramiel, and the console-home computer war, I think it's unlikely the home computer would have made it into enough homes to shift it from an expensive gimmick, into a part of everyone's lives.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
When Jobs died, he was compared to Edison and Henry Ford and to Disney.
That sounds about right to me. Those guys could be spectacular assholes, too.
You say the first part but can you prove it? I remember the uproar when Apple came out with a computer without a floppy drive. Was it the original iMac? Anyway, from what I recall, Apple introducing the usb port coincided with them withholding the floppy.
The main complaint from people here, while acknowledging that it was absolutely past it's time in terms of data storage, was about the all powerful emergency boot disk. A lot of equipment still such as industrial robots or things like music synthesizers still use this. There was no USB drives around at the time and it was one of those circular problems - we can't get rid of the floppy because of this need, we don't want to spend time making another way to fulfill this need since the ubiquitous floppy fulfills it. When I looked just, like, 5 years ago, serial ports were still on a lot of the notebooks. Not so anymore. And the parallel port also had a particularly long life on desktops - way past it's prime.
That was the nature of the PC industry. It's why Microsoft was backwards compatible to the point of being painful for an extremely long time. It comes down from established user base and was manifested when things like the iPad announcement when a huge percentage of posts here predicted its demise simply because they couldn't see using one, and thus unable to look past themselves, thought it was the same with everyone. The PC industry is rife with examples like that and to an extent the tail wags the dog - people sometime don't know what they want until they have it and most companies go by the consumer focus group approach which would have yielded very dissimilar results.
It's works much the same way in the gaming console industry, with Nintendo playing the role of Apple.
Now, while you can point at me and yell Apple fanboi, I think an Apple dominated world would have been disastrous (app store being the norm by the late 90s, total lockdown, anyone?), unless you have some concrete counterargument, I think I can leave now.
The point was to question what someone said no one had questioned. If you can't see that your reasoning is already flawed and you really shouldn't be one to throw down another challenge.
BTW, I know quite a bit about the path computing and graphical user interfaces have taken and I still think it is a valid question. Would no one else have continued the work from Xerox PARC? Jobs was not in charge of Apple from 1985 until 1997. Computing and adoption of graphical user interfaces as the norm soared in that time. And I don't think it was due to what he was doing at NeXT.
You'll find that many of the top 0.01% of their fields are total a-holes. Just comes with the territory of being an extremely successful person. Michael Jordan was a total a-hole. Larry Ellison and a few others whose names escape me at the moment.
Its too bad you have to be horrible person to bring out the best in people.
You don't have to be a horrible person though you probably have to be a demanding one. Steve Jobs had a particular style that apparently was effective but it's not hard to find examples of people who have great success without the rough edges. Ghandi is a pretty good example of a guy who by most accounts was a pretty decent person and seemed to get the best of out of people. Being a leader requires you to ask things of people that they may not always want to do. You can persuade, cajole, order, demean, bully, ask, etc. There are many ways to get people to act and usually you need some combination of all of them. You can do things without being a jerk though one has to admit that sometimes being a jerk can be a useful tactic - Steve Jobs being a prime example.
He was a rich scumbag derelict father. Just that simple selfish act for so many years is enough in my mind to place him in the same class as a drug dealer on the street.
There was one kid in my neighborhood who had an Apple. He was the kid with yuppie parents who liked to show off (they were in debt up to their ears with various status symbols). Most everyone else had Commodores. A few had Sinclairs (marketed in the U.S. under Timex) and Atari 400's and 800's.
The PC's and Apples back then ran in the $1,500 - $2,000 range (that would be probably $5,000-$6,000 in today's dollars). They were way outside the reach of the working class. The real computers for the masses were the ones in the $200-$800 range.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Without Apple, we very well still have floppy drives and serial connectors on our notebooks.
Floppy drives were already dying; due to their stagnant capacity of 1.44mb, very few people used them for actual data storage by the turn of the century. By the time Apple removed them, their function had been reduced to emergency booting (and, on Windows, loading SATA/SCSI/RAID drivers on install). The advent of cheap CD-R drives, combined with the ability to boot the system directly from a CD, made the floppy drive unnecessary on PCs as well, and thus it was gradually removed.
