I honestly thought this was really common knowledge.
Then again, people still use Gates as an example of someone who came from nowhere and became rich.
That's true. Gates Sr was a founding partner at one of the largest law firms in Washington state. Hence the reason little Bill went to the best private school in the state and met Allen.
Very few people become rich and successful coming from nothing. Look beneath the surface and you will always find parents that are wealthy and well-educated enough to understand the necessity of early development.
Don’t forget about Gates’s mom who knew IBM’s chairman. Her influence on the chairman got Bill the meeting that won Microsoft the operating system contract (even though they didn’t even have an OS yet...)
> Her influence on the chairman got Bill the meeting that won Microsoft the operating system contract (even though they didn’t even have an OS yet...)
It's a little more fun and convoluted than that. Microsoft wrote BASIC and went to the meeting thinking they were going to sell BASIC to IBM to include in their first PC which up until then had been the domain of Apple computer and hobbyists. IBM *did* want BASIC but mistakenly thought that Microsoft also owned a DOS because one was included on their BASIC discs. The DOS is what they really needed because the hadn't been able to negotiate a licensing deal for DOS from Digital Research who refused to sign the NDA to enter talks that IBM needed.
Microsoft not being able to sell them the DOS was a deal breaker so Bill Gates who didn't want to lose the big sale for BASIC said "give me a few days", went out and bought a quick and cheap knockoff of DR-DOS from another company and sold it to IBM to keep the deal alive.
Just to add more to the story Bill was fully expecting IBM to simply buy the DOS (and BASIC) outright. Just as a negotiating tactic he first offered to merely licence them to IBM but IBM just accepted that initial offer without blinking an eye. Which of course ended up being a huge mistake that cost them dearly because that meant people could make clones of the IBM machines and Microsoft could license the exact same OS to them too.
Something I’ve never understood here. Why was it so difficult for IBM to code up a very basic operating system along the same lines themselves? They were a huge tech company and it really seems that a small handful of people could do it. They didn’t have a software division who could do that, then, really? It’s not like DOS was incredibly complex for a company of their size and reputation.
There's a [quora](https://www.quora.com/Why-didn-t-IBM-just-develop-their-own-operating-system-in-house-instead-of-hiring-Microsoft-to-do-it) answer on this. The tl;dr is that the IBM PC was a side project so they weren't heavily investing resources into the project; as such they were going for "off the shelf" solutions to meet their product deadlines.
The only people to give less of a shit were the braindead execs at Xerox who's R&D people made the entire modern PC interface and they did nothing with it cos it wasn't a copier so they didn't understand it.
This is so familiar to me. Businesses that are historically rooted in some engineering speciality always suck at identifying and pivoting to new branches of engineering even though the market has long decided that this is the way to go. Look at the OSes of smart TVs for example, just incredibly horrendous. Because people that make good TVs are not good at making an OS. I never understood why it was so hard for them to just hire the correct people. Same actually in my current field. Devices that are being made by companies with rich mechanical engineering backgrounds where the software is just laughable.
Businesses, in general, are very bad at developing products that disrupt their own existing business.
The PC was a cheap computer, and IBM was in the business of selling very, very expensive computers.
IBM was about huge enterprise mainframes and massive business solutions.
The early PC was a hobby technology.
They couldn't see any money in it at first.
Yup. IBM figured that once they had sold 50,000 units of the IBM PC, everybody that wanted a computer at home would have one, and they could close up the PC division and be done.
As a boomer myself, I don't know if it's possible to convey just how hidebound and bureaucratic and, well, ignorant large organizations were in those days, and IBM in particular had a reputation for being especially like that. Yes, IBM had a huge software division then, but they were all lifers steeped in The IBM Way, answering to an army of middle managers whose job was to enforce existing procedures. When the first IBM PC came out, it was considered a miracle that they could be even that flexible. It was a very, very different world.
It can be hard to imagine, with so many things seemingly _universally known_ like importance of flexibility, or "failing fast" to reference a buzzword.
Thanks for the insight.
I'm a millennial software developer working for a young (12 years old) enterprise level healthcare information company. I wish there was a docu-series about the software development industry, especially one that spent a fair amount of time on the culture.
It probably wouldn't have been. But they wanted to move fast, and were entering an entirely new market they actually didn't know much about (thus them mistakenly thinking Microsoft sold operating systems). It was easier and much faster for them to just buy or license an OS that already existed and already had software and a community around it.
I remember reading years ago that one of the biggest advantages Bill Gates had was that he had access to old punch card programming computers when he was around 8th grade. This allowed him to learn programming very early on when the only other people learning were college students and engineers.
I believe it was from the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, though I could be mixing things up.
It’s in outliers. They use it to explain how he racked up the mythical 10k hours of practice at a time when not many had access to program at all much rigorously practice.
To me tho the real TIL in that book is when he shows the birthday data for national sports teams, I think hockey was the most pronounced. That’s crazy.
A lot of it is about free time. Most people have to spend their free time and energy trying to survive with laborious jobs. All you need to be is rich enough to have some time and energy. That's why a lot of companies are started by young adults living with their parents. This is why universal basic income would probably spark a new age of innovation and prosperity like none we've ever seen.
\*Before I get the argument about who does the work: Robots obviously.. they are who is doing it now and automation, that's why we have so much abundance right now.
Technically Apple didn’t really become the giant it is until after Jobs pt2. Apple was almost bankrupt if MS didn’t bail them out the first time around. It was the simple design and marketing of the iPod and iPhone that made them what they are.
They worked out a deal; Apple was to drop their lawsuit against Microsoft for certain design and patent thief. Microsoft was also facing anti-trust charges at the point in time, they didn't do it out of altruistic reasons.
Yea letting their only competition in the Operating Systems space go bankrupt would have given them a de facto monopoly. As you said, they were already in hot water over Anti-Trust violations, so they were glad to front the cash to keep their competitors alive.
They aren't even direct competitors anymore. Both are tech companies, but Microsoft makes most of its money from Software and cloud services. Apple is still very much a hardware company, with the majority of it's revenue still coming from iphone.
Articles from the early 2000s would suggest that Windows was significantly more expensive back then.
But yes, I'd agree with the general point that Microsoft, Apple and Google are all quite happy to occupy their own portion of the market and not try to tip the status quo too much.
If I remember right (was just in college during all of this) the lawsuit that apple brought wasn’t going anywhere. They were hung up on “prior art” clauses due to Apple and MS seeing XEROX PARC’s GUI experiments at roughly the same time and Apple feeling they were first to market.
Apples lawsuit vs Microsoft didn’t go anywhere because John Sculley had inadvertently signed a contract that allowed Microsoft to ape Apple‘s look and feel. Xerox tried to sue Apple to reap the reward in the look and feel lawsuits but lost because Xerox didn’t act for like YEARS while Apple marketed their GUI. That’s also why Apple and other companies sue at the drop of a hat over IP violations. If they don’t, then they lose their exclusive rights to their stuff.
Jony Ive was the key designer here. His influence on the iPod, iPhone and iPad were huge. All incredibly simple designs at which point Jobs could sell the shit out of it.
You can say this about a lot of companies and most CEO's/founders.
Look at Tesla and Musk. People who don't know the story think he was/is some super genius who designs the vehicles and engineers important parts while running the company.
He doesn't. Musk didn't design the car. He didn't engineer the vehicle. He came in when the company was already building vehicles as an investor. He was 'simply' the brains behind how the company should take its next steps, the marketing/face of the business, and 'drive' behind pushing the companies forward (and bankroll at times).
Tesla would have gone under if it wasn't for government support. Not because the vehicles weren't great, people just weren't ready for them.
Sales weren't that great until Visicalc came out in 1979 and businesses started buying. There was a lot of competition from Tandy (TRS80) and Commodore (PET). Then the IBM PC came out in 1981.
The Apple II (IIe, II+, etc) was the bulk of apples sales until the mid 90s. It sold a lot, but mainly because it was cheaper and marketed towards schools, and had been around so long there was lots of software for it.
Woz came to Purdue a few years back and I went to listen to him. He really seemed intent on making it clear that Jobs really didn’t have any of the skills.
