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Technology (Apple) Businesses Technology Apple

An Insider's Take on Steve Jobs 114

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the quite-a-bit-of-new-money-to-go-with-it dept.
Jerry Rivers writes "Business Week has an interesting, if short, interview with Edgar Woolard Jr., the man who brought Jobs back to Apple in the dark days of 1996. "Old money" Woolard offers some interesting insights into the man behind the iMac and the iPod, including his take on Jobs' 'five special characteristics' that make him the success that he is."
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An Insider's Take on Steve Jobs More

An Insider's Take on Steve Jobs

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @08:55PM (#14603674)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Great interview. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by macserv ( 701681 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @10:32PM (#14604136)
      Definitely true, John... most people are underinformed. I think the Amelio chapter of Apple's history is one that most Mac fanatics are wrong about. The man got the right people into the company, stopped the downward slide, set the designers free (there were curvy, bondi designs long before iMac), and welcomed Steve back in to the company.

      Gil could have done a lot better, but even if he had, the people would have still wanted Steve back, and quite rightly. The company needs Steve, and his influence is obvious. His ability to be prepared when opportunity strikes (some would call that luck - I don't believe in luck) is legend. Apple has an easier time dealing with huge corporations that most any other company, since Steve is at the helm.

      I think that the only downside of his CEO position is that he doesn't get to spend enough time walking around, communicating with his engineers and designers, and corraling their managers.

  • The fifth quality is true (Score:5, Insightful)

    by KrisCowboy ( 776288 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @09:01PM (#14603701) Journal
    Yeah. This damn guy knows exactly how to make money. When every company was making computers, he decided to produce art and he still made money. How many CEOs would work for nothing just to prove that they aren't there for the money? Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer wouldn't - that's for sure.

  • Jobs is like Caesar (Score:3, Insightful)

    by catmistake ( 814204 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @09:02PM (#14603702) Journal
    Jobs, who had been a consultant since late 1996 after Apple bought his NeXT Software, refused to take the CEO job at first

    I'd heard this before, too. I thought this must be corp. myth, similar to the way Caesar refused to be emperor... each time he refused, he was less resistive to the idea.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • He was interim CEO for a couple years, and kept the "iCEO" title later just for fun. The $1.00 salary story is true, and he was quoted saying that Apple needed to make better use of its money at the time. What he did get was more stock options.
      • I never doubted it.

        Is there something that indicates to you that I doubted it? Is it because I used the word "myth?"

        Contrary to popular belief, myth ~= falsehood.

        But my point was that this is just what happened to Caesar. The Senate begged him to be emperor, and he forcefully rejected the idea... the citizens cheered for him to do so, and he says "no... no, really, I couldn't..." They ask him again and again... eventually, he softens and says "well... ok." The story serves to add to the mystery of

        • Actualy ... the Senate begged him to be King, and he said no every time. He never accepted the crown - it was the suspicion that he would eventualy that led to his being assassinated.

          Contrary to popular belief Caius Iulius Caesar was never "Emperor", the most he ever was was Dictator (which was a traditional position that the Romans would appoint at times of national emergency).

  • New icon (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hey - Isn't it time for that G5 icon to change? :)

  • Reminds me of a joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by Krach42 ( 227798 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @09:08PM (#14603733) Homepage Journal
    So, Bill Gates dies, and goes to Heaven, and he meets up with Saint Peter, and says "Hey, it's Bill, I'm just going to go on in." And Saint Peter says, "Sorry Bill, everyone is equal here. You need to stand in line like everyone else."

    Begrudgingly, Bill Gates walks to the end of the enormous line, but as he's waiting to get into Heaven, a limo drives up, and there in the limo is Steve Jobs! Now, Bill Gates is furious, so he walks up to Saint Peter and complains, "Hey! I thought you said everyone was equal here! But, I just saw Steve Jobs, yeah, Steve Jobs roll with a limo!"

    Saint Peter laughs, and responds, "Oh no, that wasn't Steve Jobs. That was God, he only thinks he's Steve Jobs."

  • Bill Gates describes... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    how much bigger his manhood is over Steve Jobs [cnn.net]

  • Wrong Steve (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30, 2006 @09:37PM (#14603880)
    "If Steve has a good relationship with you, there's nobody better in the world to work with. He trusts you, and he listens, and he bounces his ideas off you. But if he doesn't trust you, it doesn't work."