As for serial ports, Apple didn't remove them much earlier than most mainstream PC vendors. Once dial-up lost its popularity, the serial port was no longer needed for external modem support, and the number of serial mice dwindled to the point where the connector became an unnecessary cost.
It surprises me that some people act shocked to find out about the negative parts of Steve Jobs' personality. Anybody who was even halfway paying attention for the past few decades knew about his dark sides. It's very common, of course, for great achievers to come with strong negatives, so it was no surprise. But even if you didn't understand that it's true in general, the specifics have been out there about Jobs for many, many years. He was a visionary genius (even if a lot of technical-minded people still don't understand that), but he was also very cruel, selfish and overbearing at times. The truth has been very clear for a long time. Those trying to make him just a hero OR just a villain are off track. He was far too complicated for either of those roles.
Apple introducing the usb port...
FYI, unless you're specifically referring to Apple adopting the already existing USB standard, that didn't happen.
If the former, disregard and carry on.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Even in the US, the Apple II seemed to have occupied the same niche as Britain's BBC Micro - a "respectable" computer for the slightly-to-very wealthy, and agencies like schools answerable to the political elite.
Nope. Apple II computers were in pretty much every school you cared to walk into during the 1980s at least in the US. In fact we still had Apple II computers in schools well into the 1990s. As a result Apple was often the first choice (budget permitting) of computer for people at home along for middle class (and up) families along with the cheaper C64. The IBM PC and clones were the dominant force from about 1984-5 onward along with the Mac to a much lesser extent. By 1988 the Apple II and C64 were in low single digit market share.
The computers that built the revolution were the Commodore 64, Atari X[LE], the Sinclair Spectrum, et al. Those were the machines you'd find if you skydived into a random neighborhood and broke into the first house you saw. Those were the computers we used.
Aside from the C64 the market share numbers say otherwise. The Sinclair, and Atari computers barely made a dent and never got above 5% market share combined. The Apple II got up to between 10-15% market share and stayed there until about 1985 when the Mac was introduced.
I'm not dissing Jobs here but I think Apple's contribution to the revolution is severely overrated.
No, it probably isn't. Many of the things you take for granted these days were really made mainstream by Apple. (note I didn't say invented, just made mainstream) That's not to diminish the contributions of others, Apple certainly didn't do it all themselves by any means. But Apple played a key role in the way things actually played out. I'd say that the contributions of others might be underrated but I can't really say that Apple's contributions are overrated.
But it's also obvious that without Apple, the revolution would have happened anyway.
Yes it would have. And it would have been different. But that does not diminish the role that Apple played in what actually did happen.
"Vell hiz' just this guy, y'know."
...are the press. They'd have nothing to write about otherwise. Otherwise legacies truthfully don't mean shit to the rest of us.
Isn't this exactly what Edison and Ford did? Edison didn't invent electricity, or the lightbulb. Ford did not invent the Automobille. What they did was popularize these technologies by refining them and making them more practical, and yes, marketing them.
He was the kid with yuppie parents who liked to show off (they were in debt up to their ears with various status symbols).
Apple is suing me for my gold-plated butt plug business. Apparently they think they hold the patent on expensive crap for assholes.
To be fair, the ZX Spectrum and BBC both launched before (and cheaper than) the C64.
But yep, the PC and DOS/Windows were a joke to card-carrying geeks well into the 90s, they were office tools first and hideously bad multipurpose computing devices second.
In a perfect world there would be an Amiga on every desk today.
You say the first part but can you prove it?
Of course not. That's a foolish thing to ask.
I remember the uproar when Apple came out with a computer without a floppy drive. Was it the original iMac?
I remember it too. It was before USB flash storage was widespread and before CD-Rs were cheap and everyone had to buy external drives because otherwise they couldn't exchange files with anyone.
