Eddy Cue blasts Alex Gibney's 'mean-spirited' Steve Jobs documentary at SXSW

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 43
    I saw it, and it's as bad as they say.

    The interviews and reporting is all negative, and not just towards Jobs, but Apple in general. In particular, Gibney slams Apple for holding its profits in Ireland and lays blame for the Foxconn worker who jumped to his death over a missing iPhone prototype. Or the no-poaching agreements between Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. There's no balance or perspective (that it's not solely an Apple issue). At one point they got into the stolen iPhone 4 prototype sold to Gawker and painted Apple as a gang of thugs knocking down Adrien Chen's door. What about the gleeful trafficking of Apple's prototype? The film acknowledged that the REACT team was funded by many Silicon Valley companies, but Gibney limited the scope of his criticism to Apple. Just Apple. It was an extremely slanted hit piece, which I didn't expect from Alex Gibney.
  • Reply 22 of 43

    I have owned and managed several companies. When I see the sheer number of loyal individuals that have worked for Steve for decades that are still working at Apple ,well this fact speaks for itself. If Steve was a tyrant he simply would not have these longtime friends still working at Apple. 

  • Reply 23 of 43
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    part of the human psyche seems to want heroes.

    ... and villains. People who revel in seeing Apple being torn down or just want a sensationalistic story want Steve to be portrayed as a villain. One reason is that if you make Steve the linchpin of the whole company and he's a hero then it's a great foundation that the company is built on. If he is portrayed as being a villain or even just a fraud like the Mother Teresa example then it undermines everything Apple is built on. Steve's individual characteristics aren't all that important to Apple one way or the other, Apple is made up of tens of thousands of people, not one but as far as the public perception of him goes, some of the people who didn't get along with him just want retribution for how they were treated and people who were treated well want a more balanced portrayal.

    You can see the people at the Q&A and how they are talking about Apple:


    [VIDEO]


    Mocking the liver donation from Tim, covering Steve's paternity for the umpteenth time, talking about how Laurene didn't contribute to the film and encouraged others not to, comparing Steve to fraudulent characters and Scientology, saying that Apple doesn't live up to the core values they project. When it comes down to the basis of their claims, there's nothing but their opinions, they admitted people close to Apple didn't co-operate with them. You can hear the guy holding the camera laughing away at them taking jabs at Apple.

    These are the same kind of idiots that post on comment sections all over the internet with the idea that people who buy Apple products are somehow deluded into paying more money for their products and it's all a lie and it's their job to expose everything. You can get a cheaper Android or Windows product and presumably they use free-range Chinese employees to build their products. The guy who made the film even has an iPhone. Why not make a documentary about Samsung and the crime family running that if they want a real story.
    From listening to people who worked near him or with him, I don't think I would have enjoyed it. Would the positives been enough to put up with the negatives? I don't know. I do know of people who left Pixar because of him.

    People left Apple when Steve died, some the same day. The following was an engineer who described being overworked under Steve but left when he was no longer there:

    http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2014/03/13/why-apple-cant-be-insanely-great-after-steve-jobs

    "One of the 200 interviews on which Kane bases her book was with an engineer who had worked at Apple for 15 years. “He said my job is like Sisyphus,” referring to the king in Greek mythology who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill each day, only to repeat the process the next day and forever more.

    “He said, ‘I'm asked to work long hours, do the impossible in blind faith that all that is going to be part of something significant. Then that moment would come when Steve went up on stage... and that gives you the energy to keep going'.”

    I finally left because that reward wasn't as great as it used to be. It wasn't as meaningful.

    When Steve Jobs died, that engineer handed in his notice. “I finally left because that reward wasn't as great as it used to be. It wasn't as meaningful.”

    At the same time, senior executives are taking the opportunity to enjoy life – something that wasn’t possible under Jobs, who hated taking holidays and hated his employees taking time off too.

    “I think Tim is a more reasonable person,” says Kane. “What I’ve heard is that people are taking more vacations, they're buying second homes now that they have time to spend in them. They're enjoying life.”

    While that’s great for them, it takes the edge off the company. “I think to continue to be the edgy, innovative company that drives innovation requires an intensity that's just insane,” says Kane. Without Steve Jobs behind them, Apple has lost its insanity."

