“About a week after Jobs’ death, the promotional tour for ‘Steve Jobs,’ the Walter Isaacson biography, began in ernest [sic]. This week, the book itself hit,” Mike Elgan writes for Cult of Mac. ” And so did the ‘dark side’ revelations. Plus, former rivals and Apple employees with an axe to grind came pouring out of the woodwork to tell snarky stories about Jobs’ flawed morality, bizarre personality and petty misconduct.”
“As they are wont to do, the lame-stream media pounced on the negative angle,” Elgan writes. “The praise was too much. But so is the ongoing character assassination. It’s time to bring the pendulum back to the center, and provide context for some of the most egregious dissing. In particular, there are four major falsehoods about Jobs being thrown around in the past three weeks that need to be addressed.”
Four major falsehoods about Steve Jobs:
1. Steve Jobs stole ideas from Xerox to create the Mac.
2. Steve Jobs was mean, petulant, brittle, abrasive and cantankerous.
3. Steve Jobs intended to spend all of Apple’s money to destroy Android.
4. Steve Jobs was evil.
Full article – highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Good book
Who care what he did and how he did it. The world is a better place because of his drive. What the book outlines..even through his faults..is that everyone around him wanted to go with an easy out. Everyone wanted to trend toward the middle ground…and we would have been stuck in a perpetual corporate IT world without him.
No one particularly cares, but it is bad that some people like to lie about Jobs.
By the way, Elgan forgot to mention that Apple significantly changed UI, adding concept of menu bar — when there is horizontal line of short words which magically expand to quite wide pull-down menus. This was tremendous leap in actual usability of GUI, without which it would stay gimmicky as it was in Xerox version.
Also, Elgan forgot to mention that some of key GUI inventors such as Alan Key went to work for Apple (no wonder, since Xerox considered them only as a showcase laboratory with no real chance to “put ding to the universe).
So Apple/Jobs was both legally and morally perfect with the whole GUI story.
Dear Mike Elgan,
When Steve Jobs turned 20 the drinking age was just 18. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that states started raising the drinking age to 21.
I California, the drinking age has always been 21, at least since Steve was born.
Yea, it’s always been 21 here in California.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimum_purchase_age_by_state
California, the home of Ronnie Ray-gun. So when he became President, he strong armed all the other states to be as backwards as California.
Now I understand his motives.
Sarah Palin idioms really discount a writer’s credibility and whatever sort of journalistic integrity he thinks he has. It’s just stupid, and makes me stop reading.
I agree, and I did stop.
Your loss, no one else’s.
BTW, in the interest of further pissing you off because it’s so fun (and easy) to push knee-jerkers’ buttons:
The New Oxford American Dictionary 2010 Word of the Year:
refudiate
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20022860-503544.html
I wonder if Obama’s new word for Navy Corpsman, or in Obama speak Navy “Corpse-Man” ever made it to The New Oxford American Dictionary 2010 as Word of the Year.
Does Obama still see dead people when he marks Memorial day? Maybe, when he’s in those other 7 to 9 extra states beyond the 50 states that comprise America.
I love it when Palin detractors like to “highlight” her intelligence level when compare to the dolt we have currently in the White House!
But you’re right about one thing because it comes so natural for them. It is so fun (and easy) to push knee-jerkers’ buttons with all the material Obama and Biden give us.
Anyone who would seriously compare Obama’s intelligence with Sarah Palin’s, and consider Obama a dolt should probably have their head examined, or at the very least be prevented from going out alone into the world so they don’t hurt themselves… so, I’ll have to assume you were just joking, right?
Right. It is silly to compare Obama’s intelligence to Palin’s. She is smart and actually accomplished. He on the other hand, refuses to release any of his grades because he is ashamed of them. And his main accomplishment – singlehandedly bringing about the full wreckage of the American free enterprise system. Intentionally. What a doofus.
You think she’s smart?… really?
Comments like that make me wish MDN had an ignore button for certain readers.
I’m not aware of any evidence that either one of them is very bright.
However, Obama has slaughtered far more innocent people than Palin, he has destroyed more lives financially, and he has removed health insurance from tens of millions– soon to be hundreds of millions– of americans.
So, I won’t debate who is more stupid, but if you’re defending obama, you’re evil.
I could care less about her intelligence, I just think she’s a real tw@t…
And you have accomplished what, exactly?
‘“About a week after Jobs’ death, the promotional tour for ‘Steve Jobs,’ the Walter Isaacson biography, began in ernest. ‘
I had an Uncle Ernest.
Are there no proofreaders to correct the infantile spelling on this site?
What do you mean by “this site?”
“This site,” MacDailyNews, appropriately placed a “sic” designation after the incorrect word “ernest.” The offending site, the one you bemoan for lack of proofreading, is “Cult of Mac.”
You should be more clear as to whom you are directing you invective in the future, lest you be misunderstood.
good book.
The man was complex, yes he was a jerk, @sshole, overbearing and had an explosive personality. He was also pasionate, loyal, caring and could see the good in people. Its called being human and we all share these traits a different times in our lives.
As far as xerox parc, who gives a flying f*ck how it went down. That was over 30 years ago at this point.
The book about him is the only biography that he approved. CoM’s “defense” is just grasping at straws trying to sugar coat the messy parts of jobs life. Get over it CoM no one is perfect and at the end people are going to recount the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to someone like Steve Jobs. That too is human nature.
Rest in Peace Steve. You left more than a ding in the universe for a lot of us.
