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Steve Wozniak "Steve Jobs Played No Role In My Designs For the Apple I & II"
mikejuk writes: In a recent interview with very lucky 14-year old Sarina Khemchandani for her website, ReachAStudent, Steve Wozniak was more than precise about the role of Steve Jobs. "Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He'd never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn't know software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that's what he wanted to do. The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed." He also says a lot of interesting things in the three ten minute videos about life, electronics and education.
I'm sure we already all knew it, but it is good to hear it come from him for once.
I think that's obvious. As a developer you have my respect and my sympathy for crossing paths with such assholes like Jobs.
The best product is meaningless if you don't have someone like Jobs shoving it down people's throats to get them to buy. Same with Woz, if you don't have something really cool to sell, then no one would have listened to Steve for very long. Two sides of the same coin. I'm not an Apple or Jobs fan, but obviously Steve did a lot of things right for a long time.
I doubt Woz was very good at sales. I doubt Steve was very good at building computers. No product "sells itself", and anyone who really believes that is an idiot.
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Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that
au contraire mon ami... He invented a style that makes billions. Do not be so hasty in judgement.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I am so sick of the cult of authority worship.
It's part of the worship of the wealthy.
It's part of the denigration of work, as the executives go around saying that engineers are and should be interchangable, we're fry cooks, and working us to death is slightly more efficient than allowing us lives. And so we should all be worked to death.
because of the media's worship of Jobs. What's he anyways? An executive? The man famous for bullshit? "Reality distortion field"
For bad decisions like making the first macs impossible to expand?
For bad decisions like not making products where you can change a battery that's lost half it's capacity in six months?
Don't you feel a bit cheated?
Considering how Apple nearly died when Steve was gone, and became the most profitable company on the planet after he returned, it's obvious that he did something.
Basically, Jobs was no engineer at all, he was a salesperson, the kind who could sell ice to eskimos by dressing it up somehow. A technology company needs both. Most companies aren't going to get far if they can't figure out how to sell stuff to customers, but a tech company also needs technology to sell, meaning you need engineers to make it.
I don't think any of this stuff is a revelation. Steve was obviously gifted with being able to market and sell stuff, and probably also at being able to know what kind of things *would* sell well and what wouldn't, and maybe some very high-level direction for changes to be made to sell things. The engineers like Woz are the ones who actually made everything happen though.
Quote is addressing a wee bit of a straw man. Still, it's a good drop of blood in the water for the Jobs haters to turn out.
Which was no doubt the idea behind posting it in the first place.
Apple would have collapsed even if Jobs stuck around. It was a company that grew too big, too fast. It was a feeding ground for people with grand ideas and even more grandiose egos. Like many of it's contemporaries, it was doomed to fall.
Jobs' return was a different story, but a lot can still be attributed to luck. To Jobs credit, he was a more mature businessman and he reentered at a time when Apple realized that it had to be more humble. He probably would have saved the company regardless of what happened. Yet there was a lot of luck. Things like the iPod were initially directed at Apple's existing customers. The growth that it triggered and the products that it enabled were far from a bygone conclusion.
The vacuum of consumer demand for computers was created and Steve Jobs was in the right place at the right time.
He's no more special than any other lottery winner.
Yet there was a lot of luck.
There was no luck. Anyone with half a brain knew that OS9 was shit and tanking fast. They needed something better and fast, they had no time to start from scratch. They hired back Jobs because he basically forked Mac OS and re-wrote it correctly as Next OS. With just a little work Next OS became OSX and suddenly apple can sell real computers with real operating systems on them. no magic, no luck. just pure engineering skill.
Not at all. He's quite right. Jobs was important, but simply wasn't the technology guy. It's got to the point where you ask young people (10 year-olds, say) today who Steve Jobs was, you'll quite often hear laughable stuff such as "the inventor of the computer".
Without Jobs, Woz's designs would have been brilliant one-offs. Without Woz, Jobs would not have had anything to make a company from. So both were needed to create Apple. As Jobs said, "Great Artists Ship".
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