Steve Jobs Resigned As Apple CEO

[rumpleforeskiin]

I read an interesting piece this morning comparing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Twenty years ago, Gates was nearly universally loathed as the ruthless businessman while the brilliant Jobs was a man without a home having been displaced by his hand-picked successor, John Sculley.

The writer surmised that 100 years from now Jobs will be remembered as the greatest inventive mind since Thomas Edison while Gates will be remembered more for his philanthropy than for any contributions he made to the tech industry, just as Andrew Carnegie is now more remembered for his gifts to education than for the fortune he made in the steel industry.

 

[CS Martin]

Got to agree with the analysis Rumps, but let's remember that both Gates and Carnegie are nothing more than "robber barrons" trying to secure a positive place in history via large cash outlays. Interesting comparison between Edison and Jobs though.......could be.....

 

[rumpleforeskiin]

Another writer remarked today that there have been, in the history of personal computing, only three totally revolutionary, game changing, innovations: the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the iPhone. Steve Jobs revolutionized the industry three times. Everybody else on Earth none.

What you say is true, CS, but mention the name Carnegie today and you think Carnegie Foundation and Carnegie-Mellon University, not the exploitation of cheap labor. When you mention Gates 100 years down the road, it's quiet possible that the first thing that will come to mind will be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, not Bill's ruthless business practices.

 

[daydreamer41]

I think Steve Jobs was an innovator that comes along once in a generation. Thomas Edison was the innovator of his generation. Steve Jobs was the innovator of our generation. His contribution with the Apple was to personalize the computer by enhancing the User Interface to make the computer easier for people to use.

In the iphone, he combined the power of the phone and computer to people one device they could make phone calls and use to access the internet. Edison lived longer and invented more. It's ashame that Jobs had to die before his time. He would have innovated more useful devices for all of us to use.

 

[Techman]

Yes, Jobs did change the way the average person looks at and interacts with certain technology but he was not any great inventor of the technology his company so successfully put on the market. There were MP3 players long before the iPod came about, smartphones before the iPhone and tablets long before the iPad. Before iTunes, there was Napster which was the real driving force in making MP3 and digital music in general the popular format it is today. What Jobs did was very much like the way Japanese companies have gained their success, they take what already exists and improve on it. He was, however, one of the greatest marketing geniuses of his time when it comes to consumer electronic products. As far as ruthless business practices, Bill Gates has nothing on Steve Jobs who was known as one of the most rigid and ruthless corporate executives in history. But in any business, no one gets to that level of success by acting like Mother Theresa.

 

[rumpleforeskiin]

Yes, Jobs did change the way the average person looks at and interacts with certain technology but he was not any great inventor of the technology his company so successfully put on the market. There were MP3 players long before the iPod came about, smartphones before the iPhone and tablets long before the iPad. Before iTunes, there was Napster which was the real driving force in making MP3 and digital music in general the popular format it is today. What Jobs did was very much like the way Japanese companies have gained their success, they take what already exists and improve on it. He was, however, one of the greatest marketing geniuses of his time when it comes to consumer electronic products. As far as ruthless business practices, Bill Gates has nothing on Steve Jobs who was known as one of the most rigid and ruthless corporate executives in history. But in any business, no one gets to that level of success by acting like Mother Theresa.

Yes, there were MP3 players before Jobs, they were unreliable and unattractive and nobody cared. Yes, there were tablets before the iPad, but nobody cared. What Jobs did was make them user friendly and attractive. Yes, there was Napster, which was, of course, shut down for the simple fact that it was used to steal music.

I don't know much about Jobs rigidity and ruthlessness, but I do know that he managed the most loyal and dedicated workforce in corporate history. Apple could not have achieved what it has otherwise.

 

[Techman]

Actually Napster tried on a number of occasions to make a deal with the recording industry but they refused every time. The years they lost fighting Napster in the goal to shut it down cost the recording industry hundreds of millions of dollars and did absolutely nothing to halt or even slow music piracy. But the music industry, one of the most corrupt and greedy industries in history, always refused anything that wasn't strictly on their terms. Even today, artists make less money on their music sales than the record companies or Apple does. And if Napster had been an Apple creation, you would be lavishing praise on it.