    I thought he was talking about Balmer but it says ideas, not chairs.

  • The Five Characteristics (Score:5, Informative)

    by vmardian ( 321592 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @09:39PM (#14603890) Homepage
    From the article...

    1. Incredibly creative and has great vision.
    2. Absolute perfectionist.
    3. Great ability to attract outstanding people to work with him.
    4. If he respects you, he will interact with you and modify his ideas
    5. The damn guy knows how to make money!

  • Reality Distortion Field (Score:4, Interesting)

    by D4C5CE ( 578304 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @09:44PM (#14603912)
    Need I say more... [folklore.org] (Follow the links, Luke! ;-))

  • off the record (Score:1, Insightful)

    by SP33doh ( 930735 )
    ok, this has nothing to do with jobs, but... buisnessweek isn't the most realiable and/or good place ever.
    • It's an interview. Generally speaking, no commercial news source is reliable as a scholarly reference, but this isn't about research or reportage. Take it for what it is and not what it isn't. Now if, by saying that "buisnessweek (sic) isn't the most realiable and/or good place ever," you are saying the interview is actually contrived, then that is a fairly serious accusation that needs to be backed up with either contradictory evidence or reliable research which shows a longstanding pattern of wilfully

  • Secrecy in product design (Score:3, Interesting)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @10:06PM (#14604013) Homepage
    He doesn't reveal a single thing about what he's working on. Anyone who leaks information gets killed. When the new gadget is revealed, the audience cheers because it's nothing like anyone expected. Every living thing on Earth loves Steve Jobless.

    Then of course, there are the other visionaries. When the other guys design products in secrecy they're the devil for not involving anyone else. They're selfish bastards for not allowing anyone else to copy their idea.

  • The more I read about him (Score:5, Interesting)

    by topham ( 32406 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @10:30PM (#14604116) Homepage
    The more I read about him, the more I think perhaps the negative comments are sour grapes.

    I used to think that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates where similar people. I've come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs is who Bill Gates wishes he was. Bill Gates has repeatedly said he wanted a computer in every home, etc.

    But he failed to have a computer designed that DESERVED to be in every home. (and, in many ways, an OS that deserves to be on any computer...) He build an empire that could almost force it to be true, but that is hardly the same thing.

    A lot of people seem to be unimpressed with the current crop of new Intel based Macs. I think Apples implementation of it is almost perfect.

    Apple could have chosen to be bold, all the new machines based on the Intel processors could have been completely new designs ascetically. Instead they chose the keep the outwards appearance the same and replace everything inside, and make it function exactly the same as before. (Ok, with a decent improvement in speed.)

    Had Apple chosen to be bold, and had the OS failed to deliver the promise of running almost all applications then the whole thing would have been looked upon as a fiasco. Instead they focused on getting the internals right.

    I remember having conversations with people years ago about the idea of emulating a PowerPC based Mac on an Intel x86 platform; nobody thought it would been feasible. Even if you got it to work, it would never be fast enough to be useful. But Apple has done it, Rosetta is a stunning achievement and it's integration with the OS is almost seamless.
    (yes I tried the PowerPC emulator (PearPC) and was amazed that it worked as well as it did. But that doesn't make it viable for joe-user.

    • Re:The more I read about him (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @10:41PM (#14604198) Homepage
      They're opposites, you're right. Steve Jobs is by nature the person Bill Gates has been trying his entire career to be. Throughout modern computing history, Steve Jobs has consistently been involved with projects that were both visionary and innovative (Apple, Macintosh, NeXT, Pixar, etc.), often so innovative that they were unviable in the marketplace simply because no one quite knew what to do with them yet despite waves of "oohs" and "aahs."

      Bill Gates, on the other hand, has never innovative, nor has his company innovative. While Steve Jobs' projects have always been light on their feet, leading edge, ahead of their time, and customer-oriented, Gates' projects have always been heavy-handed, borderline plagiarism, behind schedule, and very, very corporate-bureaucratic in nature.

      You're quite right in your assessment that what Jobs has managed to do by merit (win a place for himself and his creations in history), Gates has done via ruthlessness, leverage, and mere financial brute force.

      • Re:The more I read about him (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Khelder ( 34398 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @09:27AM (#14606500)
        I'm reminded of something Jobs said in Triumph of the Nerds [pbs.org]:
        The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products. I have no problem with their success -- they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.