    Steve here describes the feelings of the staff at Apple. They didn't endure Steve, they welcomed him, they endured people like Amelio who drove the company into the ground:


    [VIDEO]


    Steve said the following in an interview:

    "At times I've been pretty hard about managing companies and a lot of times people haven't wanted to leave and I haven't given them any choices. If somebody wanted to write a book about me, most of my friends would never talk to them but they could go find the handful of a few dozen people that I fired in my life who hate my guts. It was certainly the case in the one book I skimmed. I mean it was just "let's throw the darts at Steve". Such is life. That's the world I've chosen to live in. If I didn't like that part of it enough, I'd escape and I haven't so I'm willing to put up with that. But I certainly didn't find it very accurate."
    I've also suffered in jobs where my boss felt they were a genius and demanded endless attention to please them.  Placing ridiculous deadlines on their workers backs and expecting all to accept this without disagreement. And it turned out they were just needy people who wanted attention and didn't know what they were doing.

    You're talking about people who think a lot of themselves, not people who other people think a lot of. You can see in the following videos that Steve earned respect, he didn't just demand it. Compare how he handled his presentation vs Amelio:


    [VIDEO]


    [VIDEO]
  • Reply 24 of 43
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Slurpy View Post

     

     

    This trashy, skewed, agenda-driven, loose-with-the-facts summary is all I needed to read to determine the quality of this hit-piece. 

     

    - Yeah, if I was attempting to lead a company out of irrelevancy and near-bankruptcy, I would also focus things by culling all non-essential programs, until the situation  improved, and the capacity to give potentially becomes much greater. If Jobs didn't take this approach, Apple would either not exist today, or not be in the position it is in, where it is doing infinitely more good than it otherwise could have. 

     

    - Steve Jobs personally paid Chinese workers a pittance? My, I learn something new everyday. What disgusting, crass statement. Yeah, the salary of those workers have nothing to do with China, nothing to do with Foxconn or the companies that actually EMPLOY the workers, nope, the salaries of these people was all up to the great Steve Jobs. 

     

    - The family shit is not even worth commenting on, it's so low brow, and beaten like a dead horse already. All evidence points to the fact that Jobs becamse a much better human being later in his life, he was loved by his wife and family, and by all accounts he was loyal to them. But yeah, that's irrelevant, let's demonize him for shit he did when he was 20 yrs old, for which we only have one side of the story. That's journalism for you.  

    This documentary just seems like hit-piece trash, a nasty, superficial look at Jobs meant to create controversy and attention. Let's ignore the thousand of anecdotes of people who say they wouldn't trade anything in the world for their experience of working with the guy, or the other thousand that maintain how Steve helped, mentored, and guided them. I doubt if Jobs was such a disgusting human being, people like Tim Cook would have offered him their liver. There are so many anecdotes of him going out of his way to make someone's day and to help people in the capacity that he could. 


     

    I've seen a lot of complaints recently about how evil Jobs was because he cut the philanthropic efforts. Then they say "BUT APPLE WAS LOADED". It's like, no, Apple really wasn't doing extremely well until 2011 or so, when Jobs was on the way out.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton View Post



    I saw it, and it's as bad as they say.



    The interviews and reporting is all negative, and not just towards Jobs, but Apple in general. In particular, Gibney slams Apple for holding its profits in Ireland and lays blame for the Foxconn worker who jumped to his death over a missing iPhone prototype. Or the no-poaching agreements between Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. There's no balance or perspective (that it's not solely an Apple issue). At one point they got into the stolen iPhone 4 prototype sold to Gawker and painted Apple as a gang of thugs knocking down Adrien Chen's door. What about the gleeful trafficking of Apple's prototype? The film acknowledged that the REACT team was funded by many Silicon Valley companies, but Gibney limited the scope of his criticism to Apple. Just Apple. It was an extremely slanted hit piece, which I didn't expect from Alex Gibney.



    One of the commenters on the Verge (who, of course, ran a Jobs hit piece using this turd as evidence.) said that one of the producers is a lawyer for Gawker Media. That explains the focus on that incident.

