If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs.
Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer.
The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.
They were both brilliant, but from everything that I've read, Jobs was an ass****, and Woz was the opposite, and that is a huge, huge difference.
The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc.
To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.
Oft repeated, and not untrue, but very incomplete.
Jobs also made a lot of people. A lot of fortunes in SilVal only exist because of Steve Jobs.
He also virtually single handedly and without much fanfare at the time or credit in the history books created the employee compensation model that came to define SilVal success, with workaday employees and especially engineering contributors receiving stock options to reward them and keep them invested in the company's success.
I don't disagree with what you say, but I have literally never seen or heard "SilVal". Is this a common shorthand? I hear "the Valley" and see "SV" but never this halfcronym.
You are correct that jobs made a ton of people - and not just wealthy, he created an entire ecosystem around Apple, which made a large number of people vast sums of money.
That last part however.. is not actually true - Fairchild Semiconductor did it, and did it far before Apple did. I'd like to say intel (and a ton of others) did the same thing.
Sure, but he was cruel for no reason to many people who did not deserve it, I don't even care about his tech problems. Nobody should park in the handicap stalls without a license plate because he keeps leasing new cars.
You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.
You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor.
Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.
Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit).
The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.
As Henry Ford is (spuriously) claimed to have said: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
Apple did build Apple II models, up to and including the Apple IIgs. They had a good run. And the line was not without its flops — the Apple III was a notorious disaster, though allegedly more due to Jobs than Wozniak.
But none of the pure 8-bit PC vendors survived the 1980s. One of the better qualities of Jobs was that he was not afraid of the company disrupting itself — foregoing the short term success of the Apple II line in favor of the Mac, which in the long run was vastly superior. The same situation played out with the iPhone disrupting the iPod.
I do wonder if it's possible to be a brilliant marketer, and reach the levels Jobs did, without being an asshole. The core of the profession is learning how to manipulate and use people better than anyone else.
I believe that's what Isaacson tries to write about in the Jobs and Musk biographies, indirectly. He seems to think that being an asshole has nothing to do with being brilliant.
Personally, I think it has more to do with having an emotional hole. Creators who do so primarily for its own sake, be they musicians, visual artists, or coders, are different from those who want to rule the world. The latter may genuinely enjoy the craft, but it's often subordinate to the deeper need for validation (see: emotional hole). It's this need that makes people assholes, imo.
And still, when it comes to built-in accessibility, Jobs is pretty much famous for his "fuck ROI" statement. He set precedence around 2007, which eventually forced other players like Google and Microsoft to follow. These days, Talkback and Narrator are builtin for both OSes, which is mostly because Apple went there first. This move changed the lifes of a a few million people.
I'm not sure what to believe. I know he was incredibly demanding, and I've heard the stories, but he also inspired a lot of loyalty and commitment from plenty of very talented engineers who were not short of other options.
Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs.
He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad.
> Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs.
> He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad.
So about this, I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in 6th grade and this is something which troubles me from watching it (multiple times as it was the only offline movie I had so much so that I once gave a mini speech in class about steve jobs haha & one of my teachesrs started calling me steve jobs haha!)
But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa. I mean iirc he did try to connect with her later but still, I just don't understand why he acted so harshly towards his mother when everything could've been going fine.
Like there were definitely plenty of moments in the movie where steve jobs wasn't the right guy. I really can't find the rationale behind some of the things.
I feel like I still don't know what to make of the whole situation regarding Steve jobs. but when you mentioned this comment, while reading it I imagined the point where Steve jobs offered Lisa a flower.
I remember this because many years after watching the movies, this youtube video came to my feed (I searched it again by just searching some PoSV related thing with lisa flower to find it)
And even the director of the movie commented in the comments of this video which was pinned!
As well as using a lot of 70's & 80's classic rock and roll classics appropriate to the era when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple, we also went for "sound-alikes" (for the Ella Fitzgerald number) and created some of our own music. This piece is one of those creations. There is no name for it that I'm aware of.
Martyn Burke
Director-Pirates of Silicon Valley
>But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa.
Jobs was, by the accounts of everyone who knew him, almost singularly focused on doing what he did in the computer industry, by the time Lisa was conceived. His relationship with Lisa's mom, Chrisann Brennan, had begun during his wild-seed-sewing hippie days. My read on it is, he looked at the relationship with Chrisann as a remnant of a past he wanted to leave behind, and the potential relationship with Lisa as a sink for his energies that didn't fit the image he wished to concoct for himself.
Steve Jobs was a flawed human, like we all are. And like all of us, his flaws were inseparable from his strengths and achievements. As someone who didn't have to experience any of those direct flaws, I feel incredible gratitude for how his achievements changed my life and the world generally, and hope that those people he hurt can forgive him.
