“Now, in an era where bean-counters and marketeers call the shots and most valley CEOs wouldn’t know a floating-point unit from a fish fork, Jobs is the last Big Kahuna still standing. Not to overlook the fact that he took a big fall along the way. With Jobs, the humiliation of being driven out of Apple in 1985 became the first act in an operatic saga: The king betrayed by a trusted ally. Exile. And at long last, triumphant return and vindication,” David Plotnikoff writes for The Mercury News.
“Of course, we can’t have a heroic figure without a fatal flaw. Jobs, who declined to be interviewed, exudes arrogance of a certain blast-furnace intensity that people find hard to overlook,” Plotnikoff writes. “When you’re worth $165 million at the ripe age of 25 and you can rightly boast that your products are changing the world, maybe that buys you the right to make some value judgments. But with Jobs, it was never enough to say ‘We’re right on this and they’re wrong.’ No, it was always ‘We’re right, they’re idiots.'”
“If there was ever an assembly of all the friends, employees and potential partners Jobs has alienated, they’d have to rent Flint Center to accommodate the mob. Jobs had a rather binary view of Apple when the Mac was being birthed by his team: Mac people were stars and everyone else was . . . something less than star quality. It was around this time that John Sculley and the Apple board began to see Jobs as a liability to the organization,” Plotnikoff writes. “Today, Apple is indisputably his company and his vision writ large.”
“The first duty of Jobs, as the Supreme Defender of the Macintosh faith, is to make sure Apple stays on message. And he’s doing a magnificent job. The brand stands for exactly what it did on the day the first Mac shipped. Apple products are still elegant, intuitive and accessible. Above all else, they are still cool,” Plotnikoff writes.
Full article here.