According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[65] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.[66]
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End of story. Before continuing celebrating Jobs, ask yourself a question, do you want to promote that kind of behavior in the Valley?
I agree with you on principle, however, the story does not end here. Woz himself said the following:
"What Steve does on the good side — like the music scenario [in which] we didn't bring just a music device called the iPod, we brought a whole music system: a store that sells it, a computer that manages and organizes it. And an iPod is just a satellite to your computer. Plug it in and it works. You don't have to do anything. You've got to admire Steve for that kind of thinking. Nobody's perfect. [Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
Specifically:
"[Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
I agree with you absolutely. If you are yourself encountering lies and nastiness from your partners, an enlightened way would be trying to understand them. And forgive.
But my point was different. We just can't afford to celebrate lies. It is very very very harmful.
I don't believe I have seen anyone, now or previously, saying anything like "Oh, and talk about business acumen -- look at the way Jobs soaked his old buddy Wozniak out of four and a half grand that one time!"
There's a vast difference between what you call "celebrating lies", and celebrating the life and work of a man who, while every bit as human as anyone else and with feet of clay to match, was nevertheless possessed of the sort of visionary genius which comes along perhaps half a dozen times in a generation. Certainly Steve Jobs could be, and was, a real revolving bastard from time to time. But so can everyone; people are complicated and they don't always behave in ways which others regard as preferable, sensible, or nice. If you're going to require sainthood as a prerequisite for honoring the accomplishments of a historical figure, I suppose that's your prerogative, but I suspect you'll find it a lonely stance to take, and I think it's strange you should utter it in the same breath as a word like "enlightened". Have you heard the one about the blind men and the elephant?
If you think Steve is the only person in the Valley to have lied to a business partner...I have a bridge that might interest you.
As for the specific event in question (the Atari money), do we know what Steve did with the extra money? Seems to me, maybe he really did need it (for rent/food/etc.) and was too ashamed to ask Woz for the extra. Maybe he figured he would re-invest it, and that it was easier to do behind Woz's back than to try and explain his plans.
Steve was no saint, but in my experience he was generally a nice guy. He also thought he knew better than everyone else, and so it would not be unusual for him to leave out explanations, make snap judgements, and be rather brusque in general (when dealing with business decisions). Why should he have to explain himself when he was obviously right?
I'm sure it didn't help that the world so often (especially toward the end) only reinforced the notion that he knew better than everyone else...
Fair point, but I generally seem to hear a lot of negative stuff about Steves personality. Sure give someone a second chance, but by the time they are on their tenth chance you have to start thinking differently.
> "[Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
> I think that's a more enlightened point of view.
This kind of argument is weak. It's just a bland kind of truism that everyone can agree with that is unrelated to the original argument - when someone says that some one is a bad person, there is an implicit comparison to most people, ie the "badness" of a person is a relative one. Then bringing up some kind of absolute quality - perfection - is just trying to distract from the original argument.
But you can’t just name one bad thing a person did and say they are a bad person, no more discussion about it. That just makes no sense at all. It’s such a minor thing, too. His wage fixing together with Google and other companies is much more recent, relevant and much worse.
At the very least Steve Jobs was an intensely interesting person. I don’t think characterising him as a bad person makes much sense. This is such a simple-minded worldview.
I still don't see the big deal with iTunes and iPod's. ipod is a great product, but there is no real killer feature; "plug it in and it just works", yes, if you have iTunes. Meanwhile, plug in any decent mp3 player of that time\* and it Just Works, assuming you just have a file system - drog and drop the files you want into the mp3 player.
Maybe you could say that ipods with itunes is simpler than dragging and dropping like that. Though I don't see much of a diffrerence; drag and drop is a common action in Windows and the like. In order to selectively add files to your ipod you'd need to learn to drag and drop... in iTunes.
iTunes is an okay-to-annoying program, at least on Windows. I've bought music on itunes that I have to "enable" on every new PC I might use. The last time I tried it dodn't even work. I
ve bought an audio book that I have never been allowed to even play! iTunes can't (or couldn't) even compete with pirated media, not by a long shot.
\* let's say when mp3 players had a capacity that actually made them worthile, maybe as small a capacity as 256MB, or 512 and more.
Long before the music store existed, the iPod was entirely different than other MP3 players of the time.
When I got the first iPod, I also had a Creative Nomad player that had a little more storage and a search function. However, the iPod on the other hand had Firewire rather than USB 1.1, making it a painless process to add and remove songs right before you go somewhere, rather than a hours long process you had to plan in advance. Even more importantly the scroll wheel on ball bearings with made it feasible to fly through a tree of artists and albums with thousands of audio tracks.
The shift in convenience was on the level of shifting from a phonograph to a cassette tape, except that records are more convenient in some situations.
It wasn't the case of any individual feature of iTunes or the iPod, it was that iTunes and the iPod were the killer feature. If you were to have looked at the landscape at that time for MP3 players, there was nothing even remotely like the iTunes+iPod experience. Even the tagline of the very first commercial was ridiculous at the time: "iPod, a thousand songs, in your pocket." That was equivalent to Google giving people 1GB of storage with their GMail account.
It doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in 2001 it was a very big deal.
You're oblivious to user experience not your own user experience. A good usability person can put him/her-self in someone else's shoes, rather than assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since software engineers think very differently from most people good usability people are rare. (Steve Jobs was actually such a person. People forget he knew enough programming and electronics to be dangerous.)
The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
> You're oblivious to user experience not your own user experience. A good usability person can put him/her-self in someone else's shoes, rather than assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since software engineers think very differently from most people good usability people are rare. (Steve Jobs was actually such a person. People forget he knew enough programming and electronics to be dangerous.)
