Apple Co-Founder’s Allies Take Aim at Hollywood Over ‘Steve Jobs’

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-co-founders-allies-take-aim-at-hollywood-over-steve-jobs-1444000308

by spking • 11 years ago

33 30 11 years ago

sigmar• 11 years ago

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

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

acomjean• 11 years ago

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

http://recode.net/2015/10/02/original-mac-team-member-andy-h...

dsugarman• 11 years ago

paywall getaround link - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

SCAQTony2• 11 years ago

Woz' and Isaacson are pretty damn credible. If someone attacked Bill Gates for being a "bully' or a "jerk" it really wouldn't wash for his humanitarian achievements from education, farming, immunizations, on ad infinitum would blow away any character criticisms.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...

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

(Edit typos and grammar corrected)

adventured• 11 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

jack92• 11 years ago

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

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

IBM• 11 years ago

It's also not true that Jobs didn't give to charity. The Jobs family has been giving to charity anonymously for more than two decades according to this report.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/laurene-powell-jobs...

jtmcmc• 11 years ago

I think the answer would be try to treat it using modern medicine and having a high chance of living.

gozo2• 11 years ago

When people get cancer they usually get more concerned about their legacy. Whether denial or not how Steve Jobs choose to spend his last years tells us something. Bill Gates is the real deal when it comes to philanthropy. Not only directly, but by founding the giving pledge with Warren Buffet. They made giving away your wealth cool.

I think people who feel a relationship to Steve Jobs are doing what they are accusing other of, making him into someone he wasn't.

setpatchaddress• 11 years ago

What company needs a demigod personality?

ProAm• 11 years ago

uber, apple, amazon, netflix, linkedin, Tesla/SpaceX.... to name few. (I dont think this is a bad thing for these companies FWIW, these companies need these types of people leading based on how the companies operate.)

SCAQTony2• 11 years ago

Luxury brands demand iconic founders: Cartier, Versace, Tesla, Ralph Lauren et al.

Laws of luxury branding from L2 Digital, Scott Galloway Professor NYU Stern:

"...Apple: Apple has the pillars of a luxury brand: craftsmanship, an iconic founder, an exceptional price point, vertical control of distribution, globally recognizable, and with a self-expressive benefit. It’s on it way to becoming the world’s largest luxury brand with the help of former Burberry and YSL CEOs Angela Ahrendts and Paul Deneve. ..."

http://www.l2inc.com/the-four-horsemen-amazonapplefacebook-g...

danso• 11 years ago

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

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

Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half of the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips. It would be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a book on the history of Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been paid this bonus.
“I think that Steve needed the money, and he just didn’t tell me the truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there are long pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been honest. If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.”
To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,” he said. “But, you know, people are different.” When Jobs learned this story was published, he called Wozniak to deny it. “He told me that he didn’t remember doing it, and that if he did something like that he would remember it, so he probably didn’t do it,” Wozniak recalled.
When I asked Jobs directly, he became unusually quiet and hesitant. “I don’t know where that allegation comes from,” he said. “I gave him half the money I ever got. That’s how I’ve always been with Woz. I mean, Woz stopped working in 1978. He never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got exactly the same shares of Apple stock that I did.”
Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did not, in fact, shortchange Wozniak? “There’s a chance that my memory is all wrong and messed up,” Wozniak told me, but after a pause he reconsidered. “But no. I remember the details of this one, the $ 350 check.” He confirmed his memory with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn.
“I remember talking about the bonus money to Woz, and he was upset,” Bushnell said. “I said yes, there was a bonus for each chip they saved, and he just shook his head and then clucked his tongue.”

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

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

staunch3• 11 years ago

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

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

meeper16• 11 years ago

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

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

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

staunch3• 11 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

ryandvm• 11 years ago

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

staunch3• 11 years ago

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

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

andrewtbham• 11 years ago

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

Apocryphon• 11 years ago

How so?

mattmaroon• 11 years ago

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

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

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

Apple Co-Founder’s Allies Take Aim at Hollywood Over ‘Steve Jobs’

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