Reminds me of that story someone (Forstall?) told about Steve at the apple cafeteria. He would go there every day for lunch and they had some program where they’d take your lunch out of your paycheck. Steve started laughing about it one day and when asked what was so funny, he said that his salary was only $1 a year so he had no idea who was paying for his lunch.
In my first company, when we set up payroll we had to assign employee numbers. Since I was setting it up I wanted to be employee #0 to see what would happen. The payroll company was smarter: the numbers had to start with 1, which was much less interesting.
Redditors are all up in arms over this, doing everything they can to downplay Jobs' role in Apple's success, going as far as to say "apoptosis had the final laugh".
To play Devil's Advocate - if giving someone a special number on their employee badge makes them happy, let them have it. I'm sure they had much bigger problems to solve than which employee number they should each have.
This is just one thing of many. A more unexcusable asshole behavior is him using Woz's help to design the Atari board for brickbreaker, lying about the payout then pocketing the vast majority of it. It shows the kind of guy he is. People blow off asshole behavior in executives all the time by claiming that anything is excusable because it serves the higher goal of the company, but there's no higher goal when it's just extra cash for yourself, it's just pure greed, or perhaps expressing a hidden resentment that someone else did something great and you needed their help.
Absolutely. I remember reading some biography about him that my dad bought me when I was in high school. I was like, shit finally I'll figure out what made this guy so great.
You come out the other end only thinking, wow. What a fucking asshole. A talented asshole, but an absolute piece of work
Does this make it impossible to separate his approach and impact on Apple's design aesthetic?
I know a lot of people know about how he treated his employees and his textbook narcissistic behavior (which you point out) and they just disregard his behavior because of his incredible eye for design how it impacted Apple's design for decades before he passed.
Its as if the impact he had was the greater good for the company so the rest of his questionable behavior gets ignored.
I think as an isolated incident it wouldn’t be a big deal, but Jobs’ general behavior towards his employees and specifically Wozniak justifies some of the resentment people feel toward him.
The guy made Apple what it is. The most impactful technology company in the history of humanity. You can call him whatever you like and I will cut him a slack.
Most people miss the point. Yes great companies are created by not just the founders but all of its employees. Everyone contributes to a certain extend. But it is really the founders who steer the ship in the right direction. Without Jobs last 10 years would certainly be very very different. Think about a world where your only choices were Windows or a crappy Android phone.
It’s like a football (soccer) team. Yes the players are playing and scoring goals. But a great coach (SAF) is just as important as a great team. Without him, the same team doesn’t perform the same.
Anyone who doesn't recognize what Jobs did for Apple doesn't understand business. The better mousetrap does not have consumers beat a path to your door. (Technology? See Sony Betamax vs. default VCR).
Wozniak on the other hand is way overblown in capabilities. It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role. Jobs was truly unique and while he had for sure people who helped him realize the dream (and of course luck and timing ... that he was able to motivate and berate with his reality distortion field etc) no question he was the unique driving force behind Apple (when they started and when he returned after being forced out).
But it's not like Jobs first stint at Apple (or really Apple itself) was necessarily such a remarkable success (at least compared to what happened when he came back). In the second half of the 80s and in the 90s Apple was merely the best of the also-ran.
> But there were many that could have filled that role.
Wasn't Apple II pretty much the thing that kept the company afloat? The Lisa was a disaster and the early Macintosh despite the impressive marketing wasn't such a great machine either. Between 1984 and 1989 Apple still sold about 3.5x more Apple 2s than Macintoshes. Of course Macs were generally 2-3x more expensive but still it seems pretty remarkable that a computer Wozniak pretty much designed singlehandedly back in 1977 remained competitive for more than 10 years with not that many fundamental changes.
By the Macintosh truly successful (not compared to Wintel of course) Jobs and most of his influence on the company and it's culture etc. were long gone.
The same thing happens with Musk. I hate Musk as much as the next guy, I am anything but a fanboy and I don't have or want a Tesla. Still it is delusional and childish to insist that Tesla and SpaceX would have been just have successful without him.