When I looked just, like, 5 years ago, serial ports were still on a lot of the notebooks. Not so anymore. And the parallel port also had a particularly long life on desktops - way past it's prime.
Lolwut? Maybe a few did but it was pretty rare, but anyway, this actually supports my point:
Apple aggressively remove "legacy" things, while the PC world doeswn't because they're stil useful. They instead slowly die off in the PC world when they cease to be useful. Due to the bredth of the market, a few manufacturers keep on shipping with that kind of thing around for years because some people still demand it.
You can still buy proper serial and parallel add-in PCIe cards and they're still useful if you need that sort of thing.
In other words, Apple getting rid of the floppy drive had basically no effect on the life of it. Same with serial and parallel port.
And what do you mean "way past its prime"? You could happily ship over a megabyte per second through the parallel port using DMA, which was entirely adequate for printers. Before USB2, the choices were USB 1.1 which had a similar through put with unstable implementations (because the USB spec is feindishly baroque and took manufacturers years ot get it sorted) and with considerably higher CPU usage.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
He said introduce, and that's what he meant. The iMac was the first computer with a USB port as standard. USB was already around as a plug in card, and because of that was rarely used, and that meant there were few USB peripherals. Apple making USB the standard port on iMacs is what encouraged manufacturers to make peripherals, and made USB a success.
Had Apple not done it, another PC manufacturer might have. But they wouldn't have done the other necessary step of removing the legacy ports.
Edison was great at stealing other peoples ideas and inventions (see what he did to Tesla), taking the credit, and profiting hugely...hmmm, so maybe this is a good comparison.
Without Apple, we very well still have floppy drives and serial connectors on our notebooks.
that's what you think
Don't forget in the late 80s apple co designed the breakthrough powerbook 100. so small and portable it had to be developed with Sony because of their expertise in miniaturization from the Walkman.
He's in hell with Objective C. Leave him be.
In fifty years, the only tech person who will be remembered will be Bill Gates, the man who cured Malaria. aka The Gates Vaccine.
Windows? Apple? What are you talking about?
Jobs was kind of an ass. It's easy to berate people if you have no creativity yourself. I don't get the worship people give to such an evil little excuse of a man.
Yes, that's quite a change, and for better or for worse it marks the beginning of the end for Apple "as we know it". Some people don't get it: Job's approach to business was a package, keep it or lose it with all the pros and cons.
Seriously, enough already.
Jobs just berated employees when he felt their work was sub-standard, "auto company founder Soichiro Honda was famous for striking employees when he was displeased with them." http://www.japanintercultural.com/en/blogs/default.aspx?blogid=151
As a lesson for :"when will Apple decline now that Jobs is gone", insiders note that Honda started putting out boring accountant-driven car designs just after the retirement of the last few of the engineers who could personally remember being taken to task by Mr. Honda. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/02/us-honda-idUSTRE82100M20120302
Catching and receiving are the same thing.
The floppy was invented and used in computers WAY before Apple though to include it. The floppy disk was invented in the late 60's. The original 8" disks were first used in IBM mainframes to upgrade microcode. 5 1/4" disks were created in 1976, around the same time that Apple started building computers. IBM used these in their CBM and, later, PET computers. As you can see, Apple was late to the floppy party as Apple didn't even exist when floppy drives were first in use. The floppy drive ecosystem developed outside of the sphere of Apple and would have been fine without them. Apple wasn't even a blip on the radar. IBM ruled.
It could be argued that Apple's primary usage of USB influenced the market to speed up the creation of USB peripherals, but this was happening anyway. The PC industry was alive and vibrant at this time with new features constantly being crammed into motherboards, CPU and memory speeds doubling, dedicated 3D and audio boards being created, etc. USB would have developed, possibly a bit slower, without Apple. While Apple had grown at this point, they were still considered a small player in the overall computer industry.
...that's how i'll remember Steve Jobs. The man who tried to patent the ridiculous (rounded corners etc), and ended up looking ridiculous.
Steve Jobs' death and it's public reaction are a perfect example of what is wrong with the world today. Steve Jobs' dies and is praised as a "genius". I bet if Jonathan Ive were to die today, no one but maybe slashdot would even report it...