I'm not a usability person, never claimed to be. I am a user who is sharing his experience with using ipods. In order to empathize with other people's experience I need to hear them first.
I feel like I'm being painted like "oh look, another tasteless nerd who doesn't _get_ the benefit of UX that comes in another flavour than a virtual terminal". I have never, ever touched a terminal unless I absolutely have to, right up until about my second year as a programmer, which learnt as an adult. I still think that things like terminals are overrated as far as streamlined work flow goes.
> The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
I haven't had the impression that ipods were such a revolution. Maybe it has to do with where I live.
I'll concede that the ipod was clearly simpler for people who thought dragging and dropping to a USB like thing was intimidating, and at the same time couldn't/wouldn't/had moral qualms about pirating music. I reckon ripping CDs was not a viable option for most people. I think I've only tried to do that once or twice myself.
I don't know where you live, but I think it's pretty well accepted that the iPod was a revolution. It swiftly and thoroughly dominated and expanded the MP3 player market, and set the bar for others to copy. Much like the iPhone did later. And the iPod came at the front end of the Apple renaissance, before they had the consumer mindshare and perception that they do now (in fact the iPod deserves most of the credit for vaulting Apple into that position).
I'm actually traditionally a Windows guy and scoff/roll my eyes at a lot of Apple stuff, but it's pretty undeniable that they've created some amazing, bar-raising products. They've done this by enforcing an uncompromising UX-first philosophy that covers all aspects of product design.
If anything I'm less technical than most HN users. I certainly was back when the ipod was new-ish. I was probably more technical than the average user at the time, though.
I gave concrete examples of the usability of the ipod. I would like it if people argued against those points, rather than some smartass, sarcastic response like the grandparent.
"You don't _get_ user experience, twenty years after even Microsoft got it."
Just as terse, no sarcasm.
I don't see how it saves time when it necessitates you to follow up with a wordy response - if you were after saving time, you wouldn't even have responded to my response. But I guess this is yet another case of me not _getting_ something.
Spend less time at your own computer and more time helping other people out with theirs. You'll "get" the reasons for Apple's success, soon enough.
You won't necessarily agree with those reasons -- I certainly wouldn't want everything to work like iTunes or my iPhone in general -- but you will understand why your limited perspective on UX doesn't catch on like Jobs's philosophy did.
You can admire Jobs for the good things he did while acknowledging the bad things. We are all human, all fallible, even our heroes. Sometimes, it's our bad deeds of the past that propel us towards the good deeds of later. Does that moment fully describe Jobs' life? Does his initial denial of his daughter Lisa describe his later relationship with her? I am sure not. Humans are not simple creatures.
It's good to remember this story too, because it shows that he was also a ruthless businessman, no matter how much effort he put into convincing everyone that this part was not "the real him".
And it's not a bad thing, it's part of the "whole truth" about someone and about how you need to be in order to succeed. And the fact that you need to be like that is not something that one should "sweep under the rug" or present as a "minor part of an otherwise great personality", because it does show you something: that at some level something is very wrong with the system and as much as we like to believe otherwise, fairness and success are a bit like having the cake and eating it too ...something that rarely happens.
So to be a great businessman, I just have to lie to people that help me, right?
I suppose it would revolve around what people think "success" is - if it means lying to others and abandonment of morals for personal gain, then that's a very sad definition of "success".
Well, he did say the truth about getting paid by Atari, and gave him "his half", which Woz regarded as "good enough compensation", otherwise he wouldn't have considered working with him in the future. It's kind of the same game played when a middle manager that brings no value to the company gets paid 3x the engineers salary, or when the CEO gets the golden parachute while the shareholders are loosing money and the employees are getting salary cuts or the company is getting downsized... but you don't go around calling people "liars" for playing this game as the corporate level, do you? Yeah, it's no longer "lying" because the information is theoretically available to all players, or at least to the IRS, but it's kind of the same game.
Woz probably didn't became upset about it because by the time he found out about that little incident, he was in some kind of "managing" position himself, and "playing the same game" but in his advantage now, and he was there because of the other decisions that Jobs made, so...
Basically what at the small "garage business" is called "being a liar" is what at the bigger levels is called "the rules of the game". And yes, you're no longer a "liar" and no longer breaking the rules, but simply because the rules are bent the way you need them to be bent.
The only alternative would be to have only fully transparent employee owned companies... and we all know this is not how our current flavor of capitalism works :)
EDIT - TL;DR: it's basically the same "bad" deal one gets in any employee <-> employer relationship, just that they didn't have this explicit relationship
I think also too a lot of people don't realize when they parrot out this story is that Jobs and Apple never abandoned Woz, Woz just chose at some point not to work there anymore and move on with his life. On his Wikipedia page it states that even though he no longer works there, he's still on the books as an employee and receives a stipend from Apple estimated at $120K.
I'm not sure how those two conclusions can be gleaned from this story.
It is pretty safe to assume that Steve Wozniak was not pulling the same types of shenanigans. And, it's really too bad if the story serves to normalize such behavior.
Second, it isn't a story about managers providing no value compared to less well paid engineers, it is a brilliant engineer letting something despicable pass because his partner brought so many non engineering assets to the table.
I think people should flee any company where there are dishonest managers who provide no value. It isn't uncommon to see companies that start out with comparable products, design and engineering talent diverge because one has a terrible management team.
The "stuff" is still there, in the company, allowing people to be employed for doing stuff they really like doing and to create more stuff... it's not as if he sold all his shares, converted it to gold and buried half of it in his tomb under a pyramid and left the other half of the gold to his children.
At least in 2000+ years we got to the level of social/human evolution where "the stuff" keeps flowing :)
End of story. Before continuing celebrating Jobs, ask yourself a question, do you want to promote that kind of behavior in the Valley?