
Apple Co-Founder’s Allies Take Aim at Hollywood Over ‘Steve Jobs’ - spking
http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-co-founders-allies-take-aim-at-hollywood-over-steve-jobs-1444000308
======
SCAQTony
Woz' and Isaacson are pretty damn credible. If someone attacked Bill Gates for
being a "bully' or a "jerk" it really wouldn't wash for his humanitarian
achievements from education, farming, immunizations, on ad infinitum would
blow away any character criticisms.

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-
Informatio...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-
Information/Foundation-Factsheet)

Steve Jobs' defenders on the other hand aren't bringing up many stellar
character examples. This is a problem for a company that needs "demigod
personality" as the face of their brand. Your milage may vary.

(Edit typos and grammar corrected)

~~~
adventured
It's a challenging problem when you're diagnosed with a potentially terminal
cancer at just 48 years of age.

Do you spend what may be a short amount of time that you have left on trying
to build a foundation to give your wealth away, or do you spend it doing what
you enjoy most? Jobs gets viciously and unfairly criticized on this point. If
other people ('normal people') choose to pursue what they want to with their
remaining time in the face of such a diagnosis, few would dare criticize them.

That becomes an even more important question when you realize that Jobs knew
his wife would be fully capable of giving his wealth away after his passing.
In the second half of his cancer battle, it was pretty obvious he was not
going to survive longer term. So what do you do at 52 or 53 years of age, when
it's apparent you're going to die? Do you spend years (which you may not have)
trying to build a successful foundation? My personal opinion is that's an
absurd premise. The reality is, we'll never know if Jobs would have become a
successful philanthropist, or whether he would have focused on his work as
Buffett has and leave the giving to eg his wife.

If Bill Gates had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer at 48, and died in his
early to mid 50s - it's likely his legacy would look a lot different too. When
Gates was 48 in 2003, his public reputation was far different than it is
today, he was openly reviled as an abusive monopolist and robber baron with a
long reputation for having been mean and abusive to employees.

It's Steve's vast billions that will be given away by Laurene, and he deserves
a lot of credit for that, as much as someone like Warren Buffett does for the
good his wealth will do. I don't see many examples of Jobs getting a
comparable treatment versus what someone like Buffett does on this point
however.

edit: if you care to, feel free to explain why you disagree with me, assuming
it's not just based on a reflexive need to bash Steve Jobs and not give him
credit for any of the good his wealth will do and or has done (while someone
like Buffett gets a lot of credit, while performing almost none of the actual
philanthropic effort either)

~~~
jack9
> he was openly reviled as an abusive monopolist and robber baron with a long
> reputation for having been mean and abusive to employees.

For some people (like me), he isn't anything more. Jobs and Gates were both
rather disruptive people. Gates held the entire computer industry back,
technologically, and abused his employees to stash wealth. What he does with
ill-gotten gains is well and good from an absolute standpoint (no eye toward
history), but the damage he did on his watch, doesn't make up for the
relatively short-term altruism he has shown. Saving 10 or 100k lives via water
treatment and scholarships or sabotaging technological innovation for decades,
is not equivalent to me. It's immoral for Gates to take from others so he
could make the decision of where that time and to what end to spend some of
his lifetime of hoarded wealth.

~~~
RaleyField
> Gates held the entire computer industry back

The industry does this job well by itself, I doubt things would be much
different if Microsoft wasn't around.

> What he does with ill-gotten gains

Yet all transactions that contributed to his gains were voluntary.