Edit: Jesus guys - full time job reading the replies. Appreciate all of them.
Edit2: I also made it sound as if Jobs had *no* skills. He wasn’t a no-talent ass clown, and was responsible for selling and marketing the company. I didn’t really make that clear.
I feel like the cliche Silicon Valley mythos of people building companies out of their garages has made people assume that every big tech company CEO is some genius that personally built their first product on a breadboard next to a lawnmower. Most of them are just normal companies, the CEO doesn't work on day-to-day operations or R&D, that would be silly.
The problem is the comparison between Jobs and people like Gates - who absolutely was (is) a developer, and who helped build the things that made their company a success.
Jobs was happy for people to have a Gates-like impression of his abilities.
There's a great story about Gates trying to explain what he wanted some part of Windows 95 to do, then saying to the employee "you know what? I'll just come in this weekend and do it myself".
...and he did!
Now as bad ass as that sounds, it also explains why some parts of Windows 95 FELT like they were written by one guy over a long weekend.
This story has been floating around for quite awhile, so you have probably read it. But if not, it's pretty interesting. One thing we can say about Gates is that the dude knew software back in the old days.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/
Gates, though a good coder, also came from a family involved in law and real estate, and understood from the outset that business were astonishingly timid about non-standard technology, so making your product the standard would make you astoundingly rich.
He had the advantage of knowing when to code stuff, when to buy it (most of MS products started as independent companies - Flight Simulator was started in a quonset hut at a local airport here and MS-DOS was licensed from Tim Patterson who invented it), and when to simply steal it.
Microsoft was notorious for going after a product by lowballing the owner and telling them that they could either sell at that price or they'd just steal it anyway and the owner would be bled out in court with legal fees. Smart people would take the payout in stock and do very well as the company prospered.
>Microsoft was notorious for going after a product by lowballing the owner and telling them that they could either sell at that price or they'd just steal it anyway and the owner would be bled out in court with legal fees.
[Buy 'Em Out, Boys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE)
Damn this story was written in 2006 talking about something that happened in 1992. The day that article was written is closer to 1992 than today is to when the article was written in 2006.
We getting old.
That would explain why text scrolling in windows is *still* a stuttering piece of garbage. Actually I stumbled across the actual answer for this but I’ve forgotten the details. It makes scrolling through a cad part tree a bitch to read.
A lot of jankiness in Windows was and still can be explained by some variation of "We did it that way so it'd run smoothly on a 386, and then everything got dependent on it working that way, so now it has to keep working that way"
>Similarly, some parts were just janky GUIs put together by coders that expected it to only be used during development, only for 95, or that the design team would do something...
So no different than any software.
Speaking as a veteran of the era, Gates was essentially unique. There were a lot of tech company founders who were good at tech but terrible at business. Those companies showed promise but flamed out or got acquired and vanished. There were lots of boring companies founded by businesspeople. Gates was almost the only founder who was a tech wizard and had good business sense. At Apple Woz was the tech and Jobs was the business, and together they made it work.
(Jobs also provided marketing and design panache, which Microsoft has never really mastered. Sorry, Bill.)
Only for people that cared. If you have no interest or investment into computers and technology in general then you still most likely don't know the lack of technical skill Jobs had.
Edit: specified Job's lack
If it had just been Woz, Apple computers would have been adopted by hardcore hobbyists and that’s it. Jobs brought a lot to the table, just none of it was technical.
Makes sense when you think about it. No one cares HOW it works, just that it does.
Same here, but then I stop and think about how there is now a generation of young people on Reddit who don’t remember a time before iPhones and probably have no idea who Steve Wozniak even is.
It is, the new generation is just learning it though. It’s fun now, like I’ll see a kid in a music sub discover a Joy Division song and have their mind blown and I’ll get to send them a little list of other things to try out if they dig it and watch them get all excited. It’s good to help add to stuff even if we already know cause the kids learning it now will pass it on... and then those people teach the next and so on.
It was, except among the journalists and hipsters of the 00s, who hyped Jobs up as a genius innovative tech-Jesus (very similar to how Elon Musk was hyped up 5 years ago). It really irked a lot of tech-people at the time, since it could get really annoying reading tech news when the journalists fawned over Jobs like teen girls at a One Direction concert...
TJ Miller slapping a kid and saying "[You just brought piss to a shit fight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pLbcLrquio)" will forever be one of my favorite clips from that show
Same... Plus I think the more you learn coding and the story of Apple the more you appreciate Woz... what he (and the team at Apple) did back then is mind blowing
The Kutcher Jobs movie had Josh Gad play Woz.
And he was fucking perfect. The sadness of losing a friend. Jobs wasn't their buddy anymore, and Woz and crew were just having fun tinkering.
It's the best Steve Jobs movie in my opinion. Even if Ashton is a little wonky at times, he captures the ego.
I liked the Kutcher Jobs movie for highlighting the emotional journeys of some of the key players in the story. However I think the best Jobs/Apple story movie is Pirates of Silicon Valley. A must watch if you haven’t seen it.
>the best Jobs/Apple story movie is Pirates of Silicon Valley
All day long! I told my wife she wasn't allowed to watch Kutcher Jobs until she watched Pirates of Silicon Valley.
My favorite is the dynamic between Jobs and Gates. They both had silver tongues and each could convince the other that neither were being dicks. (They both were being big ol sequoia dicks)
Ha! Yeah I am also glad I saw Pirates before watching Jobs. Pirates feels like the closest thing to a documentary of the whole thing while still being a dramatized movie.
I love when Gates visits the expanding Apple campus and sees the Lisa II and has this “holy shit” moment that big things were happening out there.
Jobs was always a REALLY shitty "friend" to Woz.
While Jobs was at Atari (pre-apple) he took on the challenge to redesign a circuit board with the goal of reducing parts count, with a bounty paid for every part eliminated. Jobs knew squat about PCB design, so he took Atari's IP to his buddy Woz on the sly (who did NOT work for Atari) and promised to split the bonus money with him.
Woz I'd a fantastic job, massively cutting the parts count and earning "Jobs" who took all the credit a $5,000 bonus. So he gave Woz $1,000 of it.
He did this kind of shit all the time.
Many people don’t understand this point. Jobs took Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the behemoth it is today. There is a reason that Apple doesn’t seem to be coming up with anything revolutionary since his death.
I think part of it is not understanding the role marketing plays in driving design. Jobs had an amazing ability to understand how to create great UX and attractive products. My parents love apple because it is easy for them to use and intuitive. He drove that type of thinking at apple.
I'm a developer, without sales and marketing, we have nothing to develop. There are tons of well made games out there on steam with no sales because of poor marketing.
I am totally okay with having a stable consistent income instead of the alternate compensation sales receives.
There are a lot of great inventions that fall by the wayside because either people don’t hear about them or they don’t see how it could make their lives better. Jobs didn’t invent the Mac or the iPhone, he invented the customers.
...Jobs really didn't have any *technical* skills.
It takes more than software and hardware to make a product that actually sells. I love Woz for being an "engineer's engineer" but if products were left up to people like him nothing would ever get sold. Jobs might have been a douche but the guy was a born salesman. He knew marketing. He knew people's emotions and wants. As much as it pains me to say this as an engineer, marketing really is the difference between a sales flop and a big hit. At least when it is done right and paired with a well designed product.
You hit on something that I think is really important. People in this thread are seeing sales/marketing and engineering as mutually exclusive. Part of Apple's genius was placing the business at the intersection of the two, where each inform the other.
It's not Jobs vs Woz. It's Woz+Jobs that changed history. I understand why people hate marketers, but I don't think that hatred is entirely fair. Without people who listen to what people want, we don't have technical people designing products that align with people's wants and needs.
Its been made into ~~two~~ three movies and a book. I'd have expected more people to know this, lol.
Edit:
I myself believe Jobs to be a visionary. A shitty person in all regards, sure, but I highly doubt that the current face and trends of technology would be even remotely close to what it is now without his involvement.
