I feel as though you're assuming facts not in evidence, here.
Can you explain a little bit more what legacy you feel Steve Wozniak has left at Apple that persists to this day, along with why it has been important to the company's success?
My analysis of Apple's latter day success:
- Steve Jobs, demanding a high standard of quality and providing vision for ongoing products and strategy. Selecting and grooming smart people for crucial leadership roles. Requiring accountability and virtuous integration between product components and even different products.
- Tim Cook, optimizing industrial and business processes, ensuring high margins, protecting profits and structuring clever, unmatched deals for manufacturing and supply sourcing
- Jonathan Ive, designing the physical incarnations of Apple that create strong connections to the brand for customers
So is your position that software engineering has had an equally critical role to what's described above, and the engineering leadership has been Woz-esque? While Apple does make world-class software, I'm not sure I agree about the Woz bit, but I'm open to a persuasive argument.
edit: Especially when you consider how much of Apple's software engineering assets and talent came from NeXT.
Woz had nothing to do with saving Apple in the 90s - and nothing for nearly 40 years - the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with in the late 90s. He was clearly smart enough to figure out how to save Apple. That’s more than “just” being a designer. 3 predecessors couldn’t figure it out and Gil Amelio wasn’t an idiot (Spindler wasn’t an idiot either - but oof talk about being out of your element)
The Apple of Wozniak is a historical footnote. Apple of today is NeXT - Jobs’ company.
A company doesn’t just succeed on technical prowess which is more where Woz’s skills lay. Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless. Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.
I think you're missing his point. None of what you listed is what Steve Jobs made. He made Apple I, Apple II, MacIntosh, etc. He was talking about his legacy. And he was right about it.
I think if you had asked him specifically about software engineers working on underlying technology, he probably would have recognized that. After all, he was working on NeXT there, which was using that same technology.
This clip actually made me respect his intelligence more than I had prior.
Not just the cofounder but the real genius behind all their early products. Jobs was excellent at selling great products, but it was Wozniak who engineered and built them that great.
Unfortunately in this world it's the non technical people who always get more consideration compared to engineers. Bill Gates himself had good hardware/software knowledge having worked with embedded systems for traffic control before MS, yet he is only remembered as former Microsoft chief.
Wow you dismiss Woz as non important when he not only made the product that placed Apple in the spotlight in 1976, but also made the first mass manufactured personal computer that could be attached to a display with no modifications. You could very well say he's the raison d'être of Apple as we know it.
You call his involvement (12 years as a company, and I believe 5 before Apple Comps was incorporated) 'short' and his dismiss his opinion on a piece of tech when he's probably part of the elite who's opinion actually matter. Hell Steve Jobs was never a 'techy' so to speak, so if I had to take anyone's opinion seriously (regardless I agree or not) about a piece of technology such as this is Steve Wozniak.
It's clear from your multiple posts in this thread that you have some sort of star-eyes for Jobs, and nothing I say will persuade you otherwise.
With that said, I do feel you are giving awfully too much credit to someone who never actually designed anything in his life. Sure, he was at the helm of each of the companies that ended up producing good results, but do you actually believe Jobs himself was directly involved in the day-to-day decisions and engineering of each of the products? Absolutely not, he's busy running the company. The true unsung hero's at Apple and NeXT were the engineers, and their direct management team. Jobs may have been good at assembling a good management team and motivating them, but the management team are the ones who are good at assembling the right engineering team with the right motivation. I mean, Jony Ive should get more credit than Jobs for the iPhone, because he was and is the end-all-be-all of design for the product. Who recruited him? Not Jobs, it was Brunner.
Was Jobs great? Sure. Was he any more great than any of the modern great tech CEO's (Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Larry Ellison, Jonathan Schwartz, etc...)? Nope.
(btw, it's still 7% even in 1973 dollars. Jobs took home 93% without doing a thing while Woz got no credit, and no profit)
It is illuminating to compare Apple's priorities then and now. You can easily see the common obsession with design and the drive to make it affordable. Despite Apple's early reputation, it's clear that they were still trying to keep the cost down so the experience could be shared by more people. Jobs was different, though, in that he would aggressively cut costs and just as aggressively not compromise on the user experience. Better a few things well than many poorly.
Apple then and now was able to make these "insanely great" products by attracting the absolutely best engineers. Yes, Jobs without [a] Woz is not successful. But Woz without [a] Jobs is equally so. And while brilliance in either slippery is rare, I don't doubt it's still easier to find someone with Woz's kind of talent than Jobs'.
Finally, even supposing that both skill sets are equally rare--who's going to be better at attracting new talent? One of the nice things about being able to persuade people to buy stuff is that the skill translates nicely to persuading people to share your vision and work for you.