I read something like "the internet has killed nuance" and it's so true. Could terrible people also be successful businessmen? Nope! All good or all bad any anyone who says anyone in between is blinded by their adoration.
> It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role.
Tell me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller[1] without telling me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller.
Apple shipped hardware in the summer of 1977 that took the rest of the industry *three years* to catch up to, and that only happened when Atari (and later Commodore) dedicated VLSI designers and fab bandwidth to custom chips that had like 9x the die area of the chips that shipped in the Apple. Woz had it working with a bunch of junk you could get at Radio Shack.
No, there's no one contemporary who was doing anything remotely like that. But it's sort of true that brilliance like that doesn't scale, so post-1979 or so he really didn't have much to offer and later products were produced via different means.
[1] Or the original board's timing and scanout brilliance too, but the disk controller really is his best single masterpiece.
I'm sorry, but this man got critical UI/UX paradigms right twice (iPod, iPhone) and used that position of strength to inflict his controlling views upon the entire computing industry.
I want to be in the universe where this didn't happen. Where there are six major types of smartphone. Where Google Android isn't the most open things can be. Where your smartphone provider isn't your email provider, isn't your photo bucket, isn't your banking, isn't your movie film entertainment provider. Where you can install what you want and easily switch devices. Where no company is too big.
Smartphones aren't computers in the Jobs universe. They're branded platforms wholly and totally owned by the company that makes them.
The 1990 - 2010 era was the best time we had in computing. The web was so open and everyone used it for everything. After Jobs showed what level of top-down control was legally possible, everyone has been chasing the "App Store" model and the "Platform" model and the "Walled Garden" model.
Zoomers don't know how awesome RSS and bittorrent were. How you could use any program to consume content and ingest it, schedule it, remix it. There were programs where you could create your own TV channels. Your own news streams. You could run it on all of your devices.
Now everything is super locked down, product manager-ed to a single customer experience, and rented to you. Meanwhile, Google is trying to DRM what's left of the web. Things are looking incredibly bleak.
Jobs put us on this path of not having devices and data streams open. But now you can choose one of three premium experiences.
It's easy to say, Apple was entirely Woz and Steve Jobs was just a freeloader.
That's a nice story, but managing talent is difficult as being a good engineer does not mean you are a good entrepreneur, or are good at business. Case in point: Why doesn't literally any CPU engineer at Intel, or airline engineer at Boeing, or hardware engineer at Apple, start their own company? Sure, sometimes it happens, but it only happens once or twice a decade for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of really, really smart people. And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
> Case in point: Why doesn't literally any CPU engineer at Intel, or airline engineer at Boeing, or hardware engineer at Apple, start their own company? Sure, sometimes it happens, but it only happens once or twice a decade for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of really, really smart people. And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
The CPU industry is rife with engineers leaving and starting their own successful company. Intel itself was started when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (an engineer and a physicist) left Fairchild Semiconductor as part of the "Traitorous Eight". Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann (both engineers) left Intel to form Zilog. Chuck Peddle left Motorola and formed MOS Technology and create the 6502. CPU design in fact is one of those fields that almost requires real world experience somewhere before you can really innovate in the field. There's just too many tradeoffs to be balanced.
Why haven't we seen that recently? I think it's the leftovers of the 80s, with financiers being unwilling to commit capital to engineer heavy executive teams in capital intensive fields like CPU production anymore. Talking with financiers, there's almost this infantilizing group think that engineers can't be trusted with money and MBAs are required to hold the purse strings. The same thought process that decided that hospitals shouldn't be run by doctors anymore and that universities shouldn't be run by professors anymore, leading to the rise of the administration class and incredible amounts of unfortunate externalities from those decisions.
I think that's why we're starting to see a renaissance in CPU design. The tail end of Moore's law is democratizing access to high end CPU design, allowing individuals (albeit with relatively high net worth from previous CPU design) like Jim Keller to put their money where their mouth is and work with a small team of very good engineers to create companies without involving much in the way of traditional VC.
