What I really admire about SJ is he funded Apple with equity investments. When SJ left Apple due to illness, Apple had no debt.

I believe that you have a situation that we see very often in our discussions, where a particular persons characteristics get melded into a singular description " he's an ahole" or "he's a genius". I don't know much about the insider stuff on who did what at Apple, but I do know a lot about Andy Grove of Intel. Andy had a lot of quirks that I hear about Jobs, (maybe not to the degree of some of them), but he could be a real rough houser in a meeting, having a stick with a cleanroom glove on it that had the middle finger raised that he used like a scepter. The Pentium debacle humbled him a lot, as he could not integrate the idea of people worrying about a flaw that would only manifest itself in calculations done by .00001% of the users. It was the perception, not the actual issue he could not grasp. What little I heard about Jobs indicated to me he was a "hard charging, my way or no way" kind of guy. The end result was he did bail them out a couple times that I recall. As far as the personal aspect goes, if we dive into our leaders in both business and politics to the degree they have with him, I am sure they will all turn up as equally "bad" people. Some even have overachieved and surpassed his qualities, like some of our politicians today. Apple does a much better job at listening to consumers, and driving their opinions than Microsoft or the I86 crowd. Their emphasis on graphics and stability were the 2 things that brought them a very loyal band of consumers. And those consumers are willing to pay for that capability. Intel has only woken up to the importance of graphics performance in the last 5 years or so, and hung their hat with MS when it comes to stability, which hasn't ever been a strong point. Like him or not, I think there is enough evidence to say Jobs was impactive in what he did. Hero? I am not so sure...

Please check your facts before you post. NeXT paid a royalty to Carnegie for the use of Mach Kernel. When Carnegie discontinued the project the lead developer Richard Rashid went to Microsoft's Research and development Division. One member of the development team, Avie Tevanian was hired into NeXT and later ended up at Apple.

Steve Jobs (Apple) purchased PIXAR from George Lucas when he spun that off from Lucasfilm Ltd.

How can purchasing something be stealing?

Bullseye!

I was in the VIP room too.
I'm also pretty sure I knew one of the guys who was trying to take the wall down in other room.

Success!

The see him a ruthless even though he was kind of on the 'Liberal' side of things outside of business.

Jobs was a visionary, genius, value creator and leader. No question. He was also nuts. Early on he didn't bathe. He was such a perfectionist he didn't have furniture. He neglected his first daughter, and later tried to atone, but denied it, bu naming his computer line, the Lisa, after her. He refused to consider surgery or conventional treatment for his cancer, even though they caught it very early. He could easily be with us today, if he didn't try to "force his views on reality" ( a force of will he was successful with in business) and rid himself of cancer with diet et al.

He brought computing to the mainstream with the Apple II. He brought GUIs to the mainstream forever with the Macintosh (no he didn't invent them). These two has Woz right behind him, inventing all kinds of awesome stuff, getting 15% more out of floppy drives by varying the speed with radius, and gobs of other stuff. The Mac was so far ahead of pathetic MS DOS and Windows at that time. The comparisons were completely biased and pathetic. Flat address space. Real workstation processor. Completely consistent user experience in every application. Clean graphics. Just beautiful! Where is that jack-ass, John C. Dvorak now with his idiotic droning about command-lines for "power users"? He should be eating every article he wrote from 1985-1990. Macintoshs were superior in every way. Then Jobs left Apple, screwed up on Next, an then made Pixar into a star. When he came back he rescued Apple from the Motorola/IBM PowerPC, and go them onto the now (not in 1984) superior Intel platform with Unix, and Macs took off again, superior again. Then the iPod (not new into itself), and he revolutionized music. The the iPad and iPhone and he revolutionized phones and brought a new device to the mainstream, the tablet.

He was a nut, but an absolutely major contributor to society, among a few handful, and I do not include Trump, Larry Ellison or Jack Welch.

I do not see how Apple can continue to grow without Jobs. Johnny Ive is not the same.