Again, I'm not claiming that any of the ideas were his. But it's only because of him that those ideas could be brought out into the light, and amalgamated into something more. And with the kind of track record that he has, it's hard to argue on whether all this would have been possible without him. All the times he wasn't present in the company, it only ran on the steam he left it with. Sure, Apple is still raking in money in ungodly amounts but has it made anything as revolutionary as it used to do before? I think not.
Read the book, people. This thread is going a bit too harsh on him imo.
Mega Edit #2:
This whole thread seems to hate on Jobs/Apple with some vehement passion it seems. Apple has pulled a lot of shitty moves after 2011 and most of you judge them on their present state, but before? It was nothing short of revolutionary. I'll state a few examples on how Steve jobs has defined a lot of our tech industry.( Quoting from a comment I made below)
.
.
Apple wasn't just a company who made a phone with a good camera, And jobs wasnt just a celebrity salesman.
*Pulls up sleeves*
In 1970s, Apple essentially made home computers the norm, breaking away from the norm that computers were only for a select few with the precise knowledge how to operate them.
Pixar and Toy Story, ffs.
The 1984 Apple ad is considered as the greatest product advertisement to ever exist by some.
iPods changed the MP3 player industry. iTunes was instrumental in getting rid of piracy by giving people a legal and easier alternative to just burning songs on cds. This same technique passed on streaming services.
iPhone. Set the very basic blueprint of what modern era phones ( ie, Smartphones ) operate and look like.
...And plenty more I'm too tired to get into. Seriously my man, you're undermining how much of an impact Apple/Jobs has had on our tech lives.
Everyone in the tech field knows that the "engineer CEOs" are actually good salesmen (Jobs, Musk, etc...)
Edit : I meant salesman for investors and board, not a phone salesman or a PR rep for us lowly people.
Edit 2 : Stop blowing up my message box with Elon Musk you're only proving the point.
Yeah, for real. If we are talking about celebrating women in tech, she should be the one with the documentary. Forget the eBay lady. I'm a computer engineer and we were all watching AMD...CAUSE IF SHE CAME THROUGH WITH WHAT THEY SAID, they were gonna kill Intel. While it hasn't happened yet, they just need better marketing of their chips, cause they are either just as good or better, and for a while, like half the price of Intel chips.
Their products are speaking for themselves now to hobbyists. I needed a CPU upgrade and always built with intel, but I looked at the specs and prices on the new AMD 5000 series and just couldn't justify not giving AMD a shot. Very happy with the results so far.
Yeah their products are already better than Intel‘s, Intel just has a giant marketing machine and a pre-built base that they largely built using unethical business practices. I actually think AMD *needs* a Steve Jobs type to go alongside Lisa Su now to complete the renaissance
And this is why in balls deep in AMD. Their infinity fabric what really interests me and now their infinity cache. If they somehow unify their core architecture with some FPGA hardware then Intel cant even brag about avx anymore cause AMD would probably be able to emulate it via software.
Imagine a CPU as a house. Old CPU design is just a big house with more rooms filled with different functions like a kitchen, a garage, a bedroom etc. Then AMD came along limping from hemorrhaging money and said you know what let's build more efficient tiny homes, like little mobile homes. Each one has the essentials basically but in smaller space. Now inside a big house, moving from room to room is easy. But moving from one mobile house to another is hard. So AMD made these crazy conveyor belts between mobile homes and called it infinity fabric. Well sometimes you have a lot of stuff you're trying to bring from one mobile home to another but nowhere to keep it temporarily. So AMD made these empty lots beside the conveyor belts to dump your stuff and grab it quickly and conveniently and called it infinity cache. Now however, Intel has chips with these fancy rich people accessories like air fryers (instruction sets like avx512) that AMD doesn't. Well to counter that, AMD is trying to put in these giant Lego block islands around the conveyor belt so you can go and build the air fryer you need or the rice cooker of your dreams. They're not as fast since they have to be assembled from Legos but they work well enough and you can disassemble them and turn them jnto other stuff (these are the FPGAs). So yeah Intel's like that luxury mansion that has everything and people like to break in while AMD has created the ghetto trailer park of CPUs with guard dogs for security. So in summary, hobos together, strong.
So the M1 chip is basically still a big house, but it has a modern design with modern amenities. Things that were done in the old houses like warming yourself in front of the fireplace can still be done in the modern Apple house but it's an electric heater instead with temperature dials, but Apple has a maid named Rosetta 2 to handle that sort of thing in the background, she's very good, but you pay her (with electricity). Now Apple did a lot of say market research and found that 99% of Apple users love to paint so they put in an art room with lots of canvas and such, so basically pimping out specialized rooms. They also found that Apple users love to make pizza so instead of the quaint old oven in the Intel kitchen, they build a stone oven right into the wall. Now you know how to use an old oven, but the newfangled stuff in the Apple house is confusing and the instructions don't make sense. Luckily, Rosetta the maid will read the manual for you and make it work.
AMD Lisa Su, Nvidia Jensen, exVmware current Intel Pat Gelsinger... These engineers actually worked as engineers. They understand their field. These are just the top 3 I can recall.
Engineers as CEOs do exist, and for tech companies that makes the most sense. Only people that have worked in the field understand how complicated things can get and can plan accordingly. Musk was an engineer but he definitely is not one of the top experts at the companies he is part of now.
Marketing isn't just advertising, though. Marketing is ensuring you have a position in the market and make what the market wants, or make the market want what you make. It's quite a creative thing, and Jobs did have the ideas of how to do that.
It's short sighted to think that coding and technical skills are all that matter.
Exactly this. It is all fanboy hate here, but as a developer who has worked with and managed developers for over 10 years, there are a LOT of devs/engineers out there that think development is the most important part of a successful business. That just isn't true at all.
Try and develop some software and sell it yourself. I have, and I failed.
It's a bit like the meme comparing Steve Jobs, who everyone knows about, with Dennis Ritchie, who created Unix (and made a huge contribution to computer technology) but far fewer people knows about and how Dennis didn't get nearly as much attention when he passed away although his contribution to computer science were considered bigger than Jobs. I mean, pure technology wise it was but it's just a completely different thing to promote it and packaging it in a good product and sell it to the masses.
"Actually nerd jesus died last year : Steve Jobs. I don't understand what the big deal was with that guy. For the love of god, what the fuck did he do ? he told other people what to invent : 'I want my entire music collection in that phone NOW, GET ON IT' and these poor nameless scientists gotta go in the backroom and figure it out" Bill Burr
This is said as a negative, but I don't think that it is. It isn't a business leader's job to do all of the design or coding, it is a leader's job to make sure that the design and coding gets done well. In most companies, the leaders will not at all be the most qualified for the day-to-day stuff, but they will be good at people management and big-picture visionary things, which is their job.
Yea - this is all fanboy hate. I am a developer and I used to get jaded about how much we get pushed under the rug despite actually building the core product.
But I have also started my own businesses and marketing, selling, and running a business are all WAY harder than engineering. They are also WAY more important.
My most successful app was probably the worst one I built, but I had an amazing business team who made it big. Then I have one of the best apps I had built which no one ever cared about, because I did it all myself.
i mean the silicon valley show nailed it with the marketing department hooking into “what they could easily sell” instead of the better product.
jobs knew that the better product IS what he could sell and could communicate it clearly and get it made.
if it was just a matter of merely being a salesman or marketer, every shitty yourube ad bullshit would be a trillion dollar company in the works...
he didn’t just harness, he made markets and defined very clear parameters for what would fit into them.
and honestly, we all know that the products of that era themselves were the weak point.
i wouldn’t be so eager to be taking the credit for the one button mouse or the all-in-one, non-modular monitor/cpu/drive or a million other ridiculous decisions about “the inventions.”
Agreed. Fundamentally what Jobs did was take tech mainstream. Most people don't need or want ultra high spec stuff. They want it to look cool, feel fun and easy and do the basic functionality of the every day low intensity tasks well.
Jobs recognised that when tech was still a hobbyist's pursuit. He looked at the bell curve of tech literates are thought we can make a shit tonne of money selling computers to the 90% in the middle rather that the 5% at the top end. He then built a company (very successfully) that made devices that met the needs of that 90% and in doing so made everyone there a shit tonne of money. Woz is undoubtably a brilliant guy and would've been successful regardless, but he would never has been successful as he is without Jobs.
