"Would have"? Try "has."
Just ask Fingerprints Clinton why she's not president.
Words of wisdom. Well said.
Odd...he holds 313 patents while similar CEO's (e.g., Gates, Ellison, etc) are at best in single digits.
It wasn’t until they came up with the iPod, that Apple became the successful company it is today. They didn’t invent the portable music player, but certainly refined it to the point that it dominated the market.
Jobs biggest failure was to refuse licensing the Mac OS.
But in the end, he was a huge success story -warts and all.
That is what always makes me curious. Jobs gets all the credit for Apple. What about Wozniak? It's like he never did anything important at Apple to put them on the map. Most people don't even know who he is.
In the current anti-capitalist and regulatory hell created by the Obama administration, I have doubts it would be possible to be the same kind of entrepreneur as Jobs.
Wonderful article.
Sssshhhh .... you’ll greatly upset the Apple/I-gadget people.
The one thing the fledgling Apple did ‘right’ (to help them survive) is to donate tons and tons of Apple computers to schools. Gotta hook those customers while they are still very young and impressionable, you know.
One thing I find really laughable is the Apple people insisting on the evil Intel/Microsoft empire, while their favorite company insisting on absolutely closed control operating system.
Yep, Jobs life was a total failure...
:o
“Jobs was a brash provocateur, did little of the hands-on inventing in his shop”
I don't know if he held a soldering iron, but his direction nearly bankrupted me and many other people that tried to build a business around the original MAC. His theory (no, really “fetish”) was about all in one, sealed boxes, with no fan. I still remember the smell and sound that came from the original MAC when a component (flyback transformer if memory serves me correct) blew-up from over heating. No need to even consider trying to fix it yourself because the case took a special tool to get apart. The MAC II (which Jobs hated) saved Apple and my company both. Just a big solid box that was maintainable, expandable, and equipped with a fan. The immediately effects of his later return to the company was another all in one sealed up box (i-Mac) which also suffered from heating problems, and some stupid plastic cube. All of which quickly found their way to the land fill. His success came about when he found products that could actually be sealed up plastic boxes that he would have complete control over (i-Pod, i-Phone, whatever that pad thing is called). They are fine, but I look out over a room full of PCs where once MACs sat, and I don't take it as resounding success.
“On the other hand, while Microsoft started out disrupting industries with aggressive risk taking”
Yea, PC Dos was nothing like CPM. Window 1.0 was nothing like GEM desktop or any of the other menu driven, somewhat graphical interfaces. And Windows 95 was nothing like the MAC desktop - of 1984.
“Government decided Microsoft was too successful. In 1998, a group of AGs and the DOJ responded by shackling Microsoft's creativity”
Microsoft was sued when they tried to forcibly bundle IE Explorer with Windows. There was nothing “creative” about it, in fact it was absolutely stupid. And there has been very little in the way of government interference to limit any actual “creative” things for them to do (absolutely nothing would have stopped them from creating a product like the i-pod or the i-phone. The biggest thing that has limited them is their near unhinged paranoia.
And nothing in this article mentions the original MAC development team (probably the greatest group of programming talent ever assembled). Jobs could have ranted and raved all he wanted, but without them, there would have been no MAC.
"Would have"? Try "has."
Just ask Fingerprints Clinton why she's not president.
I don't know if I'd really call these "epic failures." Yes, they were financial disasters, primarily because the hardware simply wasn't available to do what Steve wanted them to do. But they were still amazingly innovative. There are still people who LOVE the LISA. And a number of features of NeXT systems are now found not only in Macs (MacOS is heavily influenced by Mach, the OS developed at CMU and used on the NeXT) but nearly EVERY computer sold today (no floppy drive, the only IO device being a CD burner).
There's a saying that you haven't failed until you've given up. It's true. Failure allows one to learn from past mistakes, and to weed out the bad while retaining the good. See above.
Mark
Ill informed (as pointed out above) Monday morning quarterbacking of a team which happened to win. Why hadn’t Gary Kildall succeeded like Jobs? Or Adam Osborne? They too had failures from which they learned. There is much more going on that learning from failure, which we all do, sometimes to no avail. Where is Steve Wozniak now?