  • Reply 25 of 43
    maestro64maestro64 Posts: 5,043member
    Lets put this way, you do not get to where Steve got by being nice to everyone all the time. Also Eddy Cue I would say is in no position to make his statement for all of Steve's life. We all know what Steve did during is early days at Apple and we heard it from numerous sources. Steve obviously learned to tone it down with time and figured out new ways to motivate people without berating them.

    Here is my issue, we have all these people who get so offend when someone even raises their tone to them, they think everyone is bad person if they yell at them. I tell these people to grow some and your mom should not have sheltered you as much. When you work for someone else and they are paying your bills and they think you screwed up too bad take it like a person and deal with it. If you do not like it there is a door and go start you own company and you all can have your nice tea party each day.

    So what if Steve could not control his temper at first and flew off the handle to get people motived to do things they did not think was possible. That is no reason he should not be recognized for his success. I tired of people like Eddy Cue and even Cook who are trying to recreate what Steve was. Face it Steve was megalomaniac with great vision and ideas of what people love you can not change that.
  • Reply 26 of 43
    superdxsuperdx Posts: 67member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Dave Bingham View Post

     

    I have owned and managed several companies. When I see the sheer number of loyal individuals that have worked for Steve for decades that are still working at Apple ,well this fact speaks for itself. If Steve was a tyrant he simply would not have these longtime friends still working at Apple. 


     

    Keeping really good people around is no small feat. Not everyone can be kept by a nice paycheck (though there are plenty of those too). Lifers in government positions are usually terrible employees. You can't accomplish what Apple has accomplished by being a 9-5 desk jockey. 

  • Reply 27 of 43
    slurpyslurpy Posts: 5,382member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mark Fearing View Post



    Can people understand that while Steve did some cool/good/great/interesting things - he also wasn't a saint?

     

     

    I very much doubt one fucking person on the planet- even the biggest SJ or Apple fan- would ever claim he was a "saint", so you're just debating a strawman.  But there's a big difference between acknowledging that SJ wasn't perfect, and endorsing this kind of trashy, sensational hit piece. 

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton View Post



    I saw it, and it's as bad as they say.



    The interviews and reporting is all negative, and not just towards Jobs, but Apple in general. In particular, Gibney slams Apple for holding its profits in Ireland and lays blame for the Foxconn worker who jumped to his death over a missing iPhone prototype. Or the no-poaching agreements between Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. There's no balance or perspective (that it's not solely an Apple issue). At one point they got into the stolen iPhone 4 prototype sold to Gawker and painted Apple as a gang of thugs knocking down Adrien Chen's door. What about the gleeful trafficking of Apple's prototype? The film acknowledged that the REACT team was funded by many Silicon Valley companies, but Gibney limited the scope of his criticism to Apple. Just Apple. It was an extremely slanted hit piece, which I didn't expect from Alex Gibney.

     

    Wow, sounds like complete trash, recycling the most low-hanging negative, mostly deceitful anti-Apple memes of the last few years, that at the end of the day have very little to do with the truth or facts. This guy is a well regarded, respected biographer? Even the most superficial research would have shed light on the facts of these things, so this guy clearly knew he was vomiting out tired and misleading lies. Utterly disgusting, and shameful. But hey, there's $$ in dragging SJ out of his grave in order to drag him through the mud, and Apple along with him, so why not, eh? 

  • Reply 28 of 43
    slurpyslurpy Posts: 5,382member

    Love the "Steve Jobs is such a bad guy, he kept mocking Bill Gates, and look what Bill Gates is doing now!" line. Hey guys? Maybe you haven't noticed, but Steve died before he could fucking retire, so don't pretend to know what he would or wouldn't have done had he been given the opportunity that Bill Gates was given- to live. Also, what Steve rightfully attacked Bill on were the same things that others did, and justifiably so- (ie. the theft of Apple IP, creating shitty products, and creating a monopoly)- he didn't attack him for his philanthropic work, which came much, much later. The way they skew and frame things to make SJ look like a villian is truly despicable.

     

    What is even more despicable, is how this guy feels he has a right to constantly comment on and attack Steve's personal "spirituality", and SJ's philosophies, as if this guy has half of a fucking clue of what he believed. 

