> Woz even criticizes the early Mac for losing money. Says Scully saved the company.
It looks like you're trying to be critical of Woz but it's worth noting that he is totally correct here. The company would not have continued without the Apple II revenue Sculley was focused on keeping. In the same vein, Gil Amelio and Fred Thompson later saved the company from bankruptcy by selling Apple debt at remarkably favorable terms. Jobs liked to make fun of Amelio, which always struck me as a little ridiculous.
People like to latch on to Jobs's personality quirks as being strange, wonderful advantages but I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been if he'd actually developed a better ability to work with and persuade people like John Sculley and his board. The world could have been pretty different if he'd had the people skills to hang in there at Apple. NeXT being developed within Apple might have meant big early success, which might have meant things going a pretty different way in the nineties...
I'm not the one who voted you down, although "I just. Wow." isn't what I'd call a thoughtful response.
To reiterate: visualize a computing world where Jobs managed to make his peace with Sculley and the board and used all the resources of Apple to make the NeXT technology happen a lot more swiftly and completely. He might then have brought Mach kernel people into Apple and high-end workstation tech might have began being commoditized and non-suckified and merged with the PC space in the late eighties.
If you don't see how that might have made him quite a bit more successful (and changed the shape of the world to come pretty drastically) I'm not sure what else to say about it.
Pardon my momentary astonishment there, but you are talking about one of the most successful people in the industry. That alone should give you cause for pause in your analysis, which you seem especially confident of ("totally correct").
You seem to discount the possibility that Sculley et al were the problem.
Let's look at the history: While they may have temporarily boosted revenues at first, uncontroversially the "sales guys" ran Apple into the ground in the 90s. Drove it almost bankrupt. Jobs came back and indisputably saved the company from the brink of disaster, not by trying to play the same game as Microsoft, but again by pursuing visionary projects.
Jobs' refusal to compromise and "work with" the sales guys who ran Apple into the ground... is maybe, just possibly, one of the reasons he ended up being one of the most successful guys in the history of the computing industry.
It looks like you're trying to be critical of Woz but it's worth noting that he is totally correct here. The company would not have continued without the Apple II revenue Sculley was focused on keeping. In the same vein, Gil Amelio and Fred Thompson later saved the company from bankruptcy by selling Apple debt at remarkably favorable terms. Jobs liked to make fun of Amelio, which always struck me as a little ridiculous.
People like to latch on to Jobs's personality quirks as being strange, wonderful advantages but I can't help but wonder how much more successful he might have been if he'd actually developed a better ability to work with and persuade people like John Sculley and his board. The world could have been pretty different if he'd had the people skills to hang in there at Apple. NeXT being developed within Apple might have meant big early success, which might have meant things going a pretty different way in the nineties...