While Mary Alyce and the boys were in Theater 7 this weekend watching Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (“Needs more monsters,” says Fallon, age 7) I was in Theater 2 watching Jobs, the Ashton Kutcher film about Steve Jobs (“Has enough monsters,” says Bob, age 60).
I know the Jobs story fairly well having, well, lived some of it, but people have been asking me about the film so I thought I should check it out. Critics have not been kind and Steve Wozniak said he wouldn’t recommend it. I can see why.
The film is beautifully shot and Kutcher’s portrayal of Jobs, while not spot-on, is pretty darned good. He certainly has the look down and the walk. But Ashton Kutcher also produced this film and he’s definitely a better actor than producer.
There are a lot of historical inaccuracies that just don’t have to be there. Sometimes I guess the plot might demand it, like when they put Woz on the Macintosh team then have him leave Apple two years later than he actually did, apparently so they could include a pretty good scene where Woz pities Jobs. Didn’t happen as far as I know and certainly didn’t happen in 1985.
Also Woz simply wasn’t that fat back then, nor was Bill Atkinson’s hair ever that dark, and Matthew Modine is a giant compared to the real John Sculley.
Yes, Apple eventually sued Microsoft over fonts, but this film says they sued over the look and feel of Windows 1, which as I recall was the only version of Windows that actually had an Apple license and therefore a legit trash can.
But forget the chronology, the historical and casting errors, what we have here is a TV movie (think Pirates of Silicon Valley) with a feature budget — hence the great cinematography — yet without a soul. At the end of the film Jobs is cleaner and more stooped, but inside there’s that same old Steve and we don’t really understand him any better.
The great failing of this film is the same failing as with Walter Isaacson’s book: something happened during Steve’s NeXT years (which occupy less than a 60 seconds of this 122 minute film) that turned Jobs from a brat into a leader, but they don’t bother to cover that. In his later years Steve still wasn’t an easy guy to know but he was an easier guy to know. His gut for product was still good but his positions were more considered and thought out. He inspired workers without trying so much to dominate or hypnotize them.
For years there was this running joke that Steve had changed, that he was no longer that guy who made us all uncomfortable. Then an hour or a day later he’d do something that would show he hadn’t really changed at all. And yet at some point Steve did change. It was subtle but real and it set the tone for the last 15 years of his life — the most productive 15 years of his life or that of any American executive.
This film misses all of that.
Here’s hoping that Aaron Sorkin’s film on Steve Jobs will be both more historically accurate and dig more into the story of what Steve Jobs said was the best thing that ever happened to him: Being pushed out of Apple by John Scully and Apple’s board, and the growth and maturation resulting from that.
Wozniak said in an interview on Bloomberg that they only asked him to consult on Kutcher’s Steve Jobs movie after the script had already been written. That’s the wrong time to ask for consultation. He should have been consulted as the script was being written, not after the fact. He said that the script for Sorkin’s film hasn’t been written yet, and he’s already onboard with it as a consultant, so here’s hoping.
The entire 15 minute interview with Wozniak can be seen here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/video/wozniak-says-lot-of-things-wrong-with-jobs-movie-Mm1dnrz8QJuikP6iFdCJmQ.html/
(Warning: Annoying interviewer keeps interrupting him, and pressing him to trash talk on Kutcher’s film, as well as whether he thinks Apple has lost its innovation edge. To his credit Wozniak doesn’t take the bait on any of that.)
Bob, I appreciate how you’ve set the record straight. Steve Jobs is an icon, an enigma, and for many who “were there” will seek a personal truth to the recollection of events and the portrayal of Steve Jobs. I suppose because its biographical in nature and attempts to visually imitate Steve, people expect an accurate character performance as well. I haven’t seen it yet, but do you think the critics and perhaps yourself are being arm chair directors about it? I ask this, because I would give Ashton the benefit of the doubt that he would have access to as much info as anyone else and would have (?) considered it, and chose to take creative licence with events and characters. If you look at it in that light, do you think it’s a good or bad movie?
Seems pretty clear that there is world of difference between “creative license” that furthers a story and fabrication that does little more than obscure details that ultimately are important…
It’s not just the Jobs film that has terrible historical inaccuracies. There’s a long history of them, some just to keep a pace for the film audience. However, it’s very dangerous as for many this may actually be their only contact with history.