  • Reply 29 of 43
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Slurpy View Post

     

    Love the "Steve Jobs is such a bad guy, he kept mocking Bill Gates, and look what Bill Gates is doing now!" line. Hey guys? Maybe you haven't noticed, but Steve died before he could fucking retire, so don't pretend to know what he would or wouldn't have done had he been given the opportunity that Bill Gates was given- to live. Also, what Steve rightfully attacked Bill on were the same things that others did, and justifiably so- (ie. the theft of Apple IP, creating shitty products, and creating a monopoly)- he didn't attack him for his philanthropic work, which came much, much later. The way they skew and frame things to make SJ look like a villian is truly despicable.

     

    What is even more despicable, is how this guy feels he has a right to constantly comment on and attack Steve's personal "spirituality", and SJ's philosophies, as if this guy has half of a fucking clue of what he believed. 


    Much as I have deep admiration for what Bill Gates is currently doing, he (and Microsoft) had simply run out of ideas (assuming they even had much). It did not seem like there was much else for him to contribute by the late 1990s. In fact, he was even badly behind the curve on something as basic as the emergence on the internet.

     

    In the meantime, SJ had so much left to do to make our lives better. Despite the iMac, OSX, iPod, iPhone, iPad, @TV, iWatch (I think it started under him), iTunes, iLife, Pixar (and too many others too numerous to mention), I feel like he was just getting started.

     

    Also, I truly believe that, had he lived longer, he would have thoroughly disrupted the philanthropy industry.

  • Reply 30 of 43
    slurpy wrote: »
    Love the "Steve Jobs is such a bad guy, he kept mocking Bill Gates, and look what Bill Gates is doing now!" line. Hey guys? Maybe you haven't noticed, but Steve died before he could fucking retire, so don't pretend to know what he would or wouldn't have done had he been given the opportunity that Bill Gates was given- to live. Also, what Steve rightfully attacked Bill on were the same things that others did, and justifiably so- (ie. the theft of Apple IP, creating shitty products, and creating a monopoly)- he didn't attack him for his philanthropic work, which came much, much later. The way they skew and frame things to make SJ look like a villian is truly despicable.

    What is even more despicable, is how this guy feels he has a right to constantly comment on and attack Steve's personal "spirituality", and SJ's philosophies, as if this guy has half of a fucking clue of what he believed. 

    Much as I have deep admiration for what Bill Gates is currently doing, he (and Microsoft) had simply run out of ideas (assuming they even had much). It did not seem like there was much else for him to contribute by the late 1990s. In fact, he was even badly behind the curve on something as basic as the emergence on the internet.

    In the meantime, SJ had so much left to do to make our lives better. Despite the iMac, OSX, iPod, iPhone, iPad, @TV, iWatch (I think it started under him), iTunes, iLife, Pixar (and too many others too numerous to mention), I feel like he was just getting started.

    Also, I truly believe that, had he lived longer, he would have thoroughly disrupted the philanthropy industry.

    Also, Melinda was the key force behind Bill going into philanthropy, and I somewhat agree he does it for image building more than genuine generosity.
  • Reply 31 of 43
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Cpsro View Post

     



    Nope, Isaacson did not write that, nor did anyone else. Isaacson quoted Steve's sister's book of fiction based loosely on Steve, based on what she thought she knew of him. The quote is: "He was a man too busy to flush toilets." So even if it is true about Steve, there's good reason. And it doesn't necessarily mean he never or even rarely flushed the toilet... or that he even failed to flush more than twice! :smokey: 


     

    Maybe he just had some flunky who flushed toilets for him. That would be some fine job... ;-).

  • Reply 32 of 43
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    Marvin wrote: »
    ... and villains. People who revel in seeing Apple being torn down or just want a sensationalistic story want Steve to be portrayed as a villain. One reason is that if you make Steve the linchpin of the whole company and he's a hero then it's a great foundation that the company is built on. If he is portrayed as being a villain or even just a fraud like the Mother Teresa example then it undermines everything Apple is built on. Steve's individual characteristics aren't all that important to Apple one way or the other, Apple is made up of tens of thousands of people, not one but as far as the public perception of him goes, some of the people who didn't get along with him just want retribution for how they were treated and people who were treated well want a more balanced portrayal.

