
Steve Jobs, a Genius at Pushing Boundaries - smacktoward
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-genius-at-pushing-boundaries-too.html
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phillmv
>An investigation by Apple’s lawyers cleared Mr. Jobs of wrongdoing, saying he
didn’t understand the accounting implications.

I'm being hyperbolic but it strikes me as unlikely that Jobs sat down, opened
up Quickbooks and just fiddled with it until the numbers made sense. You can't
scratch your nose at an organization of that size without involving several
layers of accountants and lawyers; did everyone else involved with this also
happen to "not understand the accounting implications"?

>Mr. Jobs’s conduct is a reminder that the difference between genius and
potentially criminal behavior can be a fine line.

What a loathsome false dichotomy.

What is being described here is not genius but instead sociopathy. There's a
rather large line between being able to think coherently about how we interact
with technology, and _breaking accounting laws so you can make more money_.

I'm willing to accept that being a huge asshole correlates strongly with your
ability to milk every ounce of creativity out of your employees but I see no
reason to grant them special courtesy; this ain't no high minded civil
disobedience.

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smutticus
Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy died the same month as Jobs. Whenever I see
articles about Jobs I always wonder about these two guys and their
contributions.

Will the NYT write an article about Ritchie or McCarthy? Does the public know
anything about them?

To me it just says something about American society that we obsess over Jobs
yet forget two great men, without whom, Jobs never would have done anything
interesting. Is it just because Jobs was rich that we care more? Is it because
of his leadership, or place in the public eye? What does it say about our
definition of success?

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benihana
>To me it just says something about American society that we obsess over Jobs
yet forget two great men, without whom, Jobs never would have done anything
interesting.*

I have to disagree with this. You have absolutely no idea or proof what Steve
Jobs would have done without Ritchie or McCarthy. Your entire line of
reasoning is predicated on unprovable assumption. For all we know, Steve Jobs
still would have been successful without Ritchie and McCarthy and that's why
he's a more interesting figure. But that scenario is just as impossible to
prove as yours.

~~~
67726e
The point is that Steve Jobs, just as the rest of us, was standing on the
shoulders of giants. So why then do we obsess over him and not others? Why is
he any more important than Dennis Ritchie?

~~~
shabadoop
By that logic, why is Dennis Ritchie any more important than Steve Jobs?

~~~
67726e
He did more and enabled more people than Jobs?

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ggreer
Had Jobs been threatened with jail time, I wonder how much public backlash
there would have been. As blind as we may want justice to be, nobody can
overlook the fact that the man was responsible for some really nice gadgets.
On top of that, the story is hard to get across to the general public: some
stock back-dating and ebook price-fixing with no clear sympathetic victim. In
light of that, I can see why the DoJ didn't charge him. They would have risked
public opinion demonizing the prosecution and favoring Jobs no matter how
guilty he was.

~~~
jmzbond
I agree with you, and at the same time I'm a little saddened by this reality.
Yes Job was responsible for some really nice gadgets that changed people's
lives, but at some point the benefits are outweighed by the opportunity cost
of competition that would have possibly led to even better gadgets. To be
clear, I don't think we often get to that "point" today, but it is a risk
worth asking ourselves as a public.

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taiki
By the time Apple showed up to any particular gadget segment, that gadget
segment had existed for years, and sometimes decades before. iPad? Tablets had
been kicking around since the 80's. iPhone? iPod? Smart phones and MP3 players
had been around since the late 90's. Mac? Apple II? I think you get my point.

~~~
jmzbond
But you're making the point I am. Competition is a GOOD thing. Apple showed up
in gadget segments and made them better because they weren't terrorized by
existing players to keep out. Again I'm not saying that's the point we were
at, but I am saying that just because someone/ some company was great, that's
no excuse to allow them to try and stop competition.

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robmay
Makes you wonder if all that praise for design is really why Apple was
successful, or if it was more because he pushed the limits of the law and was
successful the way the old robber barons were, like a Rockefeller or Carnegie.

~~~
jeremiep
I would definitely tend to think its more towards pushing the limits of the
law.

Didn't he get a salary of $1 a year without any backfire while CEOs of smaller
companies tried it and got fined?

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cmelbye
> Didn't he get a salary of $1 a year without any backfire while CEOs of
> smaller companies tried it and got fined?

Yes, yes, no. It's very common and legal.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-
dollar_salary](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary)

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Trufa
The quality of the comments in this thread is terrible.

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dang
Indeed it is. If anyone has suggestions about what we could do about this,
beyond not have shallowly provocative articles to begin with, we'd love to
hear them.

~~~
seizethecheese
Sorry to suggest something you explicitly didn't ask for, but the problem is
definitely the article to begin with. This is in a similar category as troll-
bait; obnoxious behavior is guaranteed. An obvious but simple solution: an
algorithm that punishes link titles that contain certain names. I propose:

\- Steve Jobs \- Elon Musk \- Jack Dorsey \- Melissa Mayer \- Sheryl Sandberg
\- Zuckerberg \- Etc.

In many genres the fetishization of individuals leads to lowest-common-
denominator crap like this. Reminds me of "great man" history theories.

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jonathanjaeger
I'm currently reading "Inside Apple" by Adam Lashinsky and even though I knew
Apple was secretive and Jobsian and intense, I never knew the extent of it. If
you want to read more about pushing boundaries, read Inside Apple.

~~~
j_s
[http://amzn.com/B005LH4Y3G](http://amzn.com/B005LH4Y3G)

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eli_gottlieb
But could he _transgress_ the boundaries?

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jt2190

      > Brian Lam, a technology reporter and founder of The 
      > Wirecutter website, said Mr. Jobs’s seeming indifference 
      > to the law wasn’t unusual in Silicon Valley... "It’s
      > just a characteristic of young tech entrepreneurs to 
      > look at the rules and question them. "You can’t get 
      > into this game without a healthy distaste for the 
      > status quo."
    

Isn't Elon Musk also trying to push the boundaries of society?

~~~
phillmv
What an utterly obnoxious way to frame the issue.

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vincetogo
Steve Jobs was a white, male billionaire. Of course he wouldn't be in jail.

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michaelochurch
At first, I thought of Steve Jobs as a high-variance person: difficult
personality, very high creative output. Since I'm the same way, I always held
him in high regard. Unlike most CEOs (low-variance, reliably mediocre types)
he had the courage to be different. I really liked the idea of a CEO who had a
genuine personality (even a difficult one) over the typical corporate social
climber.

The more that comes out about Jobs, the more I think of him as not only slimy,
but toxic. He seems to have set the template for a thousand talentless hacks
who use his success as an excuse to be unethical.

 _Mr. Jobs’s conduct is a reminder that the difference between genius and
potentially criminal behavior can be a fine line._

This makes no sense. I'm one of those high-amplitude individuals. It comes
with great difficulty. Most highly creative people have some kind of (possibly
mild) mental illness: bipolar's a common one. That's not an excuse to be
unethical, and to break laws for one's own benefit at others' expense. (It's
one thing to break rules to make everyone win; the wage-fixing scandal is not
a case of that.) That argument (fine line between genius and insanity) might
excuse spending a whole weekend building a side project, and falling asleep in
the Monday afternoon meeting. It doesn't excuse conspiring to suppress wages
and wreck careers.