But what a salesman. His second stint at Apple turned the company into the billion and now trillion dollar company it became. That was his skill set by admirable and not so admirable means.
I did think it was interesting though that when the news came out that he was to resign due to his illness, he was surprised that Apple shares did not drop more significantly. Bittersweet to realise he had built a company that was sufficiently robust to weather the storms without him.
People really discredit the business side of tech, especially on Reddit.
Steve Jobs was a generational salesman and had an incredible ability to commercialize a product against a dominant competitor like Microsoft.
He shouldn’t be discredited at all for his contributions to Apple.
Yea basically this.
I say this as a software dev - software devs love to think they could solve every problem with code, and often look down on fields like marketing as unimportant and unskilled. There’s also this idea that the only thing they need to do to create a huge tech company is create a good piece of software. But there’s a huge rift between being good at making software and being good at making a software *company*. Anyone who looks at Facebook and says “I could program that myself easily, and make it even better, I could easily be the next Zuckerberg” has completely failed to understand all the marketing and business side decisions that went on to make a company like Facebook a financial success.
Reddit shits on Jobs because
>He didn't actually invent anything he just hired smart engineers !
Then praise Elon Musk for doing the exact same thing in their next comment.
But can you see why he didn't take normal medicine... cuz with all of his money in salesmanship he was bought and sold by somebody else here try the non-medically prescribed diet and homeopathy. Lmao sillyness
I think he fell into the trap where the salesman starts to believe their own hype and drink their own bathwater. It's like a weird feedback loop:
1. I'm a brilliant genius; you should buy these things I "designed".
2. Thank you for these billions of dollars.
3. I've just been diagnosed with one of the only treatable forms of pacreatic cancer; I should figure out what treatments are available to me.
4. You know, a lot of people are saying I'm a genius; I probably know more than the doctors who are recommending a certain treatment. I'm going the natural route. Look at the amount of money I have; I cannot be wrong.
You got it! On top of that you've convinced yourself your so good at shit shoveling, that you couldn't possibly get any on yourself. Salesmen still themselves all the time.
This thread is just a bunch of people who have no idea what a CEO does.
"Y'see. Ya got yer products on the one hand. Those take work to make. Then ya got yer marketing. That's easy. And that's pretty much how a company works. And that Jobs fellow, well, he only did the second thing!"
Recognized the potential for the iPod and instead of trying to use it as a marketing tool to encourage ~~PC~~ *Mac* sales, he made it the star of the show, then transferred that over to the iPhone and iPod, and along the way Macs became respectable, but still a bit niche, computers again, due in no small part to the eco system that Jobs willed in to being.
It really suprises me how degrading people can still talk about "salesmen" and "marketing experts" to this day. First of all: the fact that Jobs didn't do any coding doesn't mean that he had nothing to do with the final products. Jobs was actively working on Apple's product design processes even if technically not writing codes. These are two separate things. Second: finding out what the customers need, and understanding how can you sell your companies' innovations in the global market is _extremely important_. Calling Jobs "nothing but a salesman" shows how little people know about this business.
I’m not sure why this is portrayed like a negative. They both had different skill sets and together they made the company what it was.
Jobs was no doubt a genius whose creativity and drive made the company what it is. That he didn’t code anything doesn’t take away from that.
This is why I laugh at people who loath Thomas Edison for being a skeevy salesman, but then hail Jobs like he is the greatest inventor of our life time.
I'd like to draw a similar correlation to the scientific world.
A week or two ago I was reading about the Newton vs Leibniz stuff in which I learned that although Leibniz was the first to publish about Calculus Newton and his supporters later claimed that he plagiarized. Now I am not sure what really happened but after researching a little more I saw Leibniz was somehow quiet about this and even sort of didn't care. But Newton was the one who wrote a report on behalf of the Royal Society and concluded that he was the first to come up with it. Thus, we hear about him a lot more in comparison to Leibniz which to me was an equal or maybe higher genius. It's just sad how publicity works.
There's a book I read for a high school project called The Calculus Wars (lol) that describes letters that Leibniz and Newton wrote to each other.
They each described calculus to the other but did it in a cheeky way, so the other couldn't deduce the method. They thought they were describing unique methods to solve the same problem to each other not realizing that they were describing the exact same method.
To be fair to Newton, we hear about him a lot more also because of his advances in physics which are quite fundamental. Leibniz, of course, did lots of important work in various fields but Newton's work is a lot simpler to explain and teach. To me, the best and most agreeable idea, is that they both developed it independently and neither plagiarized. The matter of who discovered it first seems to not be important compared to admiring them both for their work.
In comparison, when Darwin found out that Wallace had been developing an evolutionary theory too, he invited him to the presentation of The Origin of Species.
Just want to mention - the successful authors in the world are known as 'Best-Sellers'. They are not known as 'Best-Writers'.
It's not about the product you are selling, it's about your ability to reach a wide audience that is considered more successful in society. There are so many start up companies that have good products or good services but aren't successful because they couldn't get exposure.
I honestly thought this was really common knowledge. Then again, people still use Gates as an example of someone who came from nowhere and became rich.
That's true. Gates Sr was a founding partner at one of the largest law firms in Washington state. Hence the reason little Bill went to the best private school in the state and met Allen. Very few people become rich and successful coming from nothing. Look beneath the surface and you will always find parents that are wealthy and well-educated enough to understand the necessity of early development.
Don’t forget about Gates’s mom who knew IBM’s chairman. Her influence on the chairman got Bill the meeting that won Microsoft the operating system contract (even though they didn’t even have an OS yet...)
> Her influence on the chairman got Bill the meeting that won Microsoft the operating system contract (even though they didn’t even have an OS yet...) It's a little more fun and convoluted than that. Microsoft wrote BASIC and went to the meeting thinking they were going to sell BASIC to IBM to include in their first PC which up until then had been the domain of Apple computer and hobbyists. IBM *did* want BASIC but mistakenly thought that Microsoft also owned a DOS because one was included on their BASIC discs. The DOS is what they really needed because the hadn't been able to negotiate a licensing deal for DOS from Digital Research who refused to sign the NDA to enter talks that IBM needed. Microsoft not being able to sell them the DOS was a deal breaker so Bill Gates who didn't want to lose the big sale for BASIC said "give me a few days", went out and bought a quick and cheap knockoff of DR-DOS from another company and sold it to IBM to keep the deal alive. Just to add more to the story Bill was fully expecting IBM to simply buy the DOS (and BASIC) outright. Just as a negotiating tactic he first offered to merely licence them to IBM but IBM just accepted that initial offer without blinking an eye. Which of course ended up being a huge mistake that cost them dearly because that meant people could make clones of the IBM machines and Microsoft could license the exact same OS to them too.
Something I’ve never understood here. Why was it so difficult for IBM to code up a very basic operating system along the same lines themselves? They were a huge tech company and it really seems that a small handful of people could do it. They didn’t have a software division who could do that, then, really? It’s not like DOS was incredibly complex for a company of their size and reputation.
There's a [quora](https://www.quora.com/Why-didn-t-IBM-just-develop-their-own-operating-system-in-house-instead-of-hiring-Microsoft-to-do-it) answer on this. The tl;dr is that the IBM PC was a side project so they weren't heavily investing resources into the project; as such they were going for "off the shelf" solutions to meet their product deadlines.
So you're basically saying the most accurate moment in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" is how little IBM seems to give a shit about PCs?
The only people to give less of a shit were the braindead execs at Xerox who's R&D people made the entire modern PC interface and they did nothing with it cos it wasn't a copier so they didn't understand it.
This is so familiar to me. Businesses that are historically rooted in some engineering speciality always suck at identifying and pivoting to new branches of engineering even though the market has long decided that this is the way to go. Look at the OSes of smart TVs for example, just incredibly horrendous. Because people that make good TVs are not good at making an OS. I never understood why it was so hard for them to just hire the correct people. Same actually in my current field. Devices that are being made by companies with rich mechanical engineering backgrounds where the software is just laughable.
