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"Jobs" vs. "Steve Jobs": Hollywood Takes Another Stab At Telling the Steve Jobs Story
theodp writes: Didn't like Jobs, the 2013 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher? Maybe you'll prefer Steve Jobs, the 2015 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender. "Steve Jobs is a tech visionary, total dick," writes Esquire's Matt Patches in his mini-review of the just-released Steve Jobs trailer. So, is inspiring kids to become the "Next Steve Jobs" a good or bad thing?
We're all dicks. It will inspire some to try to do it without dickness; others are going to be dicks regardless. Seriously, does anyone make it to the top without at least some dickness?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
I hope I won't be disillusioned by someone who has done research into Woz, but what I have heard of Woz has pretty much been all good. Seemingly kind hearted, personal integrity, not all about the money. While Jobs is the guy who lied to his supposed friend about how much he got paid for a project so he could embezzle money from said friend. I know which person I'd rather my children emulate.
Steve Wozniak as an engineer, and as a person in general, is much more of an inspiration to me.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Who make Jobs out to be a dick. Same with about every successful startup that exists today. Lazy people don't make it, whine about the work, and complain that their efforts were criticized often. Jobs, Gates, Torvolds, Musk and numerous others simply have expectations that some people cannot deal with.
Shitty developers are everywhere, think their code is good, but to good devs their code looks terrible unoptimized and error prone.
That's life! Deal with it! Walmart is always looking for greeters.
You have intrigue, a second act, and an untimely death to the lead role.
This is likely not even the final rendition.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Heh, even Jobs couldn't avoid being thrown out of Apple. It's just that he got to come back.
We're all dicks.
Half.
Seriously, does anyone make it to the top without at least some dickness?
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell, consecutive former New Zealand Prime Ministers Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and sitting German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Heads of government of major industrialized countries, not a D between them. (Source) In sixteen months, we'll see whether former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will become the next Leader of the [relatively] Free World.
http://www.folklore.org/
Not a bad source for stories about Jobs dickish behavior...and before some /.er wants to point it out I'll do so. There's one story with Knuth where Steve looks like a pretty big doofus. It's been reported that Knuth has denied it - in particular in a talk by Randal Monroe's where he was present - the actual quote from Knuth though could easily be interpreted as avoiding the question rather than denying it.
I'll wait for the furry retelling.
There's a subject line that's going to be entirely lost on US audiences.
You would have thought the market for this kind of thing would have dried up long ago.
Is there really a large audience demand to see a dramatisation about a sociopath whose company made computers and gadgets?
Let's face it; the reason Jobs is so admired is because we live in a "gimme gimme" world. The 1% love him because he actually did "build it" out of nothing (on the backs of thousands of other employees) -- which was their mantra while Mitt Romney was trying to prove that the 1% were the "job creators". The reality of course is that most of the very wealthy inherited their money; but that's the subject of another discussion.
What Jobs did was bully the people below him into creating great work. He knew they could do better if they just put in that 100-hour week and ended up divorced and alcoholics. Only by destroying those below you can achieve greatness by taking credit for all their hard work.
The 1% love Jobs because that's what they want to do; abuse everyone below them and in so doing, whip them into making something they'll be admired for.
But they are forgetting that Steve actually did have some out-of-the-box thinking; he wasn't a total idiot, and he could sell ice-boxes to eskimos. He actually had some skill and talent and a fuckload of charisma, and that's also why people were willing to kill themselves for him.
But the average borg-drone MBA only sees Steve being a dick, and assumes that's how he's supposed to treat his employees, and that's why America is so fucked up.