It seems like people these days can’t even accurately describe what Steve Jobs was, he was a leader. He was a genius at managing people to work for him. Steve Wozniak was not, which was why Jobs could make Pixar, Next and of course Apple. Just because he didn’t have a hard skill of engineering, doesn’t mean he was useless. Rarely is anything impressive made by a single person, everything is almost always made by teams and generally large teams. Large teams especially can only function under a great leader and jobs was a great leader for a myriad of reasons which was why he achieved success at many multiples of magnitude compared to Steve Wozniak
Ah, the old myth about the irreplaceable engineer and the dumb suit. Ask Wozniak about that. I don't think he believes Apple would be without Steve Jobs.
Wozniak did the Apple thing and got lucky purely down to Jobs' drive. Wozniak did the engineering and then left or took a hiatus. The was it and he did nothing else. I admire his technical ability for what he did but he didn't do much of note after Apple. I could be wrong.
The Woz is a legendary engineer, no one doubts that.
He's a worse-than-average entrepreneur, and I'd wager that without the other Steve, the Apple I would have been one of the many promising microcomputers which fizzled out.
I like to think all reasonable computer nerds recognize the duality that created Apple: incredible engineering (Woz) combined with incredible passion, marketing and drive (Jobs). The problem is people point to Jobs as an example of unacceptable behaviours that are excused by his results. Yet somehow Woz showed us you could do really ingenious engineering AND be a decent human being, but they don't teach this in business school.
Yep - if not x, than not y applies to every aspect of the universe. :) But what I am trying to drive home is that (IMHO) there is a huge disconnect between Job's actual talents, and the amount of respect he is given. Wozniak too would have likely been a nobody, sometimes it takes that pairing of people to produce enough drive to create a product (I know because I have experienced it first hand -- I used to work with what you might call a psychological clone of Steve Jobs, but he got me to work at a rate I never have before - only he was never abusive).
Anyway, all of what you say is basically true. :) But I feel like Jobs has stolen most of the respect from all the people who work so hard under him that really have made Apple what it is. I guess I kind of have the engineer's mind set, for better or worse - I admire people who can create things with their own two hands (or at least the people who get their hands dirty), and I don't particularly care for those who can't -- I can't really say that without sounding like an elitist prick, but maybe that is what I am. :)
Having read the same biography, I came to rather different conclusions: True, without Wozniak, there wouldn't have been an Apple I and II. However, without Jobs, the Apple I and II would never have SOLD. A company needs good engineering AND hustle.
You should read Founders at Work and Steve Jobs. Both paint pictures of Woz as the guy who quite literally designed and built the Apple I and Apple II (although not quite as much as Apple I), off of which the company was built. Without Woz, there is not Apple. There is not technology elements to unify without him. He is not a dime a dozen.
That's about Steve Wozniak (who actually made the product that made Apple great) though, not Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak seems like a great person. Steve Jobs... not so much.
The milieu in which Apple came to fruitition was full of young small microcomputer shops. So it's not like Woz invented the microcomputer for the masses - his contribution was critical for early Apple for sure, but the market had tons of alternatives as well. Without Apple II it's hard to say were Jobs and Wozniak would have turned out. Jobs is such a unique, driven figure that I'm fairly sure he would have created a lasting impression on the market even without Woz. This is not to say Woz was insighnificant - but rather the 1970's Silicon Valley had tons of people with Woz's acumen (not to disparage their achievements) but only few tech luminaries who obviously were not one trick ponies but managed to build their industrial legacy over decades.
I agree with the first one since you included Woz. But I have to say that each one of your points should be including several other people each, as I highly doubt he did each of those personally by himself. I for one feel that Woz invented the concept of the personal computer and Jobs invented the concept of selling the personal computer.
He was the driving force during Apple's best times, he does get credit from me for that. But to me, a small part of that is maybe Apple's board didn't find someone to properly replace him. Apple made a great deal of stupid choices between the eras of Steve Jobs. Now that he has resigned, it'll be interesting to see if Apple falls back to their usual "let's do something stupid since Steve isn't here!"
Ah yes, that failure Gates, I guess he'll have to go down in history as being one of the driving forces of one of the most successful companies in the history of the Earth. What a bummer.
Can you explain a little bit more what legacy you feel Steve Wozniak has left at Apple that persists to this day, along with why it has been important to the company's success?
My analysis of Apple's latter day success:
- Steve Jobs, demanding a high standard of quality and providing vision for ongoing products and strategy. Selecting and grooming smart people for crucial leadership roles. Requiring accountability and virtuous integration between product components and even different products.
- Tim Cook, optimizing industrial and business processes, ensuring high margins, protecting profits and structuring clever, unmatched deals for manufacturing and supply sourcing
- Jonathan Ive, designing the physical incarnations of Apple that create strong connections to the brand for customers
So is your position that software engineering has had an equally critical role to what's described above, and the engineering leadership has been Woz-esque? While Apple does make world-class software, I'm not sure I agree about the Woz bit, but I'm open to a persuasive argument.
edit: Especially when you consider how much of Apple's software engineering assets and talent came from NeXT.
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