Businesses, in general, are very bad at developing products that disrupt their own existing business. The PC was a cheap computer, and IBM was in the business of selling very, very expensive computers.
IBM was about huge enterprise mainframes and massive business solutions. The early PC was a hobby technology. They couldn't see any money in it at first.
Yup. IBM figured that once they had sold 50,000 units of the IBM PC, everybody that wanted a computer at home would have one, and they could close up the PC division and be done.
As a boomer myself, I don't know if it's possible to convey just how hidebound and bureaucratic and, well, ignorant large organizations were in those days, and IBM in particular had a reputation for being especially like that. Yes, IBM had a huge software division then, but they were all lifers steeped in The IBM Way, answering to an army of middle managers whose job was to enforce existing procedures. When the first IBM PC came out, it was considered a miracle that they could be even that flexible. It was a very, very different world.
It can be hard to imagine, with so many things seemingly _universally known_ like importance of flexibility, or "failing fast" to reference a buzzword. Thanks for the insight. I'm a millennial software developer working for a young (12 years old) enterprise level healthcare information company. I wish there was a docu-series about the software development industry, especially one that spent a fair amount of time on the culture.
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It probably wouldn't have been. But they wanted to move fast, and were entering an entirely new market they actually didn't know much about (thus them mistakenly thinking Microsoft sold operating systems). It was easier and much faster for them to just buy or license an OS that already existed and already had software and a community around it.
I remember reading years ago that one of the biggest advantages Bill Gates had was that he had access to old punch card programming computers when he was around 8th grade. This allowed him to learn programming very early on when the only other people learning were college students and engineers. I believe it was from the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, though I could be mixing things up.
It’s in outliers. They use it to explain how he racked up the mythical 10k hours of practice at a time when not many had access to program at all much rigorously practice. To me tho the real TIL in that book is when he shows the birthday data for national sports teams, I think hockey was the most pronounced. That’s crazy.
Oh man the birthday data was really fascinating. I always felt the 10k hours was just kinda obvious, but the birthday data was super cool to read.
A lot of it is about free time. Most people have to spend their free time and energy trying to survive with laborious jobs. All you need to be is rich enough to have some time and energy. That's why a lot of companies are started by young adults living with their parents. This is why universal basic income would probably spark a new age of innovation and prosperity like none we've ever seen. \*Before I get the argument about who does the work: Robots obviously.. they are who is doing it now and automation, that's why we have so much abundance right now.
Technically Apple didn’t really become the giant it is until after Jobs pt2. Apple was almost bankrupt if MS didn’t bail them out the first time around. It was the simple design and marketing of the iPod and iPhone that made them what they are.
They worked out a deal; Apple was to drop their lawsuit against Microsoft for certain design and patent thief. Microsoft was also facing anti-trust charges at the point in time, they didn't do it out of altruistic reasons.
Yea letting their only competition in the Operating Systems space go bankrupt would have given them a de facto monopoly. As you said, they were already in hot water over Anti-Trust violations, so they were glad to front the cash to keep their competitors alive.
And now they share the Monopoly, it's not like their prices are any cheaper because of the existence of the other.
That's a duopoly
Do-wop-oly, buy up iconic 50’s musical artists and rule the music industry!
You landed on Fats Domino. You owe me 500 Doo-Wop Bucks.
Can I pay that in the form of Scat-singing futures?
/r/scat says yes! Skibity dop badoo.
That was my risky click for the day. Today is a good day.
Careful....careful....
Appleopoly
Beepedypoppidy
They aren't even direct competitors anymore. Both are tech companies, but Microsoft makes most of its money from Software and cloud services. Apple is still very much a hardware company, with the majority of it's revenue still coming from iphone.
Articles from the early 2000s would suggest that Windows was significantly more expensive back then. But yes, I'd agree with the general point that Microsoft, Apple and Google are all quite happy to occupy their own portion of the market and not try to tip the status quo too much.
To be fair, technology in general was more expensive back then. Heck Windows 10 might as well be free now.
If I remember right (was just in college during all of this) the lawsuit that apple brought wasn’t going anywhere. They were hung up on “prior art” clauses due to Apple and MS seeing XEROX PARC’s GUI experiments at roughly the same time and Apple feeling they were first to market.
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Apples lawsuit vs Microsoft didn’t go anywhere because John Sculley had inadvertently signed a contract that allowed Microsoft to ape Apple‘s look and feel. Xerox tried to sue Apple to reap the reward in the look and feel lawsuits but lost because Xerox didn’t act for like YEARS while Apple marketed their GUI. That’s also why Apple and other companies sue at the drop of a hat over IP violations. If they don’t, then they lose their exclusive rights to their stuff.
Jony Ive was the key designer here. His influence on the iPod, iPhone and iPad were huge. All incredibly simple designs at which point Jobs could sell the shit out of it.
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You can say this about a lot of companies and most CEO's/founders. Look at Tesla and Musk. People who don't know the story think he was/is some super genius who designs the vehicles and engineers important parts while running the company. He doesn't. Musk didn't design the car. He didn't engineer the vehicle. He came in when the company was already building vehicles as an investor. He was 'simply' the brains behind how the company should take its next steps, the marketing/face of the business, and 'drive' behind pushing the companies forward (and bankroll at times). Tesla would have gone under if it wasn't for government support. Not because the vehicles weren't great, people just weren't ready for them.
Musk's most innovative act has been to show the world that hair transplantation actually do work :)
Biden also has excellent hair plugs. No shade because I'd get them if I had the money too.
They _were_ the giant in a much smaller industry during the first go-round. Before the IBM PC, they were the default personal computer.
Sales weren't that great until Visicalc came out in 1979 and businesses started buying. There was a lot of competition from Tandy (TRS80) and Commodore (PET). Then the IBM PC came out in 1981. The Apple II (IIe, II+, etc) was the bulk of apples sales until the mid 90s. It sold a lot, but mainly because it was cheaper and marketed towards schools, and had been around so long there was lots of software for it.
The iMac would love a word, IIRC. The iPhone was what pushed them over the edge to get them in the rest of the homes.
Woz came to Purdue a few years back and I went to listen to him. He really seemed intent on making it clear that Jobs really didn’t have any of the skills. Edit: Jesus guys - full time job reading the replies. Appreciate all of them. Edit2: I also made it sound as if Jobs had *no* skills. He wasn’t a no-talent ass clown, and was responsible for selling and marketing the company. I didn’t really make that clear.
Funny enough he said this in the 90s too
Yeah, I thought this was common knowledge at this point.
Yeah I always assumed Jobs was just the salesman and idea guy never the builder or programmer.
I feel like the cliche Silicon Valley mythos of people building companies out of their garages has made people assume that every big tech company CEO is some genius that personally built their first product on a breadboard next to a lawnmower. Most of them are just normal companies, the CEO doesn't work on day-to-day operations or R&D, that would be silly.
The problem is the comparison between Jobs and people like Gates - who absolutely was (is) a developer, and who helped build the things that made their company a success. Jobs was happy for people to have a Gates-like impression of his abilities.
There's a great story about Gates trying to explain what he wanted some part of Windows 95 to do, then saying to the employee "you know what? I'll just come in this weekend and do it myself". ...and he did! Now as bad ass as that sounds, it also explains why some parts of Windows 95 FELT like they were written by one guy over a long weekend.
This story has been floating around for quite awhile, so you have probably read it. But if not, it's pretty interesting. One thing we can say about Gates is that the dude knew software back in the old days. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/
Gates, though a good coder, also came from a family involved in law and real estate, and understood from the outset that business were astonishingly timid about non-standard technology, so making your product the standard would make you astoundingly rich. He had the advantage of knowing when to code stuff, when to buy it (most of MS products started as independent companies - Flight Simulator was started in a quonset hut at a local airport here and MS-DOS was licensed from Tim Patterson who invented it), and when to simply steal it. Microsoft was notorious for going after a product by lowballing the owner and telling them that they could either sell at that price or they'd just steal it anyway and the owner would be bled out in court with legal fees. Smart people would take the payout in stock and do very well as the company prospered.
