Steve could also be ruthless with his feedback. In my first meeting with him to present what I had been working on (which was held on a Saturday morning), he looked at the demo for 5 minutes and told me I had “ruined NeXTSTEP” (the software platform).
What a garbage human being. I’m glad he’s dead–he promoted toxic culture and practices that as a sector we’re all still working to purge.
I strongly recommend Pirates of Silicon Valley if you want to see more of their personalities. Wozniak says it’s the only one that depicts them accurately. Here’s clips of jobs.
Regarding OP, the next thing he does is go on stage getting applauded for others’ work. Bill Burr did my favorite standup on Steve Jobs talking about that. It applies to a lot of other leaders in the tech industry, too.
Over on the orange site, commenters are saying that NeXT failed because they didn’t get many customers, then got bought by Apple who didn’t immediately see a turnaround. From a startup perspective though, NeXT managed to live off the funding they could get until they made it to “exit” and they proved to be of immense strategic value to the acquiring company.
But the lesson I take from NeXT is that they were great - better than many would associate with Steve Jobs - at the compromise. They looked at the Mac (quite closely of course, with so many ex-Apple staff on board, leading to the lawsuit that stopped them competing in the PC market), they looked at the Alto and Smalltalk, and they built the bits of the Alto that the Mac missed with existing technology. The GUI came from Adobe, OOP from Stepstone, the image model was simulated first with removable media then with NFS, with ethernet networking coming from 4.2BSD and Mach, which also made the whole lot accessible to people with existing software. They could have gone down the Be route and started from scratch, but they licensed and Free Softwared their way to having a product.
Yeah I agree that you often have to cobble something together from existing parts to achieve something big. That’s one of the lessons I learned from reading Stallman’s biography. As far as I remember, GCC, Emacs, and many other GNU projects all started from borrowed code.
They didn’t just start typing in a blank text file. That would have pushed it from a “huge undertaking” to “unfinishable”.
The key though is you have to deeply understand all those parts and not just blindly copy them… otherwise you’ll get an incoherent system. But if you choose carefully, this can really accelerate the project and make it possible to ship.
What a garbage human being. I’m glad he’s dead–he promoted toxic culture and practices that as a sector we’re all still working to purge.
I strongly recommend Pirates of Silicon Valley if you want to see more of their personalities. Wozniak says it’s the only one that depicts them accurately. Here’s clips of jobs.
Regarding OP, the next thing he does is go on stage getting applauded for others’ work. Bill Burr did my favorite standup on Steve Jobs talking about that. It applies to a lot of other leaders in the tech industry, too.
Both the TV movie and the book it’s based on, Fire in the Valley, are quite wonderful.
“I GOT THE LOOT, STEVE!”
I love that movie.
Somehow, when it comes to Jobs, “I’m glad he’s dead” is more appropriate coming from friendlysock than from angersock.
He almost ran me over once, on his way to park his Mercedes across two handicapped spaces. I’m glad that bitch is on ice.
Over on the orange site, commenters are saying that NeXT failed because they didn’t get many customers, then got bought by Apple who didn’t immediately see a turnaround. From a startup perspective though, NeXT managed to live off the funding they could get until they made it to “exit” and they proved to be of immense strategic value to the acquiring company.
But the lesson I take from NeXT is that they were great - better than many would associate with Steve Jobs - at the compromise. They looked at the Mac (quite closely of course, with so many ex-Apple staff on board, leading to the lawsuit that stopped them competing in the PC market), they looked at the Alto and Smalltalk, and they built the bits of the Alto that the Mac missed with existing technology. The GUI came from Adobe, OOP from Stepstone, the image model was simulated first with removable media then with NFS, with ethernet networking coming from 4.2BSD and Mach, which also made the whole lot accessible to people with existing software. They could have gone down the Be route and started from scratch, but they licensed and Free Softwared their way to having a product.
Yeah I agree that you often have to cobble something together from existing parts to achieve something big. That’s one of the lessons I learned from reading Stallman’s biography. As far as I remember, GCC, Emacs, and many other GNU projects all started from borrowed code.
They didn’t just start typing in a blank text file. That would have pushed it from a “huge undertaking” to “unfinishable”.
The key though is you have to deeply understand all those parts and not just blindly copy them… otherwise you’ll get an incoherent system. But if you choose carefully, this can really accelerate the project and make it possible to ship.