I'm 42 and I've been programming since I was 12. I really always liked this guy and never understood the knee-jerk hate around him. I of course know he's far from perfect- who isn't?- but as far as interesting, game-changing people go, he's up there. At least this interview is showing some of why I felt that way... I read this back when it was published (as I pretty much devoured everything about the computer industry ever since I first touched one around 12 years old)
And as a guy who ended up being a web developer, he was TOTALLY right about the "dark ages" thing. When Internet Explorer had hegemony, web dev was close to torture... It's what made me a back-end developer. Frontend was too painful.
It's not knee-jerk hate. He was a business genius, but a fairly rotten person. The latter is why a lot of people don't like him. To see why, read about his behavior at Apple, his daughter Lisa, and check out the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley which gives a taste of both.
In the case of MLK, his womanizing activities were quite separate from his civil rights work. Steve Jobs very much got to the top by screwing over people. He was mean at work. And frequently did illegal things. There's a good argument to be made that were it not for him conspiring to prevent competitors from poaching employees, we'd be able to make more at our work places. I will absolutely never respect him for his streak of immoral/illegal acts. Wozniak is of course more the hacker we should look up to.
Some platitudes and quotes can be removed from the person who said it and still be valid. I think if the quotes from this interview were attributed to some random dude in 1996, that they would be just as valid as coming from Jobs. For some reason people play the opposite of "appealing to authority" to disparage the knowledge because of who it came from. That's intellectually dishonest to me.
What? I did not say that Jobs was not a smart businessman, that's not what I'm contending. His quotes in this article are probably very valid and prescient, none of this is what I take issue with. I'm just saying he was a bad person who frequently did illegal and immoral things, and thus he shouldn't be the person we should look up to. Wozniak is a better role model figure for us all.
No, I'm saying it's foolish to criticize an action based on other actions. Criticize an action on its own merit. I think it's a slippery slope to start saying you won't look up to someone because one subset of actions of theirs is bad. If that's the case then nobody should look up to anybody for there are certainly reprehensible actions littered over everyone's past.
At no point has anyone said that X, Y or Z action was meaningless because he e.g. disowned his daughter for the first half of her life. Someone didn't understand how anyone could dislike Steve Jobs, a couple of reasons why were given, and now you are basically asserting that Steve Jobs is beyond criticism because all humans have skeletons in their closets. Do you see the problem?
Whether or not you should look up to Steve Jobs is up to you. Examine the facts about him and then decide whether he is a role model for you. He isn't an infallible role model to everyone by default just because he was successful or in the public eye, nor should he be.
I never asserted that haha. I was basically replying to this line above:
> I will absolutely never respect him for his streak of immoral/illegal acts.
That just seems foolish to me, since tons of other people garner respect despite worse immoral/illegal acts. That's it. There's nothing else to read into my statements.
> were it not for him conspiring to prevent competitors from poaching employees, we'd be able to make more at our work places
So Apple, Google, Adobe and one other company agreed to not poach employees from each other and get into an expensive wage war. I don't see how that's automatically bad and here's why:
In the dotcom booms, salaries skyrocketed unchecked. During the bust, MANY people got laid off... with a certain salary expectation, which hampered them. I dated someone like this, she spent 6 months going into CC debt trying to swallow the pill that she just wasn't going to make again what she made as a marketer at the height of the first dotcom boom. She literally refused to accept the market rate for herself.
All Jobs, Schmidt etc. did is prevent people from being paid unreasonably (and unsustainably) high salaries. And we're already talking comfortable 6 figure salaries, here. You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked? The guys at the top would eventually get laid off at the first sign of a downturn. And their "net income" would likely be the same as if they never had their pay unsustainably raised to begin with.
An arms race is no good for anyone.
> we'd be able to make more at our work places
So that's bullshit. EVERYONE gets paid market rate, more or less. Anything else is not sustainable or requires someone being fooled indefinitely, which is impossible (unless they are a fool to begin with).
Ok let's take your argument "You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked?" in the opposite direction. Your premise is rise of salaries should be checked. Now let's say once those salaries were checked by companies by promising not to hire each other engineers, if those companies decided well let's reduce the salaries of our own engineers since they are not going to get a better deal elsewhere anyways. Very soon those salaries will be plummeting because of this agreement between the companies. You contradict yourself by the end when you say "EVERYONE gets paid market rate" It is NOT market rate if all companies in the market got together and decided not to offer higher wages to someone to incentivize them to come work for them. That is what a CARTEL would do but with lower wages.
