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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.
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!”
Given the cult of personality around Jobs, it stands to reason that his actual contributions need to be put into perspective. Nobody is denying that he was a savvy businessman, or at least a savvy product marketer. Some people want to believe he was a messiah of sorts, others a pariah. But the actual workers who made Job's vision a reality tend to be completely overlooked in this fight, and it's high time their contributions were given their due share (and not just by nerds who already respect them).
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.
Those "bad" decision make sense if you think of it in the context of planned obsolescence. Jobs wanted you to keep buying new toys as he made more money that way. Jobs had one objective in life; make money for Steve Jobs. He was an excellent flimflam man and many people fell for his "reality distortion field".
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.
It is a difficult subject to deal with. Because on the one hand you got those people who worship CEOs and think they deserve their fat bonuses and salaries. They tell anybody who complains, that CEOs deserve it because they work harder than you etc. Yet people like Steve Jobs would be nowhere without people like Woz. On the other hand there is another equally cynical group of people who claim Steve Jobs made no contributions and was just leeching of the work of others. That is an equally wrong perspective. You can even read Woz's own accounts that Steve was influential even for the early Apple computers. He was the one who pushed them to start a business. He was the one who pushed for professional looking chassis. He pushed for silent power supply etc. With the Mac it is even more clear how he influenced its development. While he didn't sit there and do the nitty bitty details. He provided lots of feedback all through development steering it in the direction of his vision. His feedback was usually far more detailed than what a regular CEO would give. The other strength of Steve Jobs which should not be belittled was that he had a talent for spotting talent and trusting it. Lots of great people like Jonathan Ive were never really allowed to make great things until they worked under Steve Jobs. They would get their smart ideas shot down by narrow minded leadership. Steve Jobs would get out of the way and let them do their Job. Even though I think Steve Jobs contributions should be acknowledge as well as the contributions of those who worked for him, that doesn't necessarily mean I think he was a good person. He was an asshole. I would never aspire to treat people the way he did. Of course he wasn't an asshole all the time to everybody. He was quite selective about it.