Apple made nice things, but America can't have nice things. Unless of course, you're already fabulously wealthy.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Genius: Having the balls to tell the engineering team "Hmmm . . . it's not quite right. Go change it and bring it back tomorrow" as many times as it takes to get it right.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
The Jobs hagiography and cult-like behavior surrounding Apple products from my generation ("millennials") is disturbing. If I had a nickel for the number of times that I asked somebody to click the Start button only to be met with the response "Where's that? Oh, sorry... I use a Mac at home" I'd be a billionaire. Which is more believable: that you don't know the location of a UI element that's been an institution SINCE THE DAY YOU POPPED OUT OF YOUR MOTHER THAT EXISTS ON A PLATFORM WITH GREATER THAN 90% MARKET PENETRATION or that you're not-so-subtly objecting to the hyperbolic pain and anguish that is the necessity of using Windows NT in a corporate environment? Apple's shit is just as uniquely stinky as every other tech vendor's. Their error messages are even more garbage and cryptic than Windows (ever try connecting to a CIFS-shared printer on OS X?). OS X apps crash with the same degree of regularity as Windows. And on top of all of this their UI is downright abhorrent and unapologetically dedicated to what some focus group leader perceives to be the LCD of computer users. OS X is the only desktop environment I've struggled to grok after having used at least a dozen different ones with some degree of regularity in my lifetime. Nothing about Apple at this point distinguishes it from the myriad of other offerings in the consumer IT world except for their Flavor-Aid, "Genius Bars," and pricing model. Jobs created a monster that's far greater of a threat to our freedom than M$. I can't help but think that we'd have been better off had NeXT succeeded and he hadn't had the smug satisfaction of returning to Apple and riding it up from its lowest point in history.
People will put up with a lot of shit if you're brilliant.
If you're just average, they're just going to call you "Asshole!" and walk away.
Teaching people to emulate Jobs is teaching them to be dicks, not to be brilliant.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm hoping it opens with a young Elon watching as his parents are brutally hunted for their scent glands.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
And isn't that a better, much more realistic goal a parent should push their kid towards than founding a global tech company?
Depends on the kid. I don't think you can realistically push anyone to be a global tech icon. That has to come from within and requires more than a tiny bit of luck. What you can do though is help provide opportunity and structure and see what happens.
Working a well paying job that allows you to live comfortably and gives you enough free time and means to do something you enjoy at home, what more could you ask for?
Nothing wrong with what you describe but it won't change the world either. Some people want more out of their career than a comfortable life. Speaking for myself I've founded several companies, have run several others and I very much enjoy what I do for a living. I don't just want a basic 9-5 job with a few weeks vacation and a 401K. I want something more than that. I want to create successful companies. You aren't going to do that playing it safe or doing the comfortable easy thing.
It is believed that being a sociopath is a genetic condition so I don't think it can be taught.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Agreed. I would much rather see a movie about Woz.
I think you are firmly in the minority there. I have huge respect for Woz but he's just not all that interesting of a guy. I've read his autobiography and honestly it was pretty dull and I'm firmly in the group that should be the target audience. Furthermore without Jobs you'd have never heard of Woz. Possibly the reverse is true as well but I have a strong suspicious Jobs would have been more likely of the two to succeed without the other. I say that meaning no disrespect to Woz at all. Great guy, great engineer, but he is a perfect example of catching lighting in a bottle.
Not only was his work much more interesting than anything Jobs did, but he's a character who I could actually root for.
The only people who think that Woz's work is more interesting are the sort of people (like us) who read slashdot. Jobs is a FAR more complex and challenging and intriguing character. The fact that you may not like him doesn't make him less interesting - quite the opposite. Flawed characters make for interesting stories. Nice guys doing the right thing is pretty boring most of the time. Nice but not a compelling story.
When I watch a Jobs bio, I spend most of the time hoping one of the other characters onscreen will just beat the shit out of him.
Which is a more interesting take than watching Woz and just thinking "what a nice guy" all the time.
I keep watching the Sony trailer but I don't see Steve Jobs anywhere. Just a clean shaven, German-looking egomaniac moving back and forth across the screen.
All of us may be dicks, but very few of us are so dickish as to fuck over even Woz.