I... don't disagree. And I lean libertarian (which is to say, things should remain unchecked). I'm just saying that in this particular instance, it may not have resulted in as "net" a bad, as is being suggested.
The beauty of free markets (when they actually work) is that the unchecked salaries would have been corrected by the market when they reached an unsustainable level (like it did in the previous dot com bust). Regarding people who refuse to face reality that their prior salary is not reflected in current market rates, well that's the person's own problem and can't be taken into consideration in arguing for suppressed wages via cartel behavior. Personally I would like to get the maximum money I can get for the work I'm doing. :)
It's crap to say "everyone has flaws" as if every flaw is equally bad, and in that way dismiss any criticism of Jobs, although I realize we're on Hacker News, so undoubtedly anything critical of Steve Jobs will be downvoted to oblivion. Try the comparison with Christopher Columbus instead — do you think he was a great man with flaws like everyone else?
In any case, I don't think Steve Jobs is in the same league as MLK.
There's a difference between disowning your child and riding your workers to the brink versus being rude to somebody at the supermarket. Nobody's saying the iPhone isn't a great achievement, it's just not surprising that some people don't like Jobs as he was a pretty terrible person (personally and professionally.)
The postscript on disowning Lisa was that he reconciled with Lisa in her teens, she lived with him and he paid for her studies at Harvard. Yes, he was an asshole for rejecting her when he was younger but if he was a terrible person in his 20s, he was less so later in life.
What I dislike about Jobs was his lack of philanthropism. He had all the money in the world and gave away nothing, which means he didn't give a shit about the rest of the world. He was approached by Gates as part of the Giving Pledge and declined.
Then his decision of alternative medicine to treat his curable cancer. He created technology that touched millions if not billions of people, and a lot of those are kids who probably looked up to him, and then he does stupid shit like that which will influence them in a bad way.
Yes, people are free to do what they want, but I'm also free to call out their stupidity and selfishness.
I may be wrong about this, but I believe that Steve Jobs did give away quite a bit of money. I think he always did it anonymously, which, if true I admire much more than someone who has a lot of pomp and circumstance around their philanthropic activities. I cant say this with certainty though, but few people really know what he did with his money so Im in no position to judge...
I admire much more than someone who has a lot of pomp and circumstance around their philanthropic activities
Why? People who make a big deal about their philanthropy often do so in order to encourage others to join the cause. How is that in any way a bad thing?
I think that some people may flaunt their philanthropy as a trophy of what a "great person" they are. I personally think there are ways to encourage people to join/support a cause without flaunting the XX millions of dollars you have given to it.
I admire someone who supports a cause because they believe in it and not for the kudos the support may bring them. That isn't to say that I don't admire the super wealthy like Bill Gates and his philanthropic causes. I am really glad he has dedicated such a large chunk of wealth to humanitarian causes.
Unfortunately, you are incorrect about him giving nothing. He gave away millions.
As for his poor choice regarding his health, it's a bit unclear how that will wrongly influence people. He eventually realized he was wrong and had the operation. The delay may have cost him his life. If anything, he's the poster child on the dangers of waiting too long for treatment.
I don't think we should forget about the positive impact he made on the world through the creation of all that wealth. He has helped transform personal computers (Apple, Next), the music industry (iTunes, iPod), mobile phone market (iPhone) and animated movies (Pixar).
His fascination with alternative medicine is unfortunate but he paid the ultimate price for his beliefs.
"It's certainly not going to be like the first time somebody saw a television. It's certainly not going to be as profound as when someone in Nebraska first heard a radio broadcast. It's not going to be that profound."
That's exactly what it was like for me, back in the mid 1990s, using WebChat Broadcasting System for the first time.
I didn't care much for computers growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found them useful primarily for gaming. When I first used the Internet, it was like lightning struck, I knew immediately what it would mean, and how big it could be one day. I viewed it as an infinite canvas. Watching the early explosion of web sites just reinforced that. The computer became nothing more than a vehicle to get to the Internet for me, and it still is to this day. It completely altered my life, growing up in the middle of nowhere Appalachia. It exposed me to a world I would have never touched otherwise. I started my first Internet company with a bunch of Australians circa 1996/97 as a teenager... from nowhere Appalachia. Not as profound as someone in Nebraska hearing a radio broadcast for the first time? I beg to differ.