The story is complicated, sure, but those are three of the most complex and capital intensive businesses anywhere. Being "good at business" is not enough to enter a mature business with such high start-up costs, strong scale and network effects, etc.
Literally the most absurd statement. Woz wasn't even involved in anything Apple did later which led to the huge size they are now and the existing product line. Doesn't even matter if the iphone (or imac) was Job's idea or not. He was the driving force that made that happen
At the same time, it does speak to an almost childish obsession with recognition and being seen by the outside as the "most genius". I think the extreme vanity demonstrated by Mr. Jobs was both a huge factor in his success but also the thing, in some ways, held him back. "Held him back" is of course relative. He had more success than almost anyone in the modern technological era, but could he have had even more? Who knows.
But I also don't understand why Reddit commenters, or anyone, would care so much as to be "up in arms" over this or any anecdote about corporate gamesmanship.
Well, imagine if he didn't build this persona. Would he have succeeded in getting investments for NeXT? Would employees have worked for NeXT inspired by him? Would Apple have ever bought NeXT?
> Since, in Scott’s mind, the computer gave birth to the business he assigned Wozniak number one, Jobs number two, Markkula number three, Fernandez number four, Holt number five, and Wigginton number six, reserved number seven for himself, and gave Espinosa number eight.
AE says:
> The badges included a name and an individual employee number, the latter based on the order in which workers joined the company. Steve Wozniak was declared employee number 1, Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on.
The former has more details and different intention for the initial numbering.
Readit News
Gotta say, that's some pretty good real-life-to-quote abstraction. Fits nearly perfectly, but not in the way one would normally think.
To play Devil's Advocate - if giving someone a special number on their employee badge makes them happy, let them have it. I'm sure they had much bigger problems to solve than which employee number they should each have.
You come out the other end only thinking, wow. What a fucking asshole. A talented asshole, but an absolute piece of work
I know a lot of people know about how he treated his employees and his textbook narcissistic behavior (which you point out) and they just disregard his behavior because of his incredible eye for design how it impacted Apple's design for decades before he passed.
Its as if the impact he had was the greater good for the company so the rest of his questionable behavior gets ignored.
He was really fortunate to meet someone who was his polar opposite in personality. And to top it off he was also a genius.
So much of Job's early success was because of Woz!
Most people miss the point. Yes great companies are created by not just the founders but all of its employees. Everyone contributes to a certain extend. But it is really the founders who steer the ship in the right direction. Without Jobs last 10 years would certainly be very very different. Think about a world where your only choices were Windows or a crappy Android phone.
Wozniak on the other hand is way overblown in capabilities. It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role. Jobs was truly unique and while he had for sure people who helped him realize the dream (and of course luck and timing ... that he was able to motivate and berate with his reality distortion field etc) no question he was the unique driving force behind Apple (when they started and when he returned after being forced out).
> But there were many that could have filled that role.
Wasn't Apple II pretty much the thing that kept the company afloat? The Lisa was a disaster and the early Macintosh despite the impressive marketing wasn't such a great machine either. Between 1984 and 1989 Apple still sold about 3.5x more Apple 2s than Macintoshes. Of course Macs were generally 2-3x more expensive but still it seems pretty remarkable that a computer Wozniak pretty much designed singlehandedly back in 1977 remained competitive for more than 10 years with not that many fundamental changes.
By the Macintosh truly successful (not compared to Wintel of course) Jobs and most of his influence on the company and it's culture etc. were long gone.
I read something like "the internet has killed nuance" and it's so true. Could terrible people also be successful businessmen? Nope! All good or all bad any anyone who says anyone in between is blinded by their adoration.
Tell me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller[1] without telling me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller.
Apple shipped hardware in the summer of 1977 that took the rest of the industry *three years* to catch up to, and that only happened when Atari (and later Commodore) dedicated VLSI designers and fab bandwidth to custom chips that had like 9x the die area of the chips that shipped in the Apple. Woz had it working with a bunch of junk you could get at Radio Shack.