It was the original iMac that caused a fuss about its not having a floppy disk drive; and if you'll recall, there was also a fuss about it not having serial ports either, opting only for USB ports.
It doesn't stop there. When the iPod came out, it was considered sub-standard. (For fun, try to find the original story about it on Slashdot.) When the iPhone came out, it was criticized for not having a tactile keyboard. When the iPad came out, it was ridiculed as being a "big iPod Touch." (Google even made a mock-up of it, as a big joke. Of course, that same day its engineers were busy trying to clone their own version of it.)
First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then...
Everybody seems to miss this, but many of Jobs' successes were because he was a movie studio head. He was also CEO of Pixar.
Jobs didn't really run Pixar; Lassiter did. Jobs had the sense to leave the moviemakers alone. But being a studio head gave him enormous clout in Hollywood. This is what make the iTunes store possible.
A successful music-delivery service required deals with the music industry. Others, notably Napster, had tried to put deals together, without success. But Jobs had a big advantage.
Hollywood is very hierarchical. At the top of the hierarchy are studio heads. Everybody in Hollywood will take a call from a studio head. Including the music industry, which is outranked by the film industry. Jobs was in a position to call up the heads of record labels and talk to them as an equal, if not a superior.
When iTunes started, Apple was nowhere; under 10% market share in computers and unknown in consumer electronics. It wasn't Apple's clout that made iTunes happen. It was Jobs' status as head of Pixar.
Everything since then has been a logical extension of Apple's entry into the entertainment industry. The iPod provided a smaller unit for delivering iTunes content. The iPhone added features in the iPod form factor. Movies, then apps, were fitted into the distribution chain designed for music.
Doesn't matter to me what anyone accomplishes if they had to be an a**hole to do it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Um, because phone-sized capacitive touch screens and other related tech became relatively affordable to reproduce.
Many people would harp on Apple's design, but really the design and tech enabled each other. Having a company pushing a ton of money into such tech allowed for the manufacturing to increase to a level where production costs were more reasonable.
So rather than other companies specifically copying Apple's design, rather Apple's use of the tech in their design enabled it to grow to a point where it was viable for everyone.
He said introduce, and that's what he meant.
"Introduce" as in, introduce into the market, or as in introduce on their own products? The distinction is not made by OP.
The iMac was the first computer with a USB port as standard.
[citation needed]
Had Apple not done it, another PC manufacturer might have. But they wouldn't have done the other necessary step of removing the legacy ports.
It was necessary to remove "legacy ports" for USB to function? So all those Dell and HP computers I used back in the mid-to-late 90's that had both floppy and USB ports were non-functional?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Seriously, enough already.
I can't get enough!
::cue singing munchkins:: Ding dong the Dick is dead! Which old dick? The wicked dick!
Now, I shall take you for an enlightening quest along the yellow-lined road to discover the impressive Wizzard of Woz is an ordinary a man behind a few curtains...
I'm no fan of jobs... but
Way back when, I bought an iPhone 3G. The alternative at the time was a blackberry.
BB had a keyboard, but the screen, web-browser, and apps in general were shyte.
Moreover, the iPhone could be rooted to install some pretty cool stuff. It had a decent touch-screen tech, and a bunch of apps (both on-market and in Cydia) which were useful to my lifestyle and profession. The design wasn't perfect: The lack of expandable storage capacity or removable battery pissed me off to no end, BUT I could do a lot more with it than a BB.
Fast-forward a few years. I bought an Android (my first one was a Milestone/droid). It lacked the games and iTunes support, but I could do a lot more with it. It also brought back a physical keyboard, which is something that I always found as better on a BB.
The Droid worked, but it lacked horsepower, and Motorola's support of updates was terrible. After the last update it ran slow as molasses (though better with GO launcher).
I've had a GS2 since shortly after they were available in Canada, which supplanted the Motorola. I do miss the physical keyboard, but the higher-res screen somewhat compensates for that as at least I can still cram content above the onscreen keyboard.