One recent example is Argo; an excellent film which is well worth viewing. But the six Americans who found refuge in the Canadian Ambassador’s residence wasn’t turned away by the British or New Zealanders. In fact, it was the British drove round the streets and found them! For their own safety they were moved to the New Zealander’s and eventually to the Canadians; don’t underestimate the risk they all took.
Then there’s U571 which was the story of how a German Enigma machine was captured. Unfortunately, the whole story was a work of fiction and the true story would have made a better film. HMS Bulldog was part of an escort group in the process of sinking a U-boat, U-111, when watching the U-boat being abandoned boarded the sinking vessel and secured the Enigma and it’s code books.
Then there’s film the likes of One Million Years B.C.. Where humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together. Absolute nonsense as any “creationist” will tell you. The earth is only 6,000 years old. 😉
Almost all Hollywood historical movies are highly inaccurate. Any professional historian will tell you that. And not just in small things like costumes, but in major things, amounting to a complete rewriting or reimagining of history.
This is the case in every period of history, Roman and Greek, Middle Ages, Elizabethan, 18th and 19th century, WWII, you name it. Almost every Hollywood movie is very far from historical reality.
Movie makers are in the business of providing entertainment and making money.
They basically don’t care about accuracy. The less familiar the historical events to their audience, the more they can get away with. The more familiar the events, the less they can get away with – but they will always try to get away with whatever they can, in the interests of making what they think is a more exciting movie.
Mark S, what you say (about almost all Hollywood historical movies being innacurate and the filmmakers not giving a hoot about telling it like it really happenned) is generally quite true, but the innacuracies in “Jobs” are particularly egregious…to the point that they really aren’t “innacuracies,” they’d be better defined as “lies.”
When the subject of a film is someone still alive (or until very recently alive) and many factual aspects of his life (personal and professional) are well known and have been documented thousands of times in the public domain, to create a biographical-style film about that person in which you’ve just “made up a bunch of sh*t” about him and randomly stren those scenes thruout the movie (either because of yourt own personal/political agenda or because you feel like that’s how you think it SHOULD’VE happenned), well…..that’s pretty deceitful.
For example – let’s say they do a movie about you…you’ve been a devoted married family man for 25 years and have never strayed, but the writers decide to tell your story and they throw in a scene in which you’re having an affair….or you’re visting a hooker, etc. Is that okay?
IMO, the five most deceitful words in all of movie-dom are “based on a true story”…..this gives the filmmaker license to tell whatever lies he wants but present it as if it’s factual. This trend seems to be increasing, not decreasing….Jobs. Argo. The Social Network. Lee Daniels: The Butler. Incredible amounts of fabricated fantasies presented as factual.
Did any of those 4 movies even bother to say “based on a true story”? If they did, I’d be inclined to take them with a grain of salt and try to enjoy them as semi-fictional. But there have been a lot of enjoyable movies that may or may not have been exactly accurate in every detail. Like Lindbergh, Hughes, Tucker.
Yes, they either said “Based on a true story” or (worse yet) “inspired by a true story” which….at least in the case of a biographical film….is even more of a sneaky way to weasel out of having any modicum of honoring the truth while still benefiting from the subject’s legacy.
There’s one big difference with the movies about the people you mention (Hughes, Tucker, Lindbergh, etc.) – they all died years ago and their story has been told and re-told many times to many generations – they are almost mythical figures in the public domain for many decades and thus IMO there’s more tolerance for a bit of creative license. But c’mon, man, Jobs just barely passed away, and his family, co-workers, friends and everybody with whom he interacted are all still with us.
No one expects exact accuracy in every detail…but that’s a far cry from a propaganda piece in which entire scenes, frequently contrary to anything that person would have ever done (such as my previous example of you havig an affair) are made up out of thin air. That’s pushing it too far.
It seems to me that, in particular, anybody still this much front and center in the public consciousness as Jobs deserves to have received at least a bit more respect to how they lived their life.
I read that 6,000 years figure at least 20 years ago so we’re up to about, what, 6,023 years now?
That reminds me of the old joke about a dinosaur skeleton being 80 million years *and two months* old. “How do you know?” “I asked two months ago and they told me 80 million years.”
Getting your facts from movies makes about as much sense as, oh I don’t know, getting them from the internet maybe! Oh wait…
Thanks you just saved my about $20. I can now pass on that movie.