Yes, I think he was wrong on that one, also the objects hype seems a little strange to me. But the rest? Pretty much spot on. In 1996, he saw the critical issues and where the web would go, at a time where most people weren't even aware of its existence. Very impressive.
also the objects hype seems a little strange to me
Well, to someone who was used to procedural level programming, the concepts of object oriented coding were pretty revolutionary. Not surprising if someone who started programming in the last decade finds OOC obvious though.
I have a blog post brewing in my head to the effect of "in defense of a liberal arts education". Teaching people how to think for themselves is highly underrated in the current economy, imo.
Maybe get out of your books, away from the computer, and experience life yourself in some way that challenges your comfort zone. Start your own adventure.
Having been through all of, "getting out of my books," "away from the computer," "experiencing life myself," and liberal arts education, I still assert that the education has value.
This is one of the best interviews I've ever read/seen from him. Why? because it's different. It really seems it was made in a very pessimist time for him, he didn't even believed he could revolutionize anything anymore with tech.
It's amazing the passion he had for design in the product creation.
He learned some humility back then in NeXT when not much went as planned for him, a quality, which would help him in later years in Apple. Jobs himself said that this experience was necessary and would define his future years.
This shows that nearly every bad thing that happens to you ends at some point, and it is up to you to convert it to something good.
>>He learned some humility back then in NeXT when not much went as planned for him, a quality, which would help him in later years in Apple. Jobs himself said that this experience was necessary and would define his future years.
Could you expand on this? Was it a move to more consumer testing and validation of product development ideas, or something else?
I remember reading that in the "Steve Jobs" by Isaacson book. Basically, pre-NeXT jobs was a douche thinking that he is above everyone and everything. While some of this didn't change later, he began to appreciate other people more and learned how to find and take care of great people that helped build the empire that Apple is today.
Personal development that changed how he approached business. It helps to not frame things in terms of startups/business. Getting kicked out of Apple and failing initially at NeXT was a major let-down that showed (most importantly to himself) that he was fallible. He probably knew he wasn't always right, but if just about everything you touch goes fairly well, it's pretty tough not to get a big head about it. This derailed that train.
We've been promised that computers would revolutionize education for the last 30 years. Computers are amazing tools for open-ended play and exploration. But there's no place for open-ended play and exploration in our school system.
Desktop computers -- and today, tablets -- have been round-pegged into the existing school structure: they're aids to do your homework, and that's about it. You can look something up on Wikipedia for your history essay, but want to dick around in Python for 6 hours or build something amazing in Minecraft with people from another continent? Good luck.
Utopian ideas never play out as intended in reality. Re: The history of radio and TV, how people thought they would be educational tools.
Computers are tools of limitless possibility, but I hardly ever see them used that way. Much more often, I see kids use the computers to play shooting games and watch pirated streams of sports broadcasts.
I think this is partly the baneful legacy of Bill Gates, with his attitude that only he gets the privilege of modifying his software and ordinary people pay him to receive his perfect writings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Computers and the Internet are a major challenge to traditional schooling, however. I see very few kids try to wrestle with the questions. For example, in the Great Gatsby, why would Tom lie about Daisy being a Catholic? http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-would-tom-lie-about-... Change a few words, homework is done, time for more League of Legends.
The whole curriculum needs to be redone. We need the freedom to dick around, but we must also recognize that very, very few kids will make anything good out of it.
You can look something up on wikipedia, then be told by the teacher that Wikipedia is not a primary source when you try and cite it. So you look at Wikipedia's citations, and find they're paywalled.
The internet is conducive to learning; it's not conducive to our educational establishment's hoops.
Agreed, but also, ironically, many kids learn more about technology on their own today, without any formal education on the subject. Look at how many programmers reside in SV w/o a college degree.
It is the same problem in schools which is on our streets. The government employee unions wield so much power that teachers are absolved from teaching and the police are absolved from behaving properly. They own the politicians.
I hate that statistic. Apple makes far more money from their App Store sales than Google does, and Google supposedly owns a substantially larger part of that market. I'd like to see breakdowns of this market share geographically. I'd like to see U.S. market share, and then regionally in the U.S. how that market share pans out. And then demographically how that pans out. In my demographic, in the Southeast U.S., I can anecdotally tell you that Android does not have anywhere close to the market share that iPhone does.
