Comment I made a rocket ship for the man! (Score 1) 146
I made a rocket ship for the man!
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And I may agree with you, *IF* you are talking about the current Apple's status quo.
Yeah I am no Apple fan, but it is hard to argue with their revenue numbers and branding success.
For better or worse the Apple of the past died. Is Jobs culpable for that death? Perhaps.
1) It was the Apple II money that funded all the company in order to lead it where it is today.
Jobs burned that money and had to go to external sources, Ross Perot, to fund NeXT...
Now would NeXT ever had gotten off the ground without Apple funding? Perhaps not...
But what funded the start of Apple? I have no doubt Jobs would have found a way, we can see that in his past.
2) The Jobs that came back to Apple is not the same Jobs that was kicked out from it.
No doubt the Jobs that returned gained from his experience at Apple and from being pushed out of Apple and so forth.
But this in fact support my argument that is what not Woz but Jobs and his growth that created Apple.
The first Jobs' Era at Apple did not ended up very well.
My understanding was that Jobs wanted to go one direction, the direction he took NeXT, and those who were then in control of the company he created wanted to go another.
I would argue that Jobs succeeded in taking NeXT there, although not without causing the same problems he left Apple with before getting it right.
If Apple had not interfered with Jobs then he would have taken Apple exactly where NeXT ended up, and possibly quicker because he would not have been starting over and had more capital and branding.
But no, the present Apple would not existed at all without the money earned with Woz's Apple II. He started the whole thing.
Perhaps not, but I believe Steve would have found the money, he always did. The Apple money was used up before NeXT took off.
Remove Jobs and there is no Apple in the past, Woz stays at HP.
Remove Woz and perhaps there would be no Apple and we would have had Pixar earlier or something else, who knows.
But we would know one Steve no matter what, and that is Jobs.
Apple now is NOT next, but a combination of the old Apple, and NeXT, both are extremely important to what it is today.
What of the original Apple is left and what of NeXT is left? Let us look at what brings in the bacon today:
Mac OS X: NeXTSTEP, the big reason NeXT was acquired. Thank God OS 9 is gone.
iTunes: did not exist until Jobs returned, uses NeXT WebObjects
Mobile hardware (iPod, iPhone, iPad): Newton from Apple perhaps, it was based on RISC tech and had a screen...but it was axed and was any of it resurrected to build the iPod, iPhone, or iPad? iOS and iTunes arguably make these devices.
iOS: based on OS X see above...
PC hardware: x86, not PowerPC
Why did Apple flounder after Jobs left if the foundation was Woz and Jobs together, why did it bounce back with Jobs?
I will tell you why, like or not, Jobs nor Wos were the foundation.
Jobs however was the one that chose the pylons and struts and assembled them to make Apple what it is today.
Woz was a great strut, and it took 100 struts to replace him, but no one could replace the master architect that is Steve Jobs...
Without Woz, Jobs would have been nothing and Apple would have been a failure.
I am no Apple fan, but I do respect Jobs and I am not convinced he ever "needed" Woz.
Woz is great, very smart guy, but without him Jobs simply would have found someone else.
This isn't the case, even Jobs admitted it, he said "It's the talented people at Apple that make the difference" or something like that.
This was Jobs gift, he had an eye for such talent, in Woz and the others he used, I mean hired.
Like it or not the mentality that Jobs had set him up for success.
One can understand Facebook's problem. Too many people use it. Too many posts are being created. Too many people miss most of what's there. Yes, it's just like Twitter.
If Facebook's layout did not stink this would not be an issue.
If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything.
Instead I get this seemingly random arrangement of things on the main page and it takes me two clicks to even bring up a complete friend list which is arranged in no useful order.
I cannot wait for the day when we look back on Facebook like we did on proprietary email protocols and instant messaging protocols and have a beautiful selection of clients.
I am still looking forward to the day when all those services are easily host on servers that are not harvesting the average user's data...
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