    You can see the people at the Q&A and how they are talking about Apple:


    [VIDEO]


    Mocking the liver donation from Tim, covering Steve's paternity for the umpteenth time, talking about how Laurene didn't contribute to the film and encouraged others not to, comparing Steve to fraudulent characters and Scientology, saying that Apple doesn't live up to the core values they project. When it comes down to the basis of their claims, there's nothing but their opinions, they admitted people close to Apple didn't co-operate with them. You can hear the guy holding the camera laughing away at them taking jabs at Apple.

    These are the same kind of idiots that post on comment sections all over the internet with the idea that people who buy Apple products are somehow deluded into paying more money for their products and it's all a lie and it's their job to expose everything. You can get a cheaper Android or Windows product and presumably they use free-range Chinese employees to build their products. The guy who made the film even has an iPhone. Why not make a documentary about Samsung and the crime family running that if they want a real story.
    People left Apple when Steve died, some the same day. The following was an engineer who described being overworked under Steve but left when he was no longer there:

    http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2014/03/13/why-apple-cant-be-insanely-great-after-steve-jobs

    "One of the 200 interviews on which Kane bases her book was with an engineer who had worked at Apple for 15 years. “He said my job is like Sisyphus,” referring to the king in Greek mythology who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill each day, only to repeat the process the next day and forever more.

    “He said, ‘I'm asked to work long hours, do the impossible in blind faith that all that is going to be part of something significant. Then that moment would come when Steve went up on stage... and that gives you the energy to keep going'.”

    I finally left because that reward wasn't as great as it used to be. It wasn't as meaningful.

    When Steve Jobs died, that engineer handed in his notice. “I finally left because that reward wasn't as great as it used to be. It wasn't as meaningful.”

    At the same time, senior executives are taking the opportunity to enjoy life – something that wasn’t possible under Jobs, who hated taking holidays and hated his employees taking time off too.

    “I think Tim is a more reasonable person,” says Kane. “What I’ve heard is that people are taking more vacations, they're buying second homes now that they have time to spend in them. They're enjoying life.”

    While that’s great for them, it takes the edge off the company. “I think to continue to be the edgy, innovative company that drives innovation requires an intensity that's just insane,” says Kane. Without Steve Jobs behind them, Apple has lost its insanity."

    Steve here describes the feelings of the staff at Apple. They didn't endure Steve, they welcomed him, they endured people like Amelio who drove the company into the ground:


    [VIDEO]


    Steve said the following in an interview:

    "At times I've been pretty hard about managing companies and a lot of times people haven't wanted to leave and I haven't given them any choices. If somebody wanted to write a book about me, most of my friends would never talk to them but they could go find the handful of a few dozen people that I fired in my life who hate my guts. It was certainly the case in the one book I skimmed. I mean it was just "let's throw the darts at Steve". Such is life. That's the world I've chosen to live in. If I didn't like that part of it enough, I'd escape and I haven't so I'm willing to put up with that. But I certainly didn't find it very accurate."
    You're talking about people who think a lot of themselves, not people who other people think a lot of. You can see in the following videos that Steve earned respect, he didn't just demand it. Compare how he handled his presentation vs Amelio:


    [VIDEO]


    [VIDEO]

    Thanks for the video links. I watched the Q & A with the filmmaker. It's clear he isn't up to the task of understanding Jobs, Apple, and what they've accomplished. Very much like Mike Daisey, as anantksundaram pointed out. A lightweight, and an emotional "thinker." I could go into tiresome detail if necessary. Someday I'd like to do it to his face.

    Now the question is, how to see the movie without paying for it.

    Edit: normally I'm against stealing people's work, but not in this case. This clown is stealing Steve Jobs' reputation and legacy.
  • Reply 33 of 43
    ecatsecats Posts: 272member
    Take one human: scrutinise and spin every action as malicious without looking into any deeper meaning for their motivation.

    You can play this game with anyone, people only chose to do it to a dead guy because he can't defend himself now.
  • Reply 34 of 43
    slurpy wrote: »
    I very much doubt one fucking person on the planet- even the biggest SJ or Apple fan- would ever claim he was a "saint", so you're just debating a strawman.  But there's a big difference between acknowledging that SJ wasn't perfect, and endorsing this kind of trashy, sensational hit piece. 