So what does the iPhone have to do with this? Well, somebody had to take a risk with these pricey multi-touch devices. Prior to iPhone, I mostly recall crappy stylus-style touchscreens.
It was a gamble, one that SJ seems to have pushed. It paid off big for Apple, and later led to an improvement in the industry. Whatever you may say about the guy, he had the balls to push a relatively immature tech towards maturity+populatity.
Apple II was limited to the semi-rich and rich, and to markets like schools where the political elite, answerable to the semi-rich and rich, made the decisions.
Poor people didn't own any computers in those days. Middle class ("semi-rich" must be a British phrase) families owned the same computers as wealthier people if they were interested in a computer. The Apple II cost $1700 when introduced which was well within reach of a middle class family in the US. Not cheap but Apple products never have been.
Covering just one of the two markets I was discussing (the Sinclair Spectrum was dominant, and a stronger seller, than the Commodore 64, in the UK.) So, no, I'm not wrong in mentioning the Sinclair brand and Sir Clive's contribution.
Fair enough, Sinclair products largely much didn't exist on this side of the pond. Honest oversight - though realistically I don't think it matters much. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum wasn't released until 5 YEARS after the Apple II and the ZX80 wasn't released until 1980. Same with the C64. Both were introduced a LONG time after the Apple II had already had a huge influence in the market and serious market share. Plus part of the reason you didn't notice many Apples is that Apple didn't sell much product prior to the Mac outside the US.
Covering total computer sales, when the Apple II was a strong seller in businesses ...
Despite some early success and influence with Visicalc, Apple has never sold its products in vast numbers in businesses. The Apple II never sold large numbers to businesses. They have a brief period of success with Visicalc until the IBM PC came out and then the IBM PC was pretty much the dominant force in business computing from then on. Apple has always had much better success in the home, education and hobbyist markets.
Avoiding quoting figures for computers that sold better than the Apple II.
Only a handful of computers sold better than the Apple II. I didn't avoid quoting them. There simply aren't many.
Many of the things you take for granted these days were really made mainstream by Apple.
OK. Like what?
It was the first popular computer to be sold as a finished product instead of a kit. Prior to the Apple II you really couldn't buy a pre-assembled personal computer. The Apple II popularized floppy disks for storage. Probably the most important was Visicalc which wasn't developed by Apple but it was first released on the Apple II. Hugely important. There also of course is the mouse, the desktop laser printer, the GUI, SCSI, etc.
They post-date the revolution...
You are seriously claiming the personal computer revolution was over in 1984? The TOTAL market for personal computers in 1984 hadn't topped 10 million units/year yet. The revolution was just getting started. Personal computers were not remotely mainstream in the early 1980s. And the machine most responsible for popularizing computers was and remains the IBM PC. The C64 only sold more units than the IBM PC (and clones) for about 2 years and that was almost entirely due to its price point. The IBM PC took the market share lead for units sold (it already had it in $) in 1985 and hasn't relinquished it since.
Was Apple influential? Of course, but not until 1984.
Apple was extremely influential in the PC market well before the Macintosh ever hit the market and had ~15% market share (close to as high as they've ever been) as early as 1981. If you think that sort of market share doesn't matter or isn't influential then I don't really know what to say.
They produced a computer that, had it come out two months later, would have been considered a "Me too"
Huh? The Apple II was introduced when it was introduced. Hypothetical timelines are meaningless. Why don't we magically transplant the origin of the IBM PC forward 4 years in time while we are at it?
The irony in your statement is astounding.
If you knew what the definition of Black and White thinking was, you wouldn't be.
You obviously know nothing of child development or substance abuse.
Life is filled with many ironies and inconsistencies.
Lastly, the ignorance expressed on this site astounds me (looking at you.)
In the past year all that I heard was thou brilliant Jobs was a bully and capital A A-hole to other people.
Bullying at the executive level is common in corporate America and in a weird way seems to be celebrated.