That's because very few of us will ever have such an opportunity. While I think most people are generally good and decent, experience has taught me that an awful lot of those same good and decent people are not above temptation. There are a lot of people (including some reading this most likely) who would screw over a friend for financial gain. People will steal if they think they can get away with it. I think Abraham Lincoln said it best - "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
The whole thing with his daughter (lying about paternity, even lying in open court saying he was infertile -- it's on record), so he didn't have to take responsibility for her, that alone to me put him high on the raging asshole list. Meanwhile he was already a millionaire, and the mother had to go onto public assistance to get by.
Sure, he eventually reconnected with his daughter, once she was like 18 and after he was now a billionaire -- but those early years without a father, can never, ever be replaced not matter what you do.
I'm NOT getting into the MS vs. Apple thing, but I'm much more impressed by what Gates has done with his life & fortunes that Jobs.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Too bad Matt Patches can't learn to communicate elegantly rather than using foul language. He has no credibility as a result. Ignored.
Jobs is uninspiring to me. Without Woz, there would have been no innovation to sell, but with those two, they had an actual product to show off first thing.
No company of any consequence is built by just one person. The error in your argument is you are presuming that Jobs couldn't have found another path or partner to success without Woz. Given that Jobs built three companies (Apple, NeXT and Pixar) it seems somewhat reasonable that chances of Jobs succeeding without Woz would be fairly high. We wouldn't have Apple but perhaps we would have had something else.
Whether Jobs is inspiring to you or not is a matter of personal choice and I don't disagree. Clearly he was very inspiring to a lot of people. It's ok if you aren't one of them. Personally I respect what he accomplished professionally (hard not to) but he's not someone I idolize or care to emulate personally. I doubt I would have liked to work with/for the man.
virtually every other CEO has done something to better the world... and Jobs's legacy doesn't seem to be one of philanthropy.
There are more ways to improve the world than through philanthropy. As just one small example: the iPhone I have sitting on my desk allows me to easily Facetime with my mother in Texas who is in a nursing home in hospice. I assure you that I regard that as an improvement to the world and Mr. Jobs is in no small way responsible for that being possible. Yes the guy was a major dick in some very tangible ways but to claim he's done nothing positive really isn't fair or accurate.
I didn't know Jobs well, but I did have a number of direct conversations with him, sat in on meetings at NeXT with him, spent five years developing software for NeXTstep, and had many talks with people who worked closely him (again, mostly at NeXT); our last conversation was him calling me up to yell at me for an op-ed piece of mine in BYTE (Nov 94) called "Whither Nextstep?"
With that tee-up, I'll say that Fassbender's portrayal of Jobs in this trailer pretty much falls flat. Fassbender looks too professional and lacks that burning gaze that Jobs used to such great effect, even while using up the people around him. Frankly, Fassbender comes across more like John Scully trying to act like Steve Jobs than like Jobs himself. Also, it took me a bit to realize that Seth Rogan was supposed to be playing Woz; again, the wrong vibes and aura. Frankly, I think that Jack Black with a beard would have been a better choice for Woz. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
But not as bad as the 24th re-telling of the Spider-Man story.
...for doing him justice as a "dick weasel".
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
1) Of course they're going for drama, thus will focus on and magnify anything they can find that makes Jobs look "mercurial".
2) Is it true, what I read a couple of weeks ago, that in the movie the team that built the Mac is depicted as 8 men? If that is actually the case, the director and producer should dragged onto the back lot and shot. The team that built the Mac was 8 men and 4 women. Why on earth would they, in the year 2015, write the women out of the story???
Just wondering as it seems like I would like to see how they would do it.
At least Elon Musk has done some original things, as opposed to Steve Jobs who just took someone else's idea, gave it a spit-shine, then sold it for three times as much.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
"I'm gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it." This is Steve Jobs pushing the Macintosh team to redesign the circuit board because some of the spacing was ugly.
Steve Jobs also pushed them to make it boot as fast as possible, rejected computer fans because of noise, and said a multibutton mouse would be inelegant. He went to great pains to make the Apple Store out of glass. Even his slides were Zen.
He was a complex character. He certainly wasn't your typical businessman:
"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products . . . the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."