    Wow, sounds like complete trash, recycling the most low-hanging negative, mostly deceitful anti-Apple memes of the last few years, that at the end of the day have very little to do with the truth or facts. This guy is a well regarded, respected biographer? Even the most superficial research would have shed light on the facts of these things, so this guy clearly knew he was vomiting out tired and misleading lies. Utterly disgusting, and shameful. But hey, there's $$ in dragging SJ out of his grave in order to drag him through the mud, and Apple along with him, so why not, eh? 

    He is well regarded as a documentary filmmaker (just check out some of his other films), but I don't think he got the whole story. And no, he doesn't understand Jobs. I don't think he was trying to. Rather, he said he wanted to understand the public outpouring of grief when Jobs died. In so doing, he presents Jobs as a man of "contradictions" (his words). He goes so far as to present the point of view that Jobs sought (spiritual) enlightenment but "missed". How does one judge another's spiritual enlightenment? Yeah, there is testimony from others to support the argument he's making, but he's concluded that Jobs is an egotistical mythmaker, that Apple's Think Different campaign is populated with iconic historical figures who don't share Apple's values. I mean, just look at all the people he interviewed: author of Haunted Empire, widely regarded as an anti-Apple hit-piece, Adrien Chen, Nolan Bushnell who retold the story of how Steve swindled Woz out of the money he made from Breakout. Stuff we've heard before, but GIbney puts them all in there, edits out anything positive, and *bam* you have a hit-piece. And Gibney complains that Apple fans hate his movie. I think he thinks he's being fair. If that's true, then he's really blind to his own bias.
  • Reply 35 of 43
    slurpyslurpy Posts: 5,382member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton View Post



    I mean, just look at all the people he interviewed: author of Haunted Empire, widely regarded as an anti-Apple hit-piece, Adrien Chen, Nolan Bushnell who retold the story of how Steve swindled Woz out of the money he made from Breakout. Stuff we've heard before, but GIbney puts them all in there, edits out anything positive, and *bam* you have a hit-piece. And Gibney complains that Apple fans hate his movie. I think he thinks he's being fair. If that's true, then he's really blind to his own bias.

     

    I don't think it's possible for a sane human being to do what you just described (ie. search out the negative and filter out the positive) and at the same time, *think* they are being fair. He knows he wasn't. Which is what makes him, and this movie, so despicable. Noone pretends to admire or look up to SJ because of his family life. There's no confusion there- people admire him because of what he accomplished at Apple, and building Apple. Yet, Gibney's premise is that people love Steve because he was a saint or something, and therefore they need to be "corrected". His entire premise, and his entire argument is a moot point, and intellectually dishonest.

     

    The most highly regarded people in history were not regarded for their family life, or how often they went around hugging people. They were regarded for their incredible accomplishments. The main topics of this movie are ancient history (Lisa, etc) and have been rehashed a million times. There's nothing new or insightful there. 

  • Reply 36 of 43
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    One way to tell a weak-minded contemporary blowhard: he will resort to the infantile cliché, "it's all about the Stories we tell." Or some variation thereof.

    Everybody is a storyteller in their mind. The ad man tells a story, the journalist, the president must tell the story of America that the people want to hear. And so on. It's the most threadbare nostrum of the past two decades. Nobody talked like that thirty years ago, before TV got into people's brains to saturate them with narrative pap for hours on end.

    Alex Gibney now says Steve Jobs was mainly a storyteller. Gag yourself with a spoon, Alex. No he wasn't. He saw that most products people used were telling lies in their designs, but that's as much as I'll give your limp-dick argument.

    You can't figure Jobs out because you don't realize what he put in your pocket—an instrument that's going to make it very hard for liars and distorters of truth to make a living in the future. Citizen Kane indeed. You wish. You are headed for the back pages with Mike Daisey.
  • Reply 37 of 43

    I agree that the filmmaker seems obsessed with the spotlight and the fame that comes from taking down well known people. I have admired the products Steve built from a time when I had no special interest in technology through a career built around technology. One cannot dismiss Steve as a 'storyteller'. I think the rare thing Steve brought to technology was in part his interest in the arts and part of that is how we communicate. And humans build narratives - part allegory, part philosophy and part historical. And these narratives are not 'fantasy'. They encompass aspects of what it means to be alive.