My theory is that Steve never got punched in the face as a young bully. Getting punched in the face is a very humbling experience. I bet this is true for other bully's that are in leadership positions now in America. Don Rumsfeld is another a-hole that comes to mind.
Instead of bully free school zones we need Punch the Bully in the face zones. This would save society a lot of future issues and we would no longer be led by A-holes.
I still don't know why at least one person he verbally raped didn't haul off and flatten his nose. I suppose they knew he would have them prosecuted for attempted murder and make it stick, or just 'disappeared'. When a man didn't even have to have a license plate on his car, he *was* the law. Ah, well; Karma got him in the end. I just hope he realized it.
Why don't you tell us what you REALLY think?
Comparing Steve jobs to Edison, Henry Ford. Is just wrong, these people actually invented things to improve our lives. Steve was just a good salesman he never invented anything. He's has only ever thought us that if you pitch a product just right you can charge what ever you want. The only people to remember him in 30 plus years will be hardcore Apple fans. Even now most iUsers don't know who he is, but ill bet they know who Billgates is.
As opposed to Ford, who refined the pre-existing automobile? Or Edison, who refined the design for electrical power delivery over wires?
and you've worked at more than 3 or 4 companies that have been successful on "teams that make money" and a few that have not -- you truly appreciate what Steve Jobs was able to accomplish, with Apple, twice. It is truly hard to build a product that makes money and then continue to grow the company. And generally when a company is declining in the way that Apple was prior to Jobs return, those companies do not survive let alone go on to change the market place. To compete against Apple is not to build a better phone or tablet, its to out market, out sell, out perform the competitors in operations, fire on all 8 cylinders and to drive business where the company has not been prior. Jobs did so many things opposite what the competitors were doing. Others were giving away software, Apple charged a premium. Others integrated free software, Apple did too and build a lot of their own. Others could not find a way to grow their business, Apple during one of the worst downturns (dot.com bust and the housing/finance bust) flourished -- that is what is outstanding about what Steve Jobs achieved in the past 15 years.
Check your privilege, cis scum!
It was necessary to remove "legacy ports" for USB to function?
No, it was necessary to remove legacy ports to push peripheral manufacturers to make their devices that used USB. You may not remember, but those peripherals didn't arrive when there was a USB spec, or when a small number of people bought USB expansion cards. They arrived because of the G3 iMac. You could even see what prompted them by looking at them. The first wave of USB devices came in translucent candy coloured cases.
[citation needed]
"The iMac was the first computer to exclusively offer USB ports as standard,[2] including the connector for its new keyboard and mouse,[3] thus abandoning previous Macintosh peripheral connections, such as the ADB, SCSI and GeoPort serial ports."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3
Dennis Ritchie, the guy who invented (actually invented) the C language and UNIX, is, once again, forgotten. It has been a year since he died.
It has been said that OSX is the best-known UNIX variant.
My single memory of Steve Jobs will be how he whored off Pixar so he could get a board position at Disney.
RIP Pixar.
Seriously??? Then you don't remember the MS/Apple PC war of the late 1980's. The MacIntosh, developed by Apple when Steve Jobs and "Woz" were in charge, was the first well marketed home computer that could run, at that time, graphical complex software (albeit in Black/White) and other demanding software packages like Mathematica or anything that requires a Windows 95 like GUI. The Amiga could do it too but Commodore's marketing people damaged the Amiga brand so badly that the Amiga was put it into a permanent vegetative state before 1990. The PC's OS, DOS, at the time was limited to using 640Kb RAM, even on PC that had 1024Kb of RAM or more, which severely limited software functionality. It wasn't until Windows 3.x and 95 came out that the selection of personal computers were brand preference. Microsoft was forced to create a GUI interface in a big part due to Apple's MacIntosh.
That sounds like the kind of thing a rapist tells their victim. "Your mouth says no but your body says yes, so clearly you must actually want this."
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
I remember all of it. Again the point was to do what the article said no one would do.
However, in defense of the question's validity, the question is not whether or not he was a well known figure involved in computing but rather was Steve Jobs just a part of a larger, inevitable computing movement? Did he make something happen that wouldn't have otherwise? Would no one else have developed the Xerox PARC idea of the GUI?