Or anybody else for that matter. Everything under the sun has prior art. Every "new" invention involves combining some prior technology with a spit-shine and then reselling it.
Apple is held to a standard that noone else in technology has ever been held to.
He was an asshat who accomplished some interesting things.
Let's just leave it at that.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The point he was trying to make was the Jobs didn't invent anything, not even an improvement over an old invention. He was just a charasmatic guy who got other people to do the work for him.
Musk didnt start paypal but merged into it.
Musk bought Tesla from a couple of creative engineers. He didnt start it.
However he great job of making both prominent companies.
I actually have 3 kids and I wasn't trying to say what he did was "simply ok" at all!
I'm just saying it's definitely a thought that runs through the heads of immature guys when they find themselves in those kinds of situations. I watched it happen with people I knew through the crazy "dot com" era.
I think Steve J. managed to turn his personal life around considerably as he got older but there's no doubt it took him a long time to address his issues. (On the flip side? At least he finally did.... More than I can say for most Hollywood actors/actresses and celebs out there.)
Is encouraging kids to grow up to be a trailer reviewer a good thing?
Yeah, you're right. Engineers would be so much better off if we just let them develop their ideas, market them, and fail in peace.
For all his faults, he was terrific at determining what people actually wanted to buy and directing engineers to create that.
Your invention is worthless if no one uses it.
"not even an improvement over an old invention."
Right. Because the Macintosh was exactly like the Xerox Star, right down to the three-button Mouse and Smalltalk commands. Which Jobs licensed for a very agreeable amount - and he then directed the improvements that led to the popular GUI-driven personal computer.
The iMac - a minimalist, low-cost, laptop-derived machine with a CRT that was extremely easy to set up and which was design-forward - good-looking enough to put it in the center of your living area and not hide under a desk. Yeah, that was totally already done.
I wonder sometimes if Slashdot has gotten any better, then I come over and read stuff like this in the 'discussion' and realize it's just the same old, same old.
The iMac - a minimalist, low-cost, laptop-derived machine with a CRT that was extremely easy to set up and which was design-forward - good-looking enough to put it in the center of your living area and not hide under a desk. Yeah, that was totally already done.
Are we talking about these things? The only time something like that was good enough looking to put in the living room was a short period in the 60s (if they came out in the 70s, they would have been uglier shades of orange and earthen brown). I'd rather have a beige mini-tower in comparison.
It was not exactly a stunning debut for Ive's design; he got a lot better when he discovered the joys of barely-translucent white. Most of the rest of his designs have been home runs.
Ashton Kutcher found something inspiring (both in his film portrayal but moreso at the Nickelodeon awards) about someone who might not have seemed that way to those in his life.
well well well, i see, lets just keep our fingers crossed... CREEBHILLS BLOG REVIEW|FORBES RELEASES LIST OF THE 2015 WORLD'S HIGHEST-PAID SUPERSTARS
"The Amazing Jobs"
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
Can we have some BBWs in there as well?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
If it doesn't involve butt-seks, then it isn't Hollywood. The agenda cannot be forgotten!
That first Jobs movie wasn't bad, it gets a lot of bad comments, but i didn't notice anything really bad about it.
And to make another one, so soon after the first, why? Said trailer doesn't really blow me away.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Apple didn't license anything from Xerox. In fact, Xerox sued Apple over the Lisa (and lost) for Apple's use of "their" technology, despite the fact that the mouse and windowing were created much earlier by Doug Engelbart.
Even if your whole narrative about Apple wasn't bunk, the fact that Douglas Engelbart's only relation with Xerox is that some co-workers basically took his work and moved over there is the icing on the dumb-cake that is your claim.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Inspire your kids to be the best [name of your kid here] they can be, not any kind of Steve Jobs.
Did Jobs place mines around Madison Avenue and snipers on roof tops to keep everyone else out? Apple is coming up on 40, but no other technology company has been able to craft an ad campaign in all that time?
Hatebois gonna hate.