Wired cover story highlights Steve Jobs' effect on tech leaders

He wasn't a jerk he always got what he wanted, no matter the consequences. 

I'm sort of tired of the "look how bad Steve Jobs was" angle that ignores everything else.

Yeah, I saw that on the newsstand and thought about reading it. Has anyone read it?

 

Just finished it. It's basically more Issacson stuff but with further anecdotes from other tech industry leaders and how Jobs shaped their thinking. 

Yeah, he was mean at times but he was always right and everything he did was either perfect, or perfected later down the line.

 

Er… 

 

I'll grant you that for the Cube/Mini, but there're quite a few other things he was dead wrong on.

Really.  There are others out there.  For some reason Steve is thought of as a total one of a kind person.  Yet I believe there are others out there.

somebody needs to look up 'de facto'.

 

At least his successes outweighed his failures when it was all said and done. Look at Ballmer for comparison. ;)

Methinks one should lighten up a bit.

Really????

You did notice the comments on the left side in yellow???  (uh, and the halo?)

I'm waiting for their cover story on Steve Ballmer. But he's probably not good copy like Steve is so the magazine wouldn't sell.

 

... he wasn't a jerk, from some peoples point of view ;)!!

and i would say most people would view him as a jerk after reading his biography

 

 

No matter what anyone says, the guy knew how to turn a buck.

I think Steve inspired a certain kind of "madness"... Eg. Voodoo PC, the guy around the time Voodoo was bought by HP, was talking up a lot of stuff and was an intense admirer of Apple. Strangely, nothing came of HP-Voodoo. Hence the "madness".

Way over my head on the correct answer, was Steve a jerk or just ruthless/perfectionist?
It seems(just my opinion, no facts)... Ruthless seems to be a factor/characteristic for these top dog players. It's business, not personal.

Perhaps you are the one that needs to look up the meaning of de facto. The AI article I read says: "...as Facebook began to morph into the de facto standard in social media," which sounds quite appropriate, and rather different from your quoted snippet.

 

So what's the big holdup?

 

Still waiting . . . since about 1977. 

Edited by Quadra 610 - 7/22/12 at 8:10pm

 

Why not both. Not that it matters. He got the RESULTS. 

 

I'm more than willing to give someone like that a pass. Easily. If only the industry were full of those like him. Imagine how much further evolved tech would be. 

 

But instead we're cursed with clowns like Ballmer, whats-his-name running RIM, Elop, and that guy from Acer, among others. 

 

Which is fine, because all you need to do is look toward Cupertino for that tall glass of ice-water in all this hell. 

Meanwhile Ballmer simply outweighs .....

Yes and no. There are so many ways to interpret a "one of a kind" comment. Is Steve Jobs one of a kind? Sure, just as we are all as there are two lives no matter how seemingly similar that are exactly the same.

However there are surely plenty of others out there that have the right kind of intelligence and ability to focus that helped make Jobs such a brilliant business man. There are also plenty of others out there that have the right kind of mindset that helped make Jobs such a brilliant business man I'm sure there are a lot more than a few. The latter sentence focuses on nurture and the former on nature.

On thing I never see get considered is how important a role luck plays in our historical heroes. Perhaps we want to feel like we have complete control over your destiny in life. I know I was taught as a child that I can be anything when i grow up. I know it's simplistic statement but I can see how it could be devastating for a child that has a certain desire that can never get fulfilled.

For better or worse I doubt more of the world's children are taught that lie as most are born into poverty, live in poverty, and die in poverty. When you're primary focus in life is to find safety, shelter and/or food you don't have little to no time for self-actualization. It's quite possible that the most brilliant minds this planet has ever seen have never been realized because they neve had the opportunity. Bad luck all around.

I wonder what Steve's life would have been life had be born in another state or country? I think the opportunity for the first consumer PC company would have been lost. If he had been raised by his biological parents with his biological sister? I think it's possible that his drive to change the world would have been mitigated had his upbringing been less rocky. All we can do is speculate and people can claim that there is no starving child in some impoverished nation that outthink Einstein, and they might be right, but the odds are certainly not in their favour.