        [Quoted from FoRK Archive [xent.com].]

      • Bill Gates, on the other hand, has never innovat[ed], nor has his company innovat[ed].

        This pattern was set right from the beginning: Copy, clone, buy -- BASIC, DOS, Windows itself. The products they decided to clone were rarely the best of the bunch, so they don't show taste (as Jobs himself famously remarked*); and the company has pursued that trail of mediocrity until today. I don't think there is any category where M$ actually has the best product. All they have is volume, and most of that achieved ille

    • Apple could have chosen to be bold, all the new machines based on the Intel processors could have been completely new designs ascetically.

      I expect changes in the appearance of future Apple computers will be less and less significant. Apple has spent years and considerable amounts of money getting to what they feel is the ideal computer (shape, look, dimensions, material, etc.).


      • I think they kept the design the same to emphasize continuity and compatibility in the face of a dramatic change.

        Time to market may have been a second factor. By keeping the older, well-liked designs, they were able to ship faster than they would if they did a major redesign.

        There's also the risk that the new designs would not be accepted by the customers, which could be construed as a failure of the Intel Macs as a whole.

        I think they'll get creative with the next few revisions.
    • The more I read about him, the more I think perhaps the negative comments are sour grapes.

      Why can't the detractors and supporters both be right?

      Everybody agrees Jobs has vision. My take is that he manipulates and uses people to achieve that vision. On the other hand, being part of that vision has tremendous rewards. That doesn't make what he does nice or benevolent, but at this stage in history people who go to work for him have to know what they're getting into. Which means what he does passes at least
      • "Everybody agrees Jobs has vision. My take is that he manipulates and uses people to achieve that vision."

        That's called "leadership".

  • My brush with Steve (Score:5, Funny)

    by stretta ( 787191 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @09:31AM (#14606519)
    I've been on the Apple campus once. I was sent to do a demo for, IIRC, the Final Cut group in 'the Piano Bar' or room, IIRC. We had a Genelec surround system sent directly to our contact at Apple and I loaded this on a huge cart along with other hardware and my Warr Guitar strapped to my back. We 'booked' the room so we were sure it would be abandoned, including the allocated setup time. So, I come crashing into the room with the cart *KERBLAM* and I see a group of five people talking at a table in the back. Our apple contact says, "We should, uh, get out of here." I shrug and follow him out. He and the other guy leave to go do something and I'm sitting outside the piano room by myself. Moments later four, ashen Apple employees scurry out of the room followed by a scruffy unshaven fellow with torn jeans. He surveys the outside area, and, like a missile locking on to a strong heat signature, zeros in on me and walks towards me, the person who burst in like a herd of buffalo on his private meeting. He holds out his hand and says, "Hi. I'm Steve." I owned a 128K Mac in 1984. Before that, the obligatory Apple //s and what not. What I do today was shaped largely by Apple, and what this person did. Heck, I started writing music by dragging notes onto a screen with a program called MusicWorks - it isn't hyperbole to say my very interest in music started with the Macintosh, and I'm staring Steve Jobs in the face. Being a fairly eloquent person, I summon up the response: "Hey." Smooth. I don't remember if I shook his hand or not. In fact, I really don't remember anything beyond saying 'hey'

  • Who's on what board? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by stevewz ( 192317 )
    It would be cool to see a matrix of the members of the Fortune 500 Boards of Directors. We always hear about who's CEO of this or that corporation, but it's amazing when you hear about who's on the Board.

  • Forget Gates...what about Land? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @10:09AM (#14606821)
    The thing I'm *most* worried about is that Steve Jobs is to Apple as Edwin Land [wikipedia.org] is to Polaroid. In a nutshell: Polaroid was Land's company through and through. The problem was that after Land died, so did Polaroid, just a lot more slowly.

    While I strangely have no such issues with Gates and Microsoft, I'm genuinely concerned that when Steve goes to that great bitbucket in the sky, we really won't have any visionaries left to push the computing/entertainment/whatever world ahead a step.

  • Gag me... (Score:3, Informative)

    by porcupine8 ( 816071 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @12:57PM (#14608470) Journal
    An interesting interview overall, and this guy certainly seems to know what he's talking about... But this line:

    I think the synergies will escalate dramatically.

    made me throw up a little.

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