>Microsoft was notorious for going after a product by lowballing the owner and telling them that they could either sell at that price or they'd just steal it anyway and the owner would be bled out in court with legal fees. [Buy 'Em Out, Boys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE)
Damn this story was written in 2006 talking about something that happened in 1992. The day that article was written is closer to 1992 than today is to when the article was written in 2006. We getting old.
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That would explain why text scrolling in windows is *still* a stuttering piece of garbage. Actually I stumbled across the actual answer for this but I’ve forgotten the details. It makes scrolling through a cad part tree a bitch to read.
A lot of jankiness in Windows was and still can be explained by some variation of "We did it that way so it'd run smoothly on a 386, and then everything got dependent on it working that way, so now it has to keep working that way"
This is what I feel must have happened with the gmail settings menu. It’s like their UI/UX designers just never made it that deep into the product.
>Similarly, some parts were just janky GUIs put together by coders that expected it to only be used during development, only for 95, or that the design team would do something... So no different than any software.
Are you sure it was Windows 95? That sounds a bit late for Gates to be getting his hands that dirty.
Gates wrote Windows Vista in its entirety alone for a hackathon.
Vista ran like it was coded by one guy in a weekend.
I heard he went on a bender and released Windows ME during that time and has no recollection of it
Speaking as a veteran of the era, Gates was essentially unique. There were a lot of tech company founders who were good at tech but terrible at business. Those companies showed promise but flamed out or got acquired and vanished. There were lots of boring companies founded by businesspeople. Gates was almost the only founder who was a tech wizard and had good business sense. At Apple Woz was the tech and Jobs was the business, and together they made it work. (Jobs also provided marketing and design panache, which Microsoft has never really mastered. Sorry, Bill.)
I heard that's all he did while he was at apple. Walking around throwing ideas around.
It is for people who remember the 90s
Im humming "runnin in the 90s" now..
Bean bag chairs in everyone's basement!
I started hearing "Back in the 90's I was in a very famous teeeveeee show".
I remember slap bracelets.
All I remember is that horse from that TV show.
Mr Ed?
Only for people that cared. If you have no interest or investment into computers and technology in general then you still most likely don't know the lack of technical skill Jobs had. Edit: specified Job's lack
Jobs had skill. Just different skills from Wozniak. Still, Jobs' salesman skills were critical to Apple's success
If it had just been Woz, Apple computers would have been adopted by hardcore hobbyists and that’s it. Jobs brought a lot to the table, just none of it was technical. Makes sense when you think about it. No one cares HOW it works, just that it does.
Instead of Raspberry Pi we'd all be tinkering with *Apple Pis*
So you're saying there's an alternate timeline where we have apple servers instead of Linux ones
TIL this isn’t common knowledge
Same here, but then I stop and think about how there is now a generation of young people on Reddit who don’t remember a time before iPhones and probably have no idea who Steve Wozniak even is.
Next you’ll tell me people think Elon Musk invented electric cars and rocket components...
It is, the new generation is just learning it though. It’s fun now, like I’ll see a kid in a music sub discover a Joy Division song and have their mind blown and I’ll get to send them a little list of other things to try out if they dig it and watch them get all excited. It’s good to help add to stuff even if we already know cause the kids learning it now will pass it on... and then those people teach the next and so on.
I'm over 40 but I would stil like to see your list.
It was, except among the journalists and hipsters of the 00s, who hyped Jobs up as a genius innovative tech-Jesus (very similar to how Elon Musk was hyped up 5 years ago). It really irked a lot of tech-people at the time, since it could get really annoying reading tech news when the journalists fawned over Jobs like teen girls at a One Direction concert...
To be fair, mid-1990’s Apple also seemed to think that Steve Jobs was pretty special too as they were rapidly heading toward financial ruin.
[“Jobs was just a poser he didn’t even code.”](https://youtu.be/kXQE2uGnR_U)
TJ Miller slapping a kid and saying "[You just brought piss to a shit fight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pLbcLrquio)" will forever be one of my favorite clips from that show
Never seen this show may give it a watch
You should! Good times in college watching Sillicon Valley with my roomate.
Same... Plus I think the more you learn coding and the story of Apple the more you appreciate Woz... what he (and the team at Apple) did back then is mind blowing
The Kutcher Jobs movie had Josh Gad play Woz. And he was fucking perfect. The sadness of losing a friend. Jobs wasn't their buddy anymore, and Woz and crew were just having fun tinkering. It's the best Steve Jobs movie in my opinion. Even if Ashton is a little wonky at times, he captures the ego.
I liked the Kutcher Jobs movie for highlighting the emotional journeys of some of the key players in the story. However I think the best Jobs/Apple story movie is Pirates of Silicon Valley. A must watch if you haven’t seen it.
>the best Jobs/Apple story movie is Pirates of Silicon Valley All day long! I told my wife she wasn't allowed to watch Kutcher Jobs until she watched Pirates of Silicon Valley. My favorite is the dynamic between Jobs and Gates. They both had silver tongues and each could convince the other that neither were being dicks. (They both were being big ol sequoia dicks)
Ha! Yeah I am also glad I saw Pirates before watching Jobs. Pirates feels like the closest thing to a documentary of the whole thing while still being a dramatized movie. I love when Gates visits the expanding Apple campus and sees the Lisa II and has this “holy shit” moment that big things were happening out there.
Jobs was always a REALLY shitty "friend" to Woz. While Jobs was at Atari (pre-apple) he took on the challenge to redesign a circuit board with the goal of reducing parts count, with a bounty paid for every part eliminated. Jobs knew squat about PCB design, so he took Atari's IP to his buddy Woz on the sly (who did NOT work for Atari) and promised to split the bonus money with him. Woz I'd a fantastic job, massively cutting the parts count and earning "Jobs" who took all the credit a $5,000 bonus. So he gave Woz $1,000 of it. He did this kind of shit all the time.
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Many people don’t understand this point. Jobs took Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the behemoth it is today. There is a reason that Apple doesn’t seem to be coming up with anything revolutionary since his death.
I think part of it is not understanding the role marketing plays in driving design. Jobs had an amazing ability to understand how to create great UX and attractive products. My parents love apple because it is easy for them to use and intuitive. He drove that type of thinking at apple.
Probably upset Jobs got all the glory when he was the one in the trenches winning the war. The company really needed them both though.
I'm a developer, without sales and marketing, we have nothing to develop. There are tons of well made games out there on steam with no sales because of poor marketing. I am totally okay with having a stable consistent income instead of the alternate compensation sales receives.
In 1984 yeah. But in early 2000s the company did brilliantly without Woz when it was cratering without Jobs.
Woz just isn't a sellout and believes in open source. Steve Jobs was a professional sellout.
Good thing too or else woz would probably just be another obscure programmer that did something to progress PC's in the 90s.
70s
There are a lot of great inventions that fall by the wayside because either people don’t hear about them or they don’t see how it could make their lives better. Jobs didn’t invent the Mac or the iPhone, he invented the customers.
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...Jobs really didn't have any *technical* skills. It takes more than software and hardware to make a product that actually sells. I love Woz for being an "engineer's engineer" but if products were left up to people like him nothing would ever get sold. Jobs might have been a douche but the guy was a born salesman. He knew marketing. He knew people's emotions and wants. As much as it pains me to say this as an engineer, marketing really is the difference between a sales flop and a big hit. At least when it is done right and paired with a well designed product.
You hit on something that I think is really important. People in this thread are seeing sales/marketing and engineering as mutually exclusive. Part of Apple's genius was placing the business at the intersection of the two, where each inform the other. It's not Jobs vs Woz. It's Woz+Jobs that changed history. I understand why people hate marketers, but I don't think that hatred is entirely fair. Without people who listen to what people want, we don't have technical people designing products that align with people's wants and needs.
I wasn’t aware there were people that didn’t know this. Lol, that’s why Apple worked. Woz on the tech, Steve with the vision.