     

    I always admired Jobs ability to cut to the bone. Whether it was his dismantling of Flash (he wasn't mean about it, he spoke obvious truths) to his famous comment on Microsoft ('They don't have taste. And I don't mean that in a small way.' - something like that) but again, you can see it as 'mean', but for me there was truth in it. And I think Microsoft would agree in that the issues of elegance and taste was not a focus for them. Maybe it was unfair of him to drag Microsoft into a fight on an issue that was foreign to them, but at the same time, why not flaunt what your products have and the others don't.

  • Reply 38 of 43
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Slurpy View Post

     

     

    I don't think it's possible for a sane human being to do what you just described (ie. search out the negative and filter out the positive) and at the same time, *think* they are being fair. He knows he wasn't. Which is what makes him, and this movie, so despicable. Noone pretends to admire or look up to SJ because of his family life. There's no confusion there- people admire him because of what he accomplished at Apple, and building Apple. Yet, Gibney's premise is that people love Steve because he was a saint or something, and therefore they need to be "corrected". His entire premise, and his entire argument is a moot point, and intellectually dishonest.

     

    The most highly regarded people in history were not regarded for their family life, or how often they went around hugging people. They were regarded for their incredible accomplishments. The main topics of this movie are ancient history (Lisa, etc) and have been rehashed a million times. There's nothing new or insightful there. 


    Exactly! Well written.

  • Reply 39 of 43
    slurpyslurpy Posts: 5,382member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mark Fearing View Post

     

    Exactly! Well written.


     

    Also, SJ names his computers after his daughter- not the best tactic to get the world forget about her. Yet, Gibney rehashes this as if he just discovered a deep, dark skeleton in Steve's closet that he is compelled to share for its incredible insights. 

     

    Look at Einstein- apart from his brilliant discoveries, he was a pretty screwed up human being. Much more screwed up than SJ was. So were most people that made history, in their personal lives. Yet, no one gives a shit about that, we're not asked to hold him in contempt because of it, we're not asked to question his brilliance or his place in history, or encouraged to watch hit pieces about the guy. It's utterly irrelevant. Look at how Elon Musk is admired- yet the guy has been divorced like 3 times so clearly is not the best family man, but again, noone really gives a shit, nor should they. But when it comes to Apple, there is an incessant need for some people to do whatever it takes to tear the company to the ground, as well as the dead guy that founded it. Even if their strongest arguments are "chinese workers" and "tax evasion", something that has nothing to do with Steve, continues to this day, and is a constant of every big company on earth. 

     

    I wonder if Gibney thought of Steve's wife, his kids, and the many people who worked with him and loved him- how this unbalanced hit-piece would hurt them- of course he didn't. People like this want you to think they're heroes for "exposing" others- when in truth, it's clear that Gibney- and those involved in this film- and much worse human beings that Steve could ever hope to be. Even with all his faults, I can't imagine SJ being able to create such a piece, it's only intent to destroy the legacy of an individual. It wouldn't be in him.  

  • Reply 40 of 43
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    I agree that the filmmaker seems obsessed with the spotlight and the fame that comes from taking down well known people. I have admired the products Steve built from a time when I had no special interest in technology through a career built around technology. One cannot dismiss Steve as a 'storyteller'. I think the rare thing Steve brought to technology was in part his interest in the arts and part of that is how we communicate. And humans build narratives - part allegory, part philosophy and part historical. And these narratives are not 'fantasy'. They encompass aspects of what it means to be alive.

    I always admired Jobs ability to cut to the bone. Whether it was his dismantling of Flash (he wasn't mean about it, he spoke obvious truths) to his famous comment on Microsoft ('They don't have taste. And I don't mean that in a small way.' - something like that) but again, you can see it as 'mean', but for me there was truth in it. And I think Microsoft would agree in that the issues of elegance and taste was not a focus for them. Maybe it was unfair of him to drag Microsoft into a fight on an issue that was foreign to them, but at the same time, why not flaunt what your products have and the others don't.

    Right on. Steve was a maker first, and any narrative he spun around the making was in the service of how the thing fit in to history, the present and the future.

    The "bicycle for the mind" analogy was not a story, Alex, it was an explanatory metaphor of great power.

    If Gibney had the imagination to grasp this, he wouldn't be wondering why he has an iPhone in his pocket.
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