Posted on 10/24/2011 10:59:42 AM PDT by US Navy Vet
My reaction to all the Steve Jobs philosophy articles is, very nice but I’ve heard it all before.
It is not deeply profound to use your inevitable death as motivation, to hope for an afterlife, to have dropped acid in the 60’s, to have “discovered” Eastern religion.
I’m not anti-Jobs but he’s no more profound than The Beatles.
We will never know if he received the gift of eternal life as he was dying. What surprised me was that he was raised as a Missouri Synod Lutheran.
Xerox PArc also invented Object Oriented Programming with the Smalltalk programming language.
Shame they didn’t know what the boys at Parc created.
“Apple just assembled off the shelf parts with some tweaking ... And so was the PC platform for that matter”
Hey, these are consumer items that must be cheap and must work well. Most parts must all have second sources.
Tell me a consumer product that wasn’t pretty mundane on the inside. Hardware, that is. Software is a different story.
Yes, the IBM’s did require a bit more of a learning curve, and they were slow to get on the graphics bandwagon. But, that all became history sometime in the early 90’s.
I got my start on a Radio Shack TRS80 and eventually got an IBM compatable around the late 80’s. I worked most of the 90’s at Drexel University, which at the time I started required all students to have a Mac. I was in charge of the IBM and Unix mainframes, but did have to have a Mac as my desktop and was involved in meetings dealing with University standards and other issues.
In the mid-90’s the University decided to shift to IBM computers (the new president’s decision I believe) so I was involved with the transition, which went surprising smoothly.
My point was (and remains) that Columbus was the one who actually did something with that knowledge. He gets the credit for taking the risks and being the pioneer. And, so should Jobs.
Perhaps, my analogy could be stretched to include the executives at Xerox. Much like the Vikings discovered N. America, and then didn't do anything with it — the PARC lab rats discovered the GUI, but Xerox did nothing with it. Maybe the PARC lab rats should get the same credit we give to Lief the Lucky. He got there first, and he likely knew he had discovered something important — but, he was thwarted by the powers-that-were. OTOH, the lab rats never left the comforts and security of their corporate lab to venture forth on their own, and bring their discovery to market. It took visionary and risk-taking college dropout to do that.
I tend to associate Apple users with liberals. Same goes for Prius drivers. Also, for some reason, it seems that Nikon (as opposed to Canon) photographers tend to be liberals... not sure why on that one though.
Marketing to a certain demographic definately is a factor.
Doesn’t surprise me. One reason I’ve never been able to stand Jobs is that I saw him on a TV show years ago, complaining about how Bill’s guys were unimaginative peons, while the Apple guys in contrast “read poetry” and such things. I kid you not. You can only take so much self-importance and poncing around in a black polo neck, and I’m afraid that was about my limit.
Doesn’t surprise me. One reason I’ve never been able to stand Jobs is that I saw him on a TV show years ago, complaining about how Bill’s guys were unimaginative peons, while the Apple guys in contrast “read poetry” and such things. I kid you not. You can only take so much self-importance and poncing around in a black polo neck, and I’m afraid that was about my limit.
Damn! That's exactly what happened to me....thought it was something I had done.
I had Vista up and running just fine for about 3 months before installing iTunes.
I have a couple games that hit an error message while starting up...this started happening later the same day after the iTunes instal.
You would think that at least one person on FR would discount this story because Walter Isaacson is the former chairman and CEO of CNN.
You’re absolutely right about Apple ripping off Xerox. And then Jobs had the ego to spend the rest of his life building up the idea that they hadn’t.
You’re absolutely right about Apple ripping off Xerox. And then Jobs had the ego to spend the rest of his life building up the idea that they hadn’t.
The graphical user interface and the mouse was born at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which was a Xerox R&D facility.
Under duress, the design team was forced to demo it to both Gates and Jobs.
Good movie to watch that is a more than rough approximation of the truth is ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’.
Excellent movie.
Well, Newton didn’t invent gravity, so there.
And there are competing claims from several countries about such inventions as photography and cinematography, prolly others as well. It’s so lame and unoriginal by now to tell us dummies that Jobs “stole” something or other. Get a life and steal something!
I think I am really ready to let Steve Jobs rest in peace.
Oh, really? Then why did you post this:
You could compare Jobs to Christopher Columbus. Mariners knew for centuries that the “scientific consensus” was bogus — that the world was round not flat. None of them sailed off to “the ends of the world” on that knowledge. That's why there's a “Columbus” day.
when the scientific concensus was NOT bogus--did NOT believe in a flat earth?
An honest commerical..
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