I meant demographically age-wise not job-wise. Either way, you're right, it's just anecdotal. But I'd love to see the breakdown for 18-30 year olds in geographic regions around the country, and then for countries in general.
Here's an interesting thought. When Jobs spoke of "Objects", did he fundamentally mean C++? Obj-C? Smalltalk? Or perhaps another level of abstraction like containerization?
He spoke about Object Oriented Programming as a paradigm, but many times he referred to WebObjects, an OOP web framework that NeXT developed. Interesingly, Apple Store and other Apple websites still use this tech.
'The defining event of the Jobs 2.0 era relationship between Apple and Adobe was the creation and subsequent scuttling of the Rhapsody project. Rhapsody was Apple's original plan for a new operating system based on the recently purchased NeXT technology.
Rhapsody's proposition for Mac software developers was simple: write your applications using these NeXT-derived APIs. These are the APIs that eventually became Cocoa, and there was much to recommend them even back then. But for Mac developers with substantial existing code bases, the proposition was more aptly phrased, "rewrite your applications using these NeXT-derived APIs."
It was a hard sell, to be sure. The sweetener that Apple hoped would push the deal over the top was that applications written using this API could also be compiled to run on Windows. And so the complete pitch to the Adobes and Microsofts of the world was this: rewrite your huge existing applications using these APIs and end up with a single code base for both Mac and Windows. Alternately, just rewrite the Mac versions of your applications using these new APIs.
The answer from the Mac development community was, essentially, "Yeah, uh, no thanks."'
I started with WO on NeXT in 1998, it was a amazing way to build web applications (in the pre-JS days). There are still WO apps in use today. The biggest benefit was Enterprise Objects, which Core Data is based on today on iOS, which made messing with big databases pretty easy. It was written in Objective-C at the time which was pretty oddball, but at Apple it eventually moved to Java and then become less supported as Apple clearly had other priorities. But WO was a lot of fun to work with even on large projects.
The way he pushes WebObjects sounds like yet another API standard. We keep chasing this integration/communication/data interchange unicorn to todays date.
It was more just a web framework based on containers.
AngularJS directives are the most modern version of it I can think of. Something somewhat reusable and modular that you can just plug in and run on any page.
But it perhaps has a long way to go before it fulfills what he talked about here, such as encapsulation of CSS in an elegant way, and remote loading.
"There are three parts to the Web. One is the client, the second is the pipes, and the third is the servers.
...
On the client side, there's the browser software. In the sense of making money, it doesn't look like anybody is going to win on the browser software side, because it's going to be free.
...
And then there's the typical hardware. It's possible that some people could come out with some very interesting Web terminals and sell some hardware.
...
But with Web server software, no one company has more than a single-digit market share yet. Netscape sells hardly any, because you can get free public-domain software and it's very good. Some people say that it's even better than what you can buy."
I'm not an apple fan, nor a Steve Jobs fan, but this prediction changed a lot of our preceptions about the internet and what computing means.
Whether this vision shaped the internet and computing or it was truly prophetic, I don't know. But still, really interesting to think about how our visions might turn into.
I'd guess that it was his vision that made this happen, because he was wrong about browsers. The browser makers who see/saw potential for income generation came out on top of the browser market.
I'm not sure the desktop computer industry will ever really die, at least not soon. Sure, the focus may be shifting more to mobile and web tech, but are we really one day going to be writing apps on our iPhones? Computers, laptop or desktop still have a large foot in the door of the industry, and as long as we still use them they will continue to develop and get better. I'm sure they'll be with us for a while.
You're taking his quote out of context. He was talking about competition between Microsoft and Apple in the mid-nineties, not about smartphones (which did not even exist back then). The industry was dead in the sense that no one was innovating in the field of desktop operating systems at the time, according to Jobs.
Even sadder to me that he seems to have had a hand in his early death. I realize the advantage of hindsight, and the nearly-pointless pontification of what might have been, but I wish he'd taken the advice he was given and had the surgery much sooner.
And as a guy who ended up being a web developer, he was TOTALLY right about the "dark ages" thing. When Internet Explorer had hegemony, web dev was close to torture... It's what made me a back-end developer. Frontend was too painful.