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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 hear hissing sounds from the apple camp.
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.
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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!”
Yes, we knew Jobs had an over-inflated ego. That came out long before his death.
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.
Of course, but if you listen to the narrative being peddled by a lot of people (including prominent media and websites), you'd think Jobs was nothing short of a one-man company genius, able to do tech design, aesthetic design, management, logistics, sales and marketing all by himself. The Steve Wozniaks and Jonathan Ives of this world tend to be quickly forgotten when attempting to create the new messiah, which Jobs entirely embraced, and fuck the ones who helped him. As with most large success stories, it involves a talented team and lots of luck rather than a single person magically doing everything perfectly.
It doesn't help that Jobs leveraged people like Woz, who's very candid and even humble, while being a total arrogant prick himself, even as the media try to portray him as an aspirational model.
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.
Sometimes people forget that Linux has their own "asshole with a vision" as well. In fact, I'd say Linux actually had two. Both of those individuals had a very strong presence (along with contentious personalities) and helped to shape Linux into what it is today during it's formative years, and not only from a technological standpoint.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
NeXT was a flop. They couldn't sell anything. It was vastly overpriced and hardly world class. The only reason that Jobs ended up back at Apple was because the OS that Apple was using at the time was hopelessly outdated and unstable and Scully was running the company into the ground. Obviously they couldn't use Windows so they needed something and the UNIX based system that NeXT was using fit the bill.
Mind you, the first few iterations of OSX were pretty bad as well. Slow, buggy and crash prone but it was a start. Apple stuck with it and got it right. I'll give Jobs credit for switching to Intel based processors. That was probably the smartest thing he did. And I'll give him credit for the whole "vertical stack" thing where Apple builds the hardware and designs the software. That was smart.
But Woz was the hands on guy. He was the guy that got it done and I don't think he gets enough credit for the overall success of the company. I'm not anti Apple or anything. I like their products. I just tend to think that Jobs gets more credit than he deserves.
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
Apple ][ dev here as well. My recollection from those days was that Woz was the engineer and Jobs was the salesman. From Mac days onward Jobs was the salesman and the designer in the look-and-feel sense, not in any technical sense.
While sales and look-at-feel are certainly important, when at a '83 trade show as a developer and returning to our booth and telling my buddies I just talked to "Steve" for a few minutes over at the Apple booth, they were excited. Then I confessed it was Jobs not Woz and the mood shifted to, eh, ok.
We certainly recognized that Jobs was essential to Apple's success, its just that we were engineers and the business/sales side held little interest for us. Again, post-Mac, our appraisal of Jobs improved due to his look-and-feel design work.
Now this all comes out after his death..Sounds like an over inflated ego to me
That thought crossed my mind as well. Since Jobs ain't there to contradict him....
Speaking as a former Apple ][ dev, this was all common knowledge. Jobs was the salesman, Woz was the engineer. That said, sales was certainly a very important and critical role. Both Steves were absolutely essential to Apple's success. Jobs got an upgrade in our view post-Mac due to his look-and-feel design work, but still he was never thought of as a hands on tech person.
Woz is the hero of the Apple story to engineers, Jobs is the hero to wall street. The mainstream news and the public at large merely lean towards the wall street perspective.