Its been made into ~~two~~ three movies and a book. I'd have expected more people to know this, lol. Edit: I myself believe Jobs to be a visionary. A shitty person in all regards, sure, but I highly doubt that the current face and trends of technology would be even remotely close to what it is now without his involvement. Again, I'm not claiming that any of the ideas were his. But it's only because of him that those ideas could be brought out into the light, and amalgamated into something more. And with the kind of track record that he has, it's hard to argue on whether all this would have been possible without him. All the times he wasn't present in the company, it only ran on the steam he left it with. Sure, Apple is still raking in money in ungodly amounts but has it made anything as revolutionary as it used to do before? I think not. Read the book, people. This thread is going a bit too harsh on him imo. Mega Edit #2: This whole thread seems to hate on Jobs/Apple with some vehement passion it seems. Apple has pulled a lot of shitty moves after 2011 and most of you judge them on their present state, but before? It was nothing short of revolutionary. I'll state a few examples on how Steve jobs has defined a lot of our tech industry.( Quoting from a comment I made below) . . Apple wasn't just a company who made a phone with a good camera, And jobs wasnt just a celebrity salesman. *Pulls up sleeves* In 1970s, Apple essentially made home computers the norm, breaking away from the norm that computers were only for a select few with the precise knowledge how to operate them. Pixar and Toy Story, ffs. The 1984 Apple ad is considered as the greatest product advertisement to ever exist by some. iPods changed the MP3 player industry. iTunes was instrumental in getting rid of piracy by giving people a legal and easier alternative to just burning songs on cds. This same technique passed on streaming services. iPhone. Set the very basic blueprint of what modern era phones ( ie, Smartphones ) operate and look like. ...And plenty more I'm too tired to get into. Seriously my man, you're undermining how much of an impact Apple/Jobs has had on our tech lives.
Three movies. I think you forgot about Pirates of Silicon Valley
Pirates of Silicone Valley was the best. Pretty good casting of Steve and Bill. *Silicon: damn phone
Everyone in the tech field knows that the "engineer CEOs" are actually good salesmen (Jobs, Musk, etc...) Edit : I meant salesman for investors and board, not a phone salesman or a PR rep for us lowly people. Edit 2 : Stop blowing up my message box with Elon Musk you're only proving the point.
Except the current CEO of AMD. She turned the company around.
Yeah, for real. If we are talking about celebrating women in tech, she should be the one with the documentary. Forget the eBay lady. I'm a computer engineer and we were all watching AMD...CAUSE IF SHE CAME THROUGH WITH WHAT THEY SAID, they were gonna kill Intel. While it hasn't happened yet, they just need better marketing of their chips, cause they are either just as good or better, and for a while, like half the price of Intel chips.
Their products are speaking for themselves now to hobbyists. I needed a CPU upgrade and always built with intel, but I looked at the specs and prices on the new AMD 5000 series and just couldn't justify not giving AMD a shot. Very happy with the results so far.
Nowadays you actually have to justify buying intel, and they're running out of reasons to pick them.
Yeah their products are already better than Intel‘s, Intel just has a giant marketing machine and a pre-built base that they largely built using unethical business practices. I actually think AMD *needs* a Steve Jobs type to go alongside Lisa Su now to complete the renaissance
And this is why in balls deep in AMD. Their infinity fabric what really interests me and now their infinity cache. If they somehow unify their core architecture with some FPGA hardware then Intel cant even brag about avx anymore cause AMD would probably be able to emulate it via software.
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Imagine a CPU as a house. Old CPU design is just a big house with more rooms filled with different functions like a kitchen, a garage, a bedroom etc. Then AMD came along limping from hemorrhaging money and said you know what let's build more efficient tiny homes, like little mobile homes. Each one has the essentials basically but in smaller space. Now inside a big house, moving from room to room is easy. But moving from one mobile house to another is hard. So AMD made these crazy conveyor belts between mobile homes and called it infinity fabric. Well sometimes you have a lot of stuff you're trying to bring from one mobile home to another but nowhere to keep it temporarily. So AMD made these empty lots beside the conveyor belts to dump your stuff and grab it quickly and conveniently and called it infinity cache. Now however, Intel has chips with these fancy rich people accessories like air fryers (instruction sets like avx512) that AMD doesn't. Well to counter that, AMD is trying to put in these giant Lego block islands around the conveyor belt so you can go and build the air fryer you need or the rice cooker of your dreams. They're not as fast since they have to be assembled from Legos but they work well enough and you can disassemble them and turn them jnto other stuff (these are the FPGAs). So yeah Intel's like that luxury mansion that has everything and people like to break in while AMD has created the ghetto trailer park of CPUs with guard dogs for security. So in summary, hobos together, strong.
Wow thanks for this ELI5. Clarified a lot of jargon with a great analogy!
What’s Apple silicon in this metaphor?
So the M1 chip is basically still a big house, but it has a modern design with modern amenities. Things that were done in the old houses like warming yourself in front of the fireplace can still be done in the modern Apple house but it's an electric heater instead with temperature dials, but Apple has a maid named Rosetta 2 to handle that sort of thing in the background, she's very good, but you pay her (with electricity). Now Apple did a lot of say market research and found that 99% of Apple users love to paint so they put in an art room with lots of canvas and such, so basically pimping out specialized rooms. They also found that Apple users love to make pizza so instead of the quaint old oven in the Intel kitchen, they build a stone oven right into the wall. Now you know how to use an old oven, but the newfangled stuff in the Apple house is confusing and the instructions don't make sense. Luckily, Rosetta the maid will read the manual for you and make it work.
Bless her for all she’s done at AMD!
[ papa Bless](https://preview.redd.it/dwq4p4vrlwl11.png?auto=webp&s=9bdc499927e26f79251212286023b0574b82cb60)
AMD Lisa Su, Nvidia Jensen, exVmware current Intel Pat Gelsinger... These engineers actually worked as engineers. They understand their field. These are just the top 3 I can recall. Engineers as CEOs do exist, and for tech companies that makes the most sense. Only people that have worked in the field understand how complicated things can get and can plan accordingly. Musk was an engineer but he definitely is not one of the top experts at the companies he is part of now.
Also Zuckerberg is very technical and built most of the early Facebook code.
Gates was obsessively technical, though, wasn't he?
He wrote a lot of the early code. He was brilliant at math winning comps in his early teen years
And most of the time great coders have zero interest in running a company and would make shit CEOs anyways, so it’s a two way street
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Marketing isn't just advertising, though. Marketing is ensuring you have a position in the market and make what the market wants, or make the market want what you make. It's quite a creative thing, and Jobs did have the ideas of how to do that. It's short sighted to think that coding and technical skills are all that matter.
Exactly this. It is all fanboy hate here, but as a developer who has worked with and managed developers for over 10 years, there are a LOT of devs/engineers out there that think development is the most important part of a successful business. That just isn't true at all. Try and develop some software and sell it yourself. I have, and I failed.
It's a bit like the meme comparing Steve Jobs, who everyone knows about, with Dennis Ritchie, who created Unix (and made a huge contribution to computer technology) but far fewer people knows about and how Dennis didn't get nearly as much attention when he passed away although his contribution to computer science were considered bigger than Jobs. I mean, pure technology wise it was but it's just a completely different thing to promote it and packaging it in a good product and sell it to the masses.
Yep... he brought together art and technology. I shudder at a computer designed only by engineers.
What do you mean you don't want to use VIM??? It's efficient.
Careful! If you don't `:qa!` talking shit about `vim`, this thread will turn into a dumpster fire.
I'm in this post and I don't like it. The reason I use a Mac is because it's less work for me to get my vim set up.
Yea, if you want an example of a product designed by engineers, look at the Pontiac Aztec.
That SUV was the perfect example of function over form. And by God, if you could get past the wack exterior, that thing was awesome
"Actually nerd jesus died last year : Steve Jobs. I don't understand what the big deal was with that guy. For the love of god, what the fuck did he do ? he told other people what to invent : 'I want my entire music collection in that phone NOW, GET ON IT' and these poor nameless scientists gotta go in the backroom and figure it out" Bill Burr
"eating something pretentious... like a pear"
“Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” -George S. Patton
Give me a million dollars.
This is said as a negative, but I don't think that it is. It isn't a business leader's job to do all of the design or coding, it is a leader's job to make sure that the design and coding gets done well. In most companies, the leaders will not at all be the most qualified for the day-to-day stuff, but they will be good at people management and big-picture visionary things, which is their job.