I have no problem in acknowledging Jobs' contributions to technology, but all this ridiculous hero worship that I continue to hear and read is just making me ill. For example, people are talking about the new iCloud service like it's the next Jobs given 'magical' technology and none of them are bright enough to know that it runs on Microsoft's Windows Azure servers because there is no Apple technology that is up to the task.

 

[CS Martin]

Yes, Jobs did change the way the average person looks at and interacts with certain technology but he was not any great inventor of the technology his company so successfully put on the market.

Here's where I disagree with you......(Oh G_d, I'm about to advocate Rump's side of this debate), the term interacts with technology is the key phrase here. Businessweek Magazine (O.K. I agree it's turn into a useless rag) some 10 or 12 years ago ran a facinating story about the revolution of design as an important part of furthering technology. Design is either asthetic or human interaction, preferably both. So while Steve Jobs probably never pushed a chip or a diode, he did imagine. This is every bit the technical innovation as creating dual core technology.

P.S. Rumps don't let this fool you.......We agree on very little.

 

[rumpleforeskiin]

The Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies. http://www.theonion.com/articles/last-american-who-knew-what-the-fuck-he-was-doing,26268/

 

[Firewire]

Design is either asthetic or human interaction, preferably both. So while Steve Jobs probably never pushed a chip or a diode, he did imagine. This is every bit the technical innovation as creating dual core technology.

Very well said. He humanized the technology. Without him, it would have had no soul.

 

[HornyForEver]

Comparing Jobs to Edison is a stretch. The average Joe will never know about the real people who made automated computing possible such as Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Ada of Lovelace, Norbert Wiener, George Boole to name but a very few. CNN scarcely talks about them, and James Gosling never contributed in founding Sun Microsystems, though he was the co-author of the Java programming language.

On the other hand, and unfortunately, the brightest ideas still need a good visionary and a good marketer to bring them to the world and Steve Jobs was certainly the most brilliant visionary when it came to technology in our era. Steve Jobs was probably one of the last men who exemplified what the American dream is. A self-made man and a half Syrian, half American child adopted by American parents who had to make his way through life and his life was not always rosy.

I also admire in him his courage. A man who learned about his cancer, but who still managed to bring to the world the iPhone and the iPad. He struggled until the very last months of his life despite all the odds. I hate Apple as a company, I hated Steve Jobs as a totalitarian dude, though I like Steve Jobs the self-made man. Finally, this is a speech that Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005 where he talked a bit about his life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

 

[daydreamer41]

Maybe you are right comparing Jobs to Edison is a stretch, but Job's contribution to modern technology is unmeasureable.

I had some of the earliest Macintoshes and I loved them. Why? They were so easy to use. Jobs' vision made the computer easy to use. Apple's operating system came before Windows. The concept of Windows was taken from Apple. This Operating System revolutionized the PC.

Of course, James Gosling was brilliant and his contribution to developing the Java language was instrumental to the development of the Internet. Java was initially designed as a software to control machines and appliances. That application was not suitable and it found its way to the browser. But if you look at the browser, you will see a very similar design in the first Apple operating system and Windows with the menus on top and icons, which are buttons.

Jobs genius was the presentation so that the average person could use the PC with ease. My first computer was the Commodore 64. It was not the easiest system to use. Nor was the first PC with DOS. I used it with Word Perfect, which was not What You See Is What You Get or WYSIWYG. Jobs my not be in the inventor league of Edison, but his influence was just as great.

 

[HornyForEver]

...The concept of Windows was taken from Apple. This Operating System revolutionized the PC...
.

It is true that Microsoft copied Apple in the 80s. Though Steve Jobs got his inspiration while visiting Xerox Park Research Facility in the 70s. Xerox managers at the time failed to see the value of the GUI, the LAN, Small-Talk, Word processors...These are the technologies we use today and Steve Jobs has the merit to have brought GUIs to the lay man in the 80s and mobile computing to the same lay man in the late 2000s. As I said before Jobs has the merit of bringing some technologies from Geeksdom to society.

 

[Firewire]

/going off topic

Actually, Edison is said to have stolen a lot of his ideas from Nikola Tesla, one of the original super genius badasses.

http://badasshistory.com/tesla.html