~~~
subdane
Technically no, if we're talking about installs of OS on platforms. Bad
business decisions and uninformed consumer decisions don't necessarily line up
with "voluntary". Voluntary on the part of the manufacturer, yes. But less
obviously so on the part of a less informed consumer. And complicated further
by the fact that some of those manufacturers later came to regret the deal
they entered - specifically that MSFT got a cut of all shipped machines
regardless of whether their OS was installed.

~~~
RaleyField
Ignorance isn't an excuse - otherwise we are the baddies for being at fault
for not steering consumers towards better alternatives, not Gates.

> later came to regret the deal they entered - specifically that MSFT got a
> cut of all shipped machines regardless of whether their OS was installed.

Then they should've developed their own OS, as they were completely free to
do.

------
acomjean
"That said, I think it’s a fine movie, brilliantly written and performed and
full of humor and feeling. It deviates from reality everywhere — almost
nothing in it is like it really happened " Andy Hertzfeld, member of the mac
team. He was consulted for the movie.

[http://recode.net/2015/10/02/original-mac-team-member-
andy-h...](http://recode.net/2015/10/02/original-mac-team-member-andy-
hertzfeld-talks-about-the-hollywood-steve-jobs-qa/)

------
dsugarman
paywall getaround link -
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QqQIwAGoVChMI8ZjX-
ZSqyAIVQqw-Ch1s6QRm&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fapple-co-
founders-allies-take-aim-at-hollywood-over-steve-
jobs-1444000308&usg=AFQjCNHQnCGbMX8cNNY8o2OucRaEEDi7oQ)

------
mattmaroon
It's been a long time since Aaron Sorkin did something that didn't feel like a
recent film school grad doing a bad impression of Aaron Sorkin. See The Social
Network for a great example.

He's become a weird cliche parody of himself, where every character has the
exact same diction and incredible grammar and rapid fire wit. It's like dozens
of different actors channeling the ghost of Josh Lyman.

Forgot about accuracy, treat it as a work of fiction and be surprised if it
just doesn't suck as a film.

------
sigmar
>Asked about the movie by “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert recently, Mr.
Cook said, “I think a lot of people are trying to be opportunistic and I hate
this.”

I'm not positive, but I'm willing to bet Cook was talking more about "Steve
Jobs: Man in the Machine" with that comment. That movie was a documentary and
was quite critical of Steve Jobs.

------
danso
I don't understand why Jobs' friends feel the need to paint him as a saint. He
was brilliant and inspiring, but he was also a jerk in inexplicable ways,
throughout his life. I imagine if most of us had as much scrutiny as Jobs did
over 50 years, the result wouldn't be a clean or tidy screenplay. But it's
important to accept his mercurial personality, if only to remind people that
great leaders are not at all perfect.

Besides him being horrible to the mother of Lisa...the other unpleasant
episode that comes to mind is how he cheated Woz even before Apple
began...this is a thing so small and so long past the time that Woz and Jobs
became legends and yet Jobs, rather than not admitting what he did, doubles up
and points out how Woz would be nothing if Jobs hadn't brought him on to
Apple. Isaacson devoted a substantial part of the early chapters to this
episode:

> _Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half of
> the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips. It would
> be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a
> book on the history of Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been paid this
> bonus._

> _“I think that Steve needed the money, and he just didn’t tell me the
> truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there are long
> pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been
> honest. If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would
> have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.”_

> _To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental difference in their characters. “Ethics
> always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand why he would’ve gotten
> paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,” he said. “But, you
> know, people are different.” When Jobs learned this story was published, he
> called Wozniak to deny it. “He told me that he didn’t remember doing it, and
> that if he did something like that he would remember it, so he probably
> didn’t do it,” Wozniak recalled._

> _When I asked Jobs directly, he became unusually quiet and hesitant. “I
> don’t know where that allegation comes from,” he said. “I gave him half the
> money I ever got. That’s how I’ve always been with Woz. I mean, Woz stopped
> working in 1978. He never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got
> exactly the same shares of Apple stock that I did.”_

> _Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did not, in fact,
> shortchange Wozniak? “There’s a chance that my memory is all wrong and
> messed up,” Wozniak told me, but after a pause he reconsidered. “But no. I
> remember the details of this one, the $ 350 check.” He confirmed his memory
> with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn._

> _“I remember talking about the bonus money to Woz, and he was upset,”
> Bushnell said. “I said yes, there was a bonus for each chip they saved, and
> he just shook his head and then clucked his tongue.”_

As always, Woz demonstrated his near-infinite compassion and wisdom when
Isaacson pressed him on Jobs' deception:

> _Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it was not worth rehashing.
> Jobs is a complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker
> facet of the traits that make him successful. Wozniak would never have been
> that way, but as he points out, he also could never have built Apple. “I
> would rather let it pass,” he said when I pressed the point. “It’s not
> something I want to judge Steve by.”_

~~~
staunch
Two serious mistakes of character in his entire life, both of which he more
than made amends for (which you failed to mention), and both of which took
place while he was young and under stress. Not bad.

Now list the mistakes you've made in your life and let's see how you
compare...

------
andrewtbham
I agree with Eddie Cue, Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine, was a hatchet job.

~~~
Apocryphon
How so?

------
meeper16
The dude was focused on taking over sliver of the meaning of life, a phone and
such.

Let Jobs screw Wosniak, take his idea (US Festivals) and pass it off on the
music industry, borrow money from Gates, steal from Parc and try to shut down
streaming music comapnies while stepping in front of the line for a liver he
never used. Not interested.

I like what Google is doing 10000000000000000x better: Google's Company That
Wants To Cure Death Now Has Its Own Website
[http://www.businessinsider.com/calico-website-google-
curing-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/calico-website-google-curing-
death-2014-8)

------
staunch
I hope Lauren Jobs knows that Steve Jobs will continue to inspire generations
of entrepreneurs. He showed Silicon Valley how to change the world in an
exciting and delightful way. Every founder is trying their best to follow his
example of excellence, whether they acknowledge it or not. Most fall far
short.

Anyone trying to create things should study Jobs, and anyone who does study
him (with an open mind) will come away with a profound respect for him as a
creator and as a person.

As Elon Musk said, "there was a certain magic about Steve Jobs that was really
inspiring"

 _Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The
round pegs in the square holes._

 _The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they
have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them._

 _About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change
things..._

~~~
ryandvm
The flip side of that is that we're now about 5 years into the phenomenon of
managers and entreprenuers cargo-culting assholeism as a way of acheiving
success. Every time I read about some jerk lamenting the fact that his
employees like to eat dinner with their families, we have guys like Steve Jobs
and Elon Musk to thank for it.

~~~
staunch
Unless you're talking about children, you can safely blame the people
themselves for their own behavior.

Most people who worked with Steve Jobs consider it a highlight of their
professional careers. He was as demanding of himself as he was of others, and
worked as hard as anyone. These are some of the traits that the assholes don't
copy.