Is it Latin for "Bloody Annoying?"

I get really frustrated when I see garbage like this printed. First it implies that somebody could be perfect and we all know that isn't the case. Further Apple has stumbled many times so people do forget the bad.

I'm not trying to discount what Steve has accomplished, he rightly deserves congratulations. I just object to setting him up as a model of perfection. More so I object the idea that Apple has never made mistakes under his leadership. Frankly Steve would be the first to admit to those mistake and often talked about growing as a leader.

People do come up short not realizing they are one of a kind too. People only need to open their eyes, there is nothing unique about Steves intelligence. Not everybody used their intelligence to build a company like Apple, but intelligence isn't measured by the size of the company you build. Luck has little to do with success. When you look at successful companies locally you often see one man driving that success. The importance of that individual driver can not be underestimated, one often sees such companies go into rapid decline after that driving force is removed.

Frankly this is where a lot of concern over Apple was expressed when Steve passed. It is a really big question, will the new leadership have a vision that is capable of sustaining the company. I fail to see what poverty has to do with anything discussed here. Many a wealthy person has failed to make a success of himself. Given a big enough trust fund you can fail repeatedly. Being successful is more about having the tools to navigate the social world and the ability to realize concepts that end up valued by the general population. Apple the company wasn't alone back then. In fact one could say they didn't even have the best product at the start. Further in the early years Apples success was driven as much by Viscalc as by consummers. That one app pulled Apple ahead of many of the other consummer directed computer companies back then.

Your statements here make me wonder if you where even around in the early days or if you even read BYTE magazine back then. I really don't know where you are getting all of this crap. Successful people come from all sorts of backgrounds. More so many people with extraordinary minds came from backwater countries often from meager means. Deleted your useless new age pyramid.

I'm getting the MonkeyBoy copy :D

Too bad most of these so called "leaders" never learned "thou shalt not copy Apple".

Do you want your annual salary to be 1$ a Year ? (50 cents for showing up, and 50 cents based on results (as Steve said) ....

 

If that also comes with the other millions of dollars a year in stock options and other income then yeah, I'll take a $1 salary no problem.

 

The whole $1 salary thing was a big show of Jobs being there for the love of it and not the money (and probably came with massive tax benefits too!) but it's not like he wasn't making up the shortfall elsewhere.

1) That simple model is 100 years old. There is nothing new age about it.

2) If you don't think luck has anything to with success then why is that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are not just from the same country but similar economic classes and age.

3) You've made intelligent out to be some single element. You've made no effort to understand there are many ways someone could be more gifted intellectually over another. You've made not effort to understand how personality can affect success, like taking a risk that another simply wouldn't take, like dropping out of Harvard.

4) It's ignorant to suggest that a child with polio can be a success Olympic swimmer if he simply puts his mind to it. It's ignorant to suggest that Genie, the most famous feral child, could grow up to be a statesman as easily as if she came from a privileged background. It's ignorant to ignore how much luck plays in your ability to succeed or how you can control aspects of your relative success.

5) Your entire posts makes intelligence out to a choice when that is the ultimate luck of the draw. If a brilliant child gets into an accident, no fault of his own, that leaves him brain damaged you seriously don't consider that unlucky? You are really think you can convince yourself that the child could be the exact same thing and make all the same world-level accomplishments regardless of any scenario they are born into? That's fucking nuts on every level!

 

Most geniuses have had personality quirks that have made them unlikable.     Einstein was reputed to be terrible to his wife and after his initial breakthroughs unable to come to terms with other advances in the field.   Picasso was terrible to all the women he supposedly loved.     John Lennon had a mean streak, especially in his younger days.    He treated his first wife like crap and pretty much abandoned his first son Julian.    

 

I also think most geniuses "don't suffer fools gladly".   The simply don't have the patience for people they consider less intelligent or less worthy than them.

 

There's a lack of balance in the lives of most geniuses because their relentless focus on what they're trying to achieve doesn't permit it.      But if they were more centered, they probably never would have achieved what they did.    

