Steve Jobs Has Balls
Jobs has his short comings but you have to give him credit. The guy has balls. Unlike Bill Gates who came from money, Jobs was an orphan who got lucky to be raised in California at the right time. Jobs is not a great coder or hardware engineer but he is a great designer and knows talent.
It took balls to startup one of the first personal computer companies when the only computers people knew of took up small rooms. He knew Steve Wozniak was a hardware genius. And even though I never really cared for the Apple II I have to admit the Apple IIc was a great design.
Jobs knew that the Apple II was just the beginning and that most people would never be comfortable with a command line based system. He saw the work at Xerox and knew that was the future. He needed to make it affordable. Pulling off the near impossible with the original Mac even while alienating everyone else at Apple in the process. Because of anger over his treatment of people during the Mac's development he was forced out of the company.
He then started NeXT. NeXT never had much of an impact on the world. But it was an incubator. And when Apple went through several CEOs and was in deep trouble Jobs was ready. He knew what to do. Design a new Mac. One that would get attention. It had to have sex appeal. He introduced the iMac and Apple was saved.
But he knew it wouldn't last long. Hardware had become much more powerful but the Mac OS had not kept up. OS 8 had a great interface but the plumbing was starting to show it's age. Jobs had the answer with NeXT. He sold the OS to Apple and combined it with UNIX. Apple had been working on a new OS unsuccessfully for years but Jobs was able to roll a lot of that work into OS X.
Becoming a personal electronics company and competing with Sony took big balls. But Jobs made the iPod the most important personal music device ever. Surpassing even the Walkman and insuring the future of the company. While at the same time legitimized legal music sales over the net.
Now Jobs has taken his design skill and his big, big balls and introduced the Mac mini. It totally changes the companies target market. And like the iPod it could be come one of the most important personal computers ever. And if you watched the Gates CES Keynote and Jobs Mac World Keynote you know who's going to win.
posted by Jason Sares @ 1/15/2005 01:29:00 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Apple was in a rough patch before the return of Jobs.
They had failed repeatedly in projects to significantly fix the shortcomings of a single user os in a networked world. Pink, Taligent, and Copland all lead to delays and eventual failure. Apple was considering using the advanced architecture of BeOS as the core of a new modern MacOS. At that time Be was very cool and was worthy of such a task. But it was not meant to be.
As the details using the BeOS were being considered Jobs made his return. As a man with strong convictions he ceased negotiations with Be and brought BSD Unix and the advanced concepts behind NeXT to table.
This finally brought about the birth of OSX. In its first releases it felt more like NeXT than a Mac. The Unix and NeXT communities were being drawn to it but to many Mac users it was a alien landscape. In subsequent releases it brought back some of the niceties of the Classic Mac GUI. This has brought just about all of its user back into the fold. Best of all, it was a fully modern system that stands out against its rivals.
I'd have Steve's baby if he asked. ;-)
Come on. Give the guy a break here. If we made award winning writing a prereq for blogs, there wouldn't be many around. I think the important thing is to stimulate some discussion.
On that note: Steve does have guts (or balls, if you prefer), but is the mini really much of a risk at this point? It's not really a bold move, considering people have been begging Apple to come out with just such a device for a long time. What's really interesting about it is trying to fgure out what Job's motivation is with this release. I think it surprised a lot of people. Some think Apple is going after new computer users, which I think is wrong, since this machine doesn't come with display, keyboard, or mouse. Some think this is a "switcher" computer, designed to lure curious or disillusioned PC users to the light side of the force. I'm not sure myself, but I know I want one even though I don't really need it.
To the Anonymous who said...
"As the details using the BeOS were being considered Jobs made his return. As a man with strong convictions he ceased negotiations with Be and brought BSD Unix and the advanced concepts behind NeXT to table."
Actually Apple announced the deal to buy Next in late (December?) 1996. You can bet the BeOS consideration was terminated by that time. Steve didn't return officially until 1997 as an adviser, so had nothing to do with ceasing BeOS negotiations. That would have been up to Apple execs at the time.
Steve wasn't the person who brought Next as a possible purchase for Apple. It was someone internal at Next who had heard Apple was looking at buying BeOS, and got in contact with Apple sources to strongly suggest Next, as they had a proven mature system. Unlike Be at the time.
Oh, and you just have to appreciate how Steve, the adviser, managed to dump the CEO of the company who bought his. I'm sure there are other examples, but I hadn't heard of that before.
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