To your point, would computing today be more or less just as pervasive without Jobs only with, say, more Amigas? I'm not saying definitively it would or wouldn't, but seriously, nobody has ever asked that question? And there are no takers that it would?
One thing that history demonstrates is that Richard Stallman was right.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/10/1227229/richard-stallmans-dissenting-view-of-steve-jobs
Again.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/01/02/2236255/why-richard-stallman-was-right-all-along
If only he had leaned "Tact" along the way.
He said introduce, and that's what he meant. The iMac was the first computer with a USB port as standard.
Nope. My Fujitsu notebook from a couple years before the iMac had a USB port (around 1998?). I and all the other IT guys had to go on the internet to even figure out what it was. I'm sure other computers also had them. However there was nothing for them at the time. It was simply a new standard that nobody was using. I'd say what he meant was that Apple was the first major company that switched to that standard and led the way for everybody else to also make the jump. I think the same could be said for a lot of similar things: 3.5" floppies, GUIs, built in networking, built in ethernet (even though nobody knew that's what those AAUI ports were for), getting rid of 3.5" floppies, EFI, etc.
Bill Gates will be the Ford/Edison/Disney of these times in 50yrs.
Jobs will be more like a Francis Ford Coppola or someone famous.
Jobs was somewhat a one hit wonder: the iPod/iPhone/iPad--same technology underneath, different form factors. If it wasn't for Gates and Windows, Apple would be selling niche computers.
It was necessary to remove "legacy ports" for USB to function?
No, it was necessary to remove legacy ports to push peripheral manufacturers to make their devices that used USB.
OK, I see where you're coming from - not a physical necessity so much as a psychological one.
Or, you know, a way to force your customers to buy all new peripherals so they can use the new iShiny you just sold them... hmm, where did this sudden sense of deja vu come from?
the G3 iMac
Ugh; I freakin' hated those things. The iMac was my introduction to Apple computers (I don't count the Apple II, that bad boy is in a class all it's own), and it was a very, very bad experience.
Might explain why I'm still not a fan of their product offerings...
[citation needed]
"The iMac was the first computer to exclusively offer USB ports as standard,[2] including the connector for its new keyboard and mouse,[3] thus abandoning previous Macintosh peripheral connections, such as the ADB, SCSI and GeoPort serial ports." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3
"First to exclusively offer" != first to offer.
Here's a fairly good possible explanation of why USB took off after the iMac G3's introduction I found on stackexchange:
Origin of the walled garden?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
...and Jay Miner (father of the Atari 2600, Atari 800 line, and the Amiga) won't be remembered for that, even though he's probably the single individual most reponsible for it.
Growing up, I never met a single person with an Apple computer in the UK. Even in the US, the Apple II seemed to have occupied the same niche as Britain's BBC Micro - a "respectable" computer for the slightly-to-very wealthy, and agencies like schools answerable to the political elite.
I grew up in a pretty large family, and we were not very well off at all. There were times when we had very little to eat. But we did have an Apple IIe. My older brother had a paper route and was hit by a car. He used the money he got from insurance to buy the computer. It was expensive as hell (but so was the first 286 we got). I learned to read and to write basic programs on that Apple IIe. We also used them in school all the way up until I was in high school. One of my first memories as a child was when we went to go and pick up that computer. I'm actually not a very big fan of Apple or Steve Jobs, but I will never forget the Apple IIe. I loved that thing. It's the reason I studied computers in college instead of doing mechanical engineering. I was sorely tempted by both fields but the computer won.
I feel bad for anyone that would remember Steve Jobs for making the computer mainstream friendly since their has never been a time when Apple computers were used by most people. One could argue that there were a lot of Apple II s in it's heyday, but that was before ANY computers were mainstream. By the time computers became mainstream, Apple's desktop computers were a niche, and they still are.