No, there's no one contemporary who was doing anything remotely like that. But it's sort of true that brilliance like that doesn't scale, so post-1979 or so he really didn't have much to offer and later products were produced via different means.
[1] Or the original board's timing and scanout brilliance too, but the disk controller really is his best single masterpiece.
I want to be in the universe where this didn't happen. Where there are six major types of smartphone. Where Google Android isn't the most open things can be. Where your smartphone provider isn't your email provider, isn't your photo bucket, isn't your banking, isn't your movie film entertainment provider. Where you can install what you want and easily switch devices. Where no company is too big.
Smartphones aren't computers in the Jobs universe. They're branded platforms wholly and totally owned by the company that makes them.
The 1990 - 2010 era was the best time we had in computing. The web was so open and everyone used it for everything. After Jobs showed what level of top-down control was legally possible, everyone has been chasing the "App Store" model and the "Platform" model and the "Walled Garden" model.
Zoomers don't know how awesome RSS and bittorrent were. How you could use any program to consume content and ingest it, schedule it, remix it. There were programs where you could create your own TV channels. Your own news streams. You could run it on all of your devices.
Now everything is super locked down, product manager-ed to a single customer experience, and rented to you. Meanwhile, Google is trying to DRM what's left of the web. Things are looking incredibly bleak.
Jobs put us on this path of not having devices and data streams open. But now you can choose one of three premium experiences.
That's a nice story, but managing talent is difficult as being a good engineer does not mean you are a good entrepreneur, or are good at business. Case in point: Why doesn't literally any CPU engineer at Intel, or airline engineer at Boeing, or hardware engineer at Apple, start their own company? Sure, sometimes it happens, but it only happens once or twice a decade for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of really, really smart people. And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
The CPU industry is rife with engineers leaving and starting their own successful company. Intel itself was started when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (an engineer and a physicist) left Fairchild Semiconductor as part of the "Traitorous Eight". Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann (both engineers) left Intel to form Zilog. Chuck Peddle left Motorola and formed MOS Technology and create the 6502. CPU design in fact is one of those fields that almost requires real world experience somewhere before you can really innovate in the field. There's just too many tradeoffs to be balanced.
Why haven't we seen that recently? I think it's the leftovers of the 80s, with financiers being unwilling to commit capital to engineer heavy executive teams in capital intensive fields like CPU production anymore. Talking with financiers, there's almost this infantilizing group think that engineers can't be trusted with money and MBAs are required to hold the purse strings. The same thought process that decided that hospitals shouldn't be run by doctors anymore and that universities shouldn't be run by professors anymore, leading to the rise of the administration class and incredible amounts of unfortunate externalities from those decisions.
I think that's why we're starting to see a renaissance in CPU design. The tail end of Moore's law is democratizing access to high end CPU design, allowing individuals (albeit with relatively high net worth from previous CPU design) like Jim Keller to put their money where their mouth is and work with a small team of very good engineers to create companies without involving much in the way of traditional VC.
Literally the most absurd statement. Woz wasn't even involved in anything Apple did later which led to the huge size they are now and the existing product line. Doesn't even matter if the iphone (or imac) was Job's idea or not. He was the driving force that made that happen
But I also don't understand why Reddit commenters, or anyone, would care so much as to be "up in arms" over this or any anecdote about corporate gamesmanship.
We don't know.
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RttLK says:
> Since, in Scott’s mind, the computer gave birth to the business he assigned Wozniak number one, Jobs number two, Markkula number three, Fernandez number four, Holt number five, and Wigginton number six, reserved number seven for himself, and gave Espinosa number eight.
AE says:
> The badges included a name and an individual employee number, the latter based on the order in which workers joined the company. Steve Wozniak was declared employee number 1, Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on.
The former has more details and different intention for the initial numbering.
I'm not surprised to find out Steve Jobs had Ricky Bobby energy
Also, I think the employee #0 is also discussed in Wozniak's biography 'iWoz', which is a great read, can recommend!