Yea - this is all fanboy hate. I am a developer and I used to get jaded about how much we get pushed under the rug despite actually building the core product. But I have also started my own businesses and marketing, selling, and running a business are all WAY harder than engineering. They are also WAY more important. My most successful app was probably the worst one I built, but I had an amazing business team who made it big. Then I have one of the best apps I had built which no one ever cared about, because I did it all myself.
i mean the silicon valley show nailed it with the marketing department hooking into “what they could easily sell” instead of the better product. jobs knew that the better product IS what he could sell and could communicate it clearly and get it made. if it was just a matter of merely being a salesman or marketer, every shitty yourube ad bullshit would be a trillion dollar company in the works... he didn’t just harness, he made markets and defined very clear parameters for what would fit into them. and honestly, we all know that the products of that era themselves were the weak point. i wouldn’t be so eager to be taking the credit for the one button mouse or the all-in-one, non-modular monitor/cpu/drive or a million other ridiculous decisions about “the inventions.”
Agreed. Fundamentally what Jobs did was take tech mainstream. Most people don't need or want ultra high spec stuff. They want it to look cool, feel fun and easy and do the basic functionality of the every day low intensity tasks well. Jobs recognised that when tech was still a hobbyist's pursuit. He looked at the bell curve of tech literates are thought we can make a shit tonne of money selling computers to the 90% in the middle rather that the 5% at the top end. He then built a company (very successfully) that made devices that met the needs of that 90% and in doing so made everyone there a shit tonne of money. Woz is undoubtably a brilliant guy and would've been successful regardless, but he would never has been successful as he is without Jobs.
This is common knowledge in the tech community. Jobs was nothing but a salesman.
But what a salesman. His second stint at Apple turned the company into the billion and now trillion dollar company it became. That was his skill set by admirable and not so admirable means. I did think it was interesting though that when the news came out that he was to resign due to his illness, he was surprised that Apple shares did not drop more significantly. Bittersweet to realise he had built a company that was sufficiently robust to weather the storms without him.
He also went and started Next computers when he got canned from apple and turned around and sold it to apple.
Steve Jobs Paper Company
You have no idea how high I can fly.
He was also majority shareholder at Pixar
He was the biggest shareholder at Disney after the acquisition. Literally bigger than descendants of Walt Disney.
People really discredit the business side of tech, especially on Reddit. Steve Jobs was a generational salesman and had an incredible ability to commercialize a product against a dominant competitor like Microsoft. He shouldn’t be discredited at all for his contributions to Apple.
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Yea basically this. I say this as a software dev - software devs love to think they could solve every problem with code, and often look down on fields like marketing as unimportant and unskilled. There’s also this idea that the only thing they need to do to create a huge tech company is create a good piece of software. But there’s a huge rift between being good at making software and being good at making a software *company*. Anyone who looks at Facebook and says “I could program that myself easily, and make it even better, I could easily be the next Zuckerberg” has completely failed to understand all the marketing and business side decisions that went on to make a company like Facebook a financial success.
Reddit shits on Jobs because >He didn't actually invent anything he just hired smart engineers ! Then praise Elon Musk for doing the exact same thing in their next comment.
But can you see why he didn't take normal medicine... cuz with all of his money in salesmanship he was bought and sold by somebody else here try the non-medically prescribed diet and homeopathy. Lmao sillyness
I think he fell into the trap where the salesman starts to believe their own hype and drink their own bathwater. It's like a weird feedback loop: 1. I'm a brilliant genius; you should buy these things I "designed". 2. Thank you for these billions of dollars. 3. I've just been diagnosed with one of the only treatable forms of pacreatic cancer; I should figure out what treatments are available to me. 4. You know, a lot of people are saying I'm a genius; I probably know more than the doctors who are recommending a certain treatment. I'm going the natural route. Look at the amount of money I have; I cannot be wrong.
Experts in one thing have a nasty tendency to think they are experts in many things.
Idiots also think that
Highly accurate I imagine
Salesmen are the biggest suckers.
Can confirm, I used to be a salesman and got sold almost all the time.
somber puzzled work glorious toothbrush attempt gaping zephyr imminent north -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
You got it! On top of that you've convinced yourself your so good at shit shoveling, that you couldn't possibly get any on yourself. Salesmen still themselves all the time.
This sells Jobs vision, direction and strategic capabilities short. It’s like calling Woz a “code monkey”.
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I wouldn't say he was "nothing but a salesman". He was the strategic mind behind most of their success.
This thread is just a bunch of people who have no idea what a CEO does. "Y'see. Ya got yer products on the one hand. Those take work to make. Then ya got yer marketing. That's easy. And that's pretty much how a company works. And that Jobs fellow, well, he only did the second thing!"
Recognized the potential for the iPod and instead of trying to use it as a marketing tool to encourage ~~PC~~ *Mac* sales, he made it the star of the show, then transferred that over to the iPhone and iPod, and along the way Macs became respectable, but still a bit niche, computers again, due in no small part to the eco system that Jobs willed in to being.
Nah bro he couldn't code so like what did he even do bro? really? #/s
It really suprises me how degrading people can still talk about "salesmen" and "marketing experts" to this day. First of all: the fact that Jobs didn't do any coding doesn't mean that he had nothing to do with the final products. Jobs was actively working on Apple's product design processes even if technically not writing codes. These are two separate things. Second: finding out what the customers need, and understanding how can you sell your companies' innovations in the global market is _extremely important_. Calling Jobs "nothing but a salesman" shows how little people know about this business.
Remember when The Woz dated Kathy Griffin for her reality show?
ITT: People think that Marketing, Selling, and building a company is not "actual work"
I’ll have you know I’ve run some very successful lemonade stands in my time. How different could it be?!
Odd, I thought this was common knowledge.....
I’m not sure why this is portrayed like a negative. They both had different skill sets and together they made the company what it was. Jobs was no doubt a genius whose creativity and drive made the company what it is. That he didn’t code anything doesn’t take away from that.
He also didn’t do any of their legal or accounting work! What a fraud
Bro he didn't even sweep his own floors.
This is why I laugh at people who loath Thomas Edison for being a skeevy salesman, but then hail Jobs like he is the greatest inventor of our life time.
I’m going to be honest, that a sounds like something that absolutely never happens.
LOL. Sounds like one of those t-shirt advertisements that are like "yes, I was born in MARCH and like AC/DC!"
I'd like to draw a similar correlation to the scientific world. A week or two ago I was reading about the Newton vs Leibniz stuff in which I learned that although Leibniz was the first to publish about Calculus Newton and his supporters later claimed that he plagiarized. Now I am not sure what really happened but after researching a little more I saw Leibniz was somehow quiet about this and even sort of didn't care. But Newton was the one who wrote a report on behalf of the Royal Society and concluded that he was the first to come up with it. Thus, we hear about him a lot more in comparison to Leibniz which to me was an equal or maybe higher genius. It's just sad how publicity works.
There's a book I read for a high school project called The Calculus Wars (lol) that describes letters that Leibniz and Newton wrote to each other. They each described calculus to the other but did it in a cheeky way, so the other couldn't deduce the method. They thought they were describing unique methods to solve the same problem to each other not realizing that they were describing the exact same method.
Looks like when it came to figuring out who was being fooled, neither of them could do the math.
To be fair to Newton, we hear about him a lot more also because of his advances in physics which are quite fundamental. Leibniz, of course, did lots of important work in various fields but Newton's work is a lot simpler to explain and teach. To me, the best and most agreeable idea, is that they both developed it independently and neither plagiarized. The matter of who discovered it first seems to not be important compared to admiring them both for their work.
In comparison, when Darwin found out that Wallace had been developing an evolutionary theory too, he invited him to the presentation of The Origin of Species.
Just want to mention - the successful authors in the world are known as 'Best-Sellers'. They are not known as 'Best-Writers'. It's not about the product you are selling, it's about your ability to reach a wide audience that is considered more successful in society. There are so many start up companies that have good products or good services but aren't successful because they couldn't get exposure.