This. When Woz created the Apple I and Apple II, the entire microcomputer market consisted of hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists. Had Woz been acting alone, the Apple I and Apple II would have made a splash at Homebrew, but they wouldn't have been products. Jobs made them products. After VisiCalc, this market expanded to finance professionals, but it was still a tiny market. It was really Raskin and Jobs who proved the viability of the Xerox PARC (and SRI before them) advancements around the GUI that propelled computing to a more general audience. Then, MS caught up, dominated the market in the 1990s, and Apple came back only when Jobs returned and began pushing industrial design and OS X. From the point until quite recently, most companies R&D could have just been attending Apple product launches and imitating as best they could (that's hyperbolic, but not entirely incorrect).
When you look at it squarely, Jobs could have sold any average product and made money, and Woz' product was so far above average it could have sold on its own (to a more limited extent), with each unit sold making money either way.
Money would be made by each person regardless but this combination not only got more units to fly off the shelf, it got the company off to a more above-average likelihood of future products doing well with growth from there.
The longer that structure can be maintained, the better.
Most of the time a miraculous salesman or marketing strategist has an average to below-average product to represent, and they will still do very well.
So well in fact, that they themselves may never find out what the full upside would be if they had a product that actually was above-average enough for it to be able to sell on its own one way or another. And then act as a multiplier to that.
Through the roof can be hard to avoid then.
Same business plan I had as a preteen, way before Apple got going.
Woz took the Apple 1 to HP to see if they wanted it, since he was working there at the time. They passed on it. It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby.
Jobs went on to start NeXT (which became modern Apple) and turned Pixar into a the studio that released Toy Story.
Jobs wasn’t just a salesman, he was a serial entrepreneur. His footnotes would be most people’s whole career. His talent wasn’t just sales, but also building teams of talented people and selling them on his vision.
true. woz made a $900 universal remote in 1987.
it could control 256 devices via IR and was programmable via PC at a time when you probably had 1 device in your house (with 7 channels.) Maybe 2 if you had a tape player. He clearly made it for himself and his sick component system.
> The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.
Woz was perfect for those in the home brew club and Steve (basically vagabond) had a different perspective on users. It was the perfect combo in hindsight.
I have used it on doors for years with zero trouble. Granted, I have to reapply every four months. It is infinitely safer than the toxic brew that is WD40.
FIPS is ancient and dates from the era when encryption was unusual and rare. That is why some of it seems so arcane. FIPS 140 didnt even allow software encryption until 140-3, 140-2 required a hardware secure enclave.
Definitely false, at least historically. The original FIPS only required HW at levels 3 and 4, "required" in the sense that levels 1 and 2 were quite doable in software (level was/is no authentication to the CM, letting it be protected by the host; level 2 was/is a form of basic authentication, e.g., encrypting private keys under a key derived from a password).
I was part of a team that had multiple level 1 and 2 certificates for software-only CMs in the 1990s, both 140 and the second edition, 140-1.
Thank you for this cultural explanation - I've experienced the same thing with Japanese co-workers - there is often a "no" but to American ears its so subtle that it often goes in one ear and out the other.
Both the cultures suffer from "a senior is always right" mentality. Therefore, with my juniors, I used to intentionally (sometimes, and mostly during early days of their joinings) make stupid little mistakes (harmless) and used to let those folks figure that out and then appreciate them on catching it. Worked like wonder. Never ever anyone hesitated to discuss anything with me anytime.. even personal issues many times :)
You just have to make it easy for others to do their jobs. Removing barriers, of any kind, helps. This is even more true with juniors.
I appreciate that this figure is showing that the relative scarcity of gold compared to oil increasing, but I'm not sure what it's saying, or is interesting beyond that? Is this reflecting a global shift towards natural gas rather than oil, or reflecting investors are particularly nervous since covid, for example?
Obviously, you can't drawn any hard conclusions, but I was wondering what the OP was thinking narratively when posting.
Funny enough, to get to actual representative diversity you need to explicitly hire underrepresented candidates and pass up on white dudes. Which Scott famously complained about.
> you need to explicitly hire underrepresented candidates and pass up on white dudes
If the initiatives that promoted diversity explicitly said that, they probably wouldn't have passed. The whole argument was about whether that was true because proponents would never be honest about that part so the public debate never got past that.
My dad was a heroin addict, and while he eventually got (mostly) clean, he wryly joked to me once "you know there aren't a ton of old heroin users for a reason"
Using street drugs kills - we can put people on opiates if done in a controlled way, for the rest of their lives, we instead have gone down the road of prohibition, closing off pathways for people to get maintenance dosing of opiates.
Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer.
The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.
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