 

I've always had a theory that geniuses like Jobs and Gates were borderline Asperger's cases.     If you look at their relationships (or lack of them) with others, Jobs' obsession with wearing the same outfit every day, his Zen design aesthetic, Gates' reputation when he was young of rarely bathing, their alienation of former friends and/or colleagues, etc., it all fits.        

......which are worth anything at all only if the stock price does better than the exercise price on the options.

 

Very few people -- except perhaps the faithful -- predicted Apple's astounding success at that time. Look at what's happened to the stocks of RIMM (down), Nokia (down), Motorola (down and out), MSFT (flat), etc -- who would have thought? It's easy to sound smart because things seem obvious in hindsight, but it took a lot of guts to do what SJ did then.

As Einstein aptly stated, "The difference between genius and insanity is your level of success." And while I assume he meant from perspective of how others perceive you it's possible that the same things that drive biology is responsible for both.

It's interesting how much of our more revered, feared and brilliant minds throughout history have focused on a single goal. I wonder if Ghangis Khan was born today, and nothing about his nurture was altered, what he'd be? I'd wager in this what-if scenario that dominating business would be more inline with his accomplishments than joining the military or being a statesman. I wonder if Steve Jobs would have been a Napoleon or Nero had he been born into a different era. I wonder what Taco Bell Steve Ballmer would have been manager of had he not gotten lucky with MS.

I like how everyone is looking for the secret to Steve and I know many people who read his book looking for some sort of insight into why he did what he did only to be disappointed. For  some reason Steve really had the ability to understand what was important to people and what matter. Honeslyt, I do not think he understood it so well himself, otherwise he would have been able to explain exactly what he did and why he did it. The problem with most companies they do not have the one mind controlling it all. When Steve came back to apple that he and only he will be making all decision not others. What went well was the fact he kept getting it right so all the critics could not bring him down like before.

 

But as other have pointed out, Steve was who was was because of his genetics, his life experiences and being in the right place at the right time. No person will be able to recreate this. Yes you can go around being intensely focus or yelling at people to be better or any number of individual things he did, but being a meme of Jobs does not mean you will accomplish the same.

 

I really do not think Steve admired anyone, especially not Mark Z, it think Steve was just f-ing with him to learn what he maybe needed to understand about social networking, beyond this I think he was trying to make Mark feel good to knock him off balance.

 

Then the question becomes do his successes justify all the actions and behaviors that people complained about?  Do the ends justify the means?

 

Can you imagine all the managers and executives out there who act like total pricks and try to flatter themselves by comparing their behavior to Steve Jobs or Dr. House?  I'm sure everyone here has had bosses like that.  Perhaps some people here actually are one of those bosses?

 

For you people who have to deal with bosses like that every day, do you find it easy to cut Steve Jobs any slack for his reported behavior towards others?

Edited by Haggar - 7/23/12 at 11:31am

 

Mr. Ballmer needs to lay off the donuts.

 

I think de facto is Latin for "just de facts, ma'am"...

 

Success and failure have everything to do with chance. Let's take Steve Jobs, for example...

 

Suppose his mother hadn't given him up for adoption, or that circumstances had been different and he was adopted by a couple from, say, South Carolina. He wouldn't have grown up in Silicon Valley, he probably never would have met Steve Wozniak, and so on, and so on. He wouldn't have had the values instilled in him by his adoptive father or learned lessons from him like that even the parts of things you build that won't be seen should be well made. His parents might not have been as tolerant of his "willfulness" and he might have been molded into a completely different personality (or maybe not, but he might have experienced a lot more frustration and just grown up an angry, unfocused rebel). He probably wouldn't have even been exposed to the nascent computer industry. What if he had been born 10 years earlier or later, or even 5 years? What if Apple had bought Be?

 

And a million other circumstances over which he had either limited or no control, all of which shaped him or provided opportunities or obstacles that came to him by chance.

Can't speak for the chap you were replying to ... But as for me,BYTE??? Well yea but only after reading Dr. Dobb's cover to cover at least once!