I, on the other hand, am very mellow. I am going to build a company even larger and more wonderful than Apple by:
– letting everyone have their voice
– validating everyone’s opinion – including throngs of stakeholders and non-stakeholders outside the company
– being really nice to everyone all the time
– saying “I hear you” and “That’s a wonderful idea” a lot
– making all decisions by consensus
– always thanking analysts and writers who have never run even a tiny company in their lives when they tell me how to run my world-spanning company.
– go to therapy every time I feel impatient with anyone with creativity and intelligence a fraction of mine.
There are a lot more ideas, but you get the drift of how someone SHOULD run a company.
+ ∞!
If you can make that work you’ll go down in history yourself as a titan 🙂
You’re being either sarcastic or naive.
@Seamus – I would surmise that you have not run a business. Nor are you in business now – only wishfully hoping to be in business, some day, maybe.
Why do I say that? In light of your commentary and as a business man who owns a business that operates on 5 continents, I must say that you need an individual at the helm who has his (or her) balls firmly in place. You need to be able to lead, you need to be able to direct, you need to be able to demand (yes, demand) the best from your fellow employees and most of all you need the courage to fight for your visions.
Otherwise, you will not have a business.
I think your last “-” is most apropos – go see a therapist.
Otherwise, as has been mentioned – I hope you are being satirical. As has been said before:
The 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not SHOULD on yourself or others.”
Cheers
luke… and Miz…
Chill out. You have just read GREAT sarcasm.
This site is often like a feminist bookstore–no humor section.
At the end of the day, if Xerox thought Apple had stolen anything, they would have sued. Of course they didn’t sue. Apple had a business deal with them allowing Jobs to see everything they were doing, and here’s the part not alot of people remember: alot of Xerox PARC’s design ideas were bad. They kind of sucked at the Human Interface stuff, but their ideas were technically groundbreaking. Apple, thankfully, had some of the best UI designers in the world, and added the Apple flair to every single pixel. For example, Steve Jobs famously insisted that every menu should have rounded corners, such as in the modern world. In Apple’s OS, famously, windows could be stacked, and overlap, a brilliant feat of engineering.
And what should really put the nail in the coffin on this one (long overdue) is that Xerox Parc’s machine DID see the light of day, and it was an overpriced pile of junk. A complete and utter flop, sealing Xerox out of the computer business forever.
Now, seriously, Windows fanboys, can you get some new material?
I try not to post here anymore, but this is a meme that always gets my goat so please feel free to use this in future…
Apple didn’t steal anything: PARC gave Apple’s people three days of access to PARC across around two weeks in 1979 in return for Apple ‘allowing’ Xerox’s investment branch, Xerox Development Corporation, to purchase 100,000 shares at $10 each – this was with Apple’s IPO imminent in 1980.
Furthermore, Xerox signed an agreement with Apple to never purchase more than 5 percent of Apple’s outstanding shares. Within a year, these shares split into 800,000 which were worth $17.6 million when Apple went public.
The fact that Xerox cashed out quickly was their fault, not Apple. If they would have held on to their shares, Xerox would currently be sitting on 6.4 million shares at $400-odd which is $2.5 billion or around 22% of Xerox’s current market cap.
I wonder how Xerox board meetings go nowadays: I suspect a lot of people looking at each other occasionally wondering how life could have been different if they would have commercialised the work on Alto and taken Warnock, Geschke and Postscript seriously.
Apple didn’t steal from Xerox. Apple got permission from Xerox to view the graphical interface system and in fact paid Xerox in shares for the privilege. Xerox’s display of the system was mainly for show: it’s a greek’s curiosity. Xerox did not know what it got in its hands and it did not attempt to commercialize its innovation because there were many companies, apart from Apple, who did view the system but had told Xerox that they were not interested and that it will not succeed in the marketplace. Xerox did nothing and didn’t even believe that Apple could pull out a rabbit out of the hat.
And the rest is history: People can say what they want and eat their sour grapes, but when history judges about the graphical interface, it’s will not be Xerox but Apple that will get the credit for changing the world of pervasive computing “for the rest of us”.
It’s also clear that many people were able to accomplish things that Steve dreamt about…However..they sat on their unfinished discoveries and didn’t know what they had. Steve saw the value, and when others refused to take things forward…he made it happen.
Inventing something new is worthless unless you have the balls and vision to implement it.
++++++
Oh Wow, Oh Wow, Oh Wow!
One has to wonder what he was seeing there at the end to make him say that… probably a huge surprise… one of those… “oh… just one more thing!” revelations.
Mac Daily News, you really need to retire the “Lame Stream Media” bullshit. That’s Sarah Palin garbage rhetoric. There’s a woman created by and reliant on that same media she calls lame. If it were not for the media, nobody would have give Palin a second tought after November 2008.
+1
Unless you’re a newbie here, you already know that at least one of the editors here at MDN licks the crumbs off the floor that fall from the table of the Neo-Con-Job.
“Lame Stream Media” is a standard Neo-Con-Job talking point phrase used in an effort to convince suckers that there is anything left of the mythological ‘Liberal Media’ to fight and kill. Hang around here long enough and you’ll see plenty more examples of rhetorical attacks against sanity.
I have read the “Stole the GUI from PARC” bullshit so many times now I almost went on a mindless rampage.
I am scared to write anything sarcastic in fear that 90% of readers will think I am serious. People, get your heads examined or better check you IQ and please don’t write anything if it is below 110 because it is just plain embarrassing.
We were talking about Apple and Steve Jobs. Why did someone drag Palin into the conversation? Sheesh. We said “Apple”, not “road apple!”
Lame-ass HATEFUL rumor mongering against Apple by sadomasochist trolls goes on forever. It’s all part of the process of human ‘reality distortion’ called: HISTORY.