Woz was an absolute genius, but his contributions ended after the 68000 Macintosh line. There can be no question who brought the second coming of Apple via the Intel iMacs, iPods, iPhones and iPads. This was all Jobs.

Have you ever asked yourself why someone would become a Navy SEAL, or join Special Forces or become a Ranger, etc.? They are all tip of the spear operations, where the absolute best is demanded of the members, and where the most impossible missions are commonplace. If coddling were the prerequisite for greatness, these groups shouldn't exist, yet there are lines around the block to join them. Greatness isn't easy; it's the most demanding thing there is.

Carnegie Melon University hasn't shut down. Mach was born there and SJ hired away the inventor to NeXT. People seem to forget PIXAR too. He stole that?

I was on the VIP side when that happened, and you had it right. Several of the curtains were pulled down and we though the walls were going to be pushed in. There was a lot of talk about this being orchestrated by Microsoft people at the time, but I don't know how accurate those accusations were. It would make sense since Steve really was a threat to Microsoft, and there were a lot of "laid-off" Microsoft employees at that time as they had started to outsource programing to India. Of course what the displaced people were being told was that the cause was "fierce competition".

That comment was worth a full belly laugh!!!!!

This sparks a really good point. Who should get the credit? Steve or Steve. I think most people that understand it give them both credit because neither could have done what they did without the other. I know there are a lot (maybe a majority) of managers, boards of directors and CEO's that are really non-contributitors (like James Taggart)). This just wasn't the case with Apple.

Whatever works.
I have run several successful businesses and can tell you that there is no way that I have discovered to make an employee happy who doesn't want to be. My son, who was the founder of one of those businesses had a sign over his office that said, NO PROBLEMS - ONLY SOLUTIONS. It had an amazing effect.

A boss who does that had better have some amazing drawcard incentives. Otherwise, they're exposing their market share to devastating predation from well-funded competitors with policies and reputation for treating employees better. This risk becomes even greater when the economy shifts from bear to bull.

Smart high-tech workers who find themselves impossibly drained at the end of each day, with no energy left for their private lives, are going to look for (or create their own) opportunities elsewhere. This is a dimension of "enlightened self-interest" employers/entrepreneurs also need to consider, and one that can make all the difference to the survival of their businesses.

The hero is not so much Job as it is Wozniak, who did actually build the machines.

With all due respect, but I find the Apple products I've been using have style AND substance.

sdesapio, you are soooo TOTALLY correct! I, too, was a Windows user (from MSDOS on!) until I finally threw in the towel in 2010 for my home system and bought an iMac. My employer still required MS based systems, but at home I was so impressed I bought a Macbook Pro, 2 iPhones, an iPad, 2 Apple TVs, and a Time Capsule/router. Apples products work seamlessly together, too. I've NEVER got a "blue screen of death" on either the iMac or Macbook. In fact, over the years, the ONLY times I've had to reboot the iMac is after a power failure or after adding an OS upgrade, which was always free BTW, requiring a reboot. Same for the Macbook Pro. And I leave the iMac on 24/7 because it contains my video library. Does Apple equipment cost more? Sure, but in my experience it is a small price for something that works ALL THE TIME.

My observation of people indicates that people lacking in certain virtues take great pleasure in bringing down those who possess them. This appears especially true when the person being taken down is also very successful. It is an expected response. Occasionally it is the reaction of a single individual but, most frequently, it seems to be a group mentality.

Think of middle school and high school behavior. Some things rarely change.

FYI. The part of the story left out here was that Xerox decided not to pursue the desktop computer industry. Carefully applied hindsight indicates that was probably the right decision for Xerox, as it would have diverted their focus. Companies make those types of decisions all of the time. When they shut down that division, those people were forced elsewhere. Was it wrong for Apple to grab these people?

Many people consider a boss who doesn't ask, but demands the most from his workers to be a jerk. However, it is those kinds of "jerks" who lead humanity out of the caves.

Sometimes the strategy of being "harsh" rather than causing people to hate you, causes them to exceed to higher levels than they ever thought they coud, It's the "tough love" business strategy,.....but make sure you know what you company needss to excel at first!>