Apple is toast without Jobs. Just a matter of time.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
For most people, he didn't even change the brand of computer that they purchased. Apple computers have always been a niche. If you want to count smartphones as the computers they are, sure, he made a blip in the brand of computer people buy, but that is already on its way out.
I'm sure Mac's miniscule market share at the time was what drove peripheral manufacturers of the time to go with USB. USB would still be popular today if Apple never made it out of the garage and so would the smartphone.
The guy was a self serving ass. He didn't respect users freedom although had no issue taking advantage of "open" standards where it suited him.
Like those who fail to see the issue and promote "open source".
I'd have had respect for him if he had a mixture of success and ethical standards.
What he had was neither. His company failed once and it'll fail again.
When it does I hope somebody will be there with the strength to overcome jerks like him and the others running companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and Adobe.
I may not have wished for his death although I sure am glad he is dead.
RIP Dennis Ritchie
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I honestly think Jobs was a major douche in a lot of ways and have never been a huge Apple fan. But come on. Apple completely set the direction for the current smartphone market (large screen capacitive touch UIs) and also kickstarted and dominates the now massive tablet computing market.
I don't personally think Samsung, etc, should be injuncted from selling similar products just because they look and behave similarly to Apple's in many ways. But to pretend they didn't copy the basic design is absurd.
Yes I think you're right. The iMac was the first to switch to USB as THE standard port. i.e. to remove the legacy ports. That's what made it jump start the USB peripheral business.
A multi-billion dollar company replacing its front page with a tribute video. You don't see that very often. To me, that says more than the contents of the video. Which, btw. is very well done, and his quote that technology alone is not the answer is something that a lot of tech companies should remember.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Slashdot posted an article a couple months ago telling us Jobs is still here, didn't they? He's a philosopher/warrior spirit living in an invisible castle floating over California. :-)
And that remains the best comparison I can think of (except maybe for Sir Isaac Newton, whom, apocrypha has it, was never seen to smile). The posted description of Steve's general prickiness applies equally well to Tom, who, if anything, was even more of Richard. How do you think GE moved to Schenectady? His NJ plant was threatening to unionize, the story goes, and one day, he just shuttered the plant and moved the operation 200 miles north to open a non-union shop. Edison was a brilliant, arrogant, unforgiving, abusive boss who inspired and excoriated his employees. He was responsible for seismic changes in the way we live. But he was an insufferably arrogant s o b whom you wouldn't want him marrying your sister.
And that remains the best comparison I can think of (except maybe for Sir Isaac Newton, whom, apocrypha has it, was never seen to smile). The posted description of Steve's general prickiness applies equally well to Tom, whom, if anything, was even more of a Richard than Jobs. Classic example: How do you think GE wound up in Schenectady? The company's NJ workers had been threatening to unionize, the story goes, so one day, Edison just shuttered the plant and moved the operation 200 miles north to open a non-union shop. Any employee not wlling to surrender plans to join a union -- and move his family -- was instantly terminated. Edison was a brilliant, arrogant, unforgiving, audacious, brutally abusive, and not all that emotionally stable boss who alternately inspired and publicly humiliated his employees. He was responsible for "seismic" changes in the way we live. But he was an insufferably arrogant s o b whom you'd never 't want marrying your sister.
Perfect.
The Commodore 64 and Jack Tramiel will be remembered for making the computer cheap enough to turn the masses into geeks.
FTFY
I agree entirely with your restating. However, just because they made it affordable for the masses to turn into geeks, didn't mean that most people stopped preferring to be consumers first and innovators last. The boom of digital media came from the cool kids, who belittled the geeks, making enough money to enjoy the commodity experience of the shiny toys based on the work they dismissed back then.
Discuss
I bank on every smart phone increasing the demand for a larger and more capable cloud, but the iPhone did not create cloud computing, the web did.
Being a computing professional for nigh on 30 years, I cringe when "computing" and "computer" are used interchangeably. It also bugs me when I hear claims that Computer Science is some lofty discipline that shadows over computer engineering and professional programming or someone corrects my pronunciation of GIF, or [/.pretence]
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Okay, so this article was basically about nothing.