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It is a shame. There are some stories that are so good and so full, one doesn’t have to change anything to make a movie from it. The story of Steve Jobs is one of them. Why make up stuff when the real story is so good?
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There is a saying from Star Trek: “Why tell the truth when a lie will work just as well?”
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I wonder if Hollywood knows the difference between the truth and a lie. In the end the difference in this movie will be money. This movie will not make as much money as it could. It will fall far short of its potential. Someday someone will write a GOOD book on Steve Jobs and someone will make a GOOD movie. If they are factual and done well, both will be studied for decades to come. When that happens the Kutcher film will never see the light of day again.
My wife and I just watched Argo for the first time a couple of nights ago. No doubt there were historical inaccuracies but we enjoyed it and thought it was worth watching. I didn’t even know about the six at the Canadian embassy beforehand. But Best Picture Oscar? I don’t think so.
Oh, and why is half the dialogue in so many films these days incomprehensibly mumbled and quiet whilst the incidental music and other sound effects totally deafening. We have to keep lurching for the remote to try and balance it all out so we can hear it without waking the baby.
Argo was a “feel-good movie”… for Hollywood.
As far as 2012 films go, I thought Silverlinings Playbook should have topped Argo.
I don’t know if this is correct, but I’ve heard that the sound track is optimized for surround sound these days, but no real effort is put into re-balancing the track for stereo speakers. The explanation I was given that the default “flattening” algorithms overbalance the music.
When the mix is designed for surround sound in a large, non-reflective space like a modern theater, rethinking for a non-surround mix that may play back in a much smaller (and possibly reverberant space) in a home is quite challenging.
If you have a surround sound unit with flexible controls you can tweak the settings and overcome many of the problems, but expecting consumers to do so is unrealistic. It’s ironic that good movie sound can sometimes also be bad movie sound.
Bob, very good point about Steve having changed between 1985 and 1997. From the outside, it seems however like the biggest difference is that he had become a great manager.
Jobs was a terrible manager at Apple pre-1985, convinced that Mac sales would soon boom when numbers shown otherwise. He wasn’t much better at NeXT when he drove costs up by insisting on having the inside of the computers painted black and other lunacies. However, when he came back at Apple he had the stuff to be a CEO.
When I met Jobs in 1992*, He came across as ‘learning the current customer, but leading them to his vision’ I never met him prior, but since the failings of NeXT as a HW platform, and it’s trials as NeXTStep/OpenSTEP, it became apparent it was not about “HIS” vision, as much as it was, understanding the future for his customers and LEADING them to his vision.
*a summit on NeXT and Healthcare. His point was, that medical technology decisions makers were rooted in the 1950s when it came to medical informatics and the delivery of knowledge to the care provider. He was trying to get to a ‘PDR in your pocket’, ‘An EMR in your hand,’ and a task specific view of the patient (Drill through. Doctors were still about Silos by specialty (and to some extent still are).
Don’t forget the original 1988 NeXT cube used a 256 MB magneto-optical drive instead of a hard drive, which contributed significantly to its exorbitant $6500 price tag (buying one of those drives alone cost that much at the time the NeXT cube was announced).
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Jobs still hadn’t learned his lesson from the prices of the Lisa ($9,995 in 1983) and Macintosh ($2,495 in 1984).
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Also when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 the Mac clone makers were slowly strangling Apple out of the hardware market–especially Power Computing in the most lucrative high end sales.
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The relatively inexpensive original iMac ($1299 in 1998) is probably the first result from these lessons. It finally reached the “sweet spot.”
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Although, it seems Jobs couldn’t resist “learning his lesson” one last time in 2000 with the $1799 Power Mac G4 Cube. 🙂
The big failing of the original NeXT was that the optical drive was the only removable drive: no floppy drive. That meant, pre-Internet, that the only way to distribute software for it was on a disk that cost roughly $50 (IIRC). The next model had an option for a 2.88 meg floppy drive.
Reading about the history of NeXT and Jobs from various sources I think he’s learned a lot from his time at NeXT.
Firstly, you can still do great things.
Secondly, it’s got to be at a price that you can still sell it!
But the biggest contribution by Jobs & NeXT is the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee used the NeXT with it’s easy programming to create the web. If NeXT’s only contribution to the history of computing is the Web that’s no small thing!
It was not just the WWW which was developed on a Next computer.
Doom, one of the best first person shooters on the PC and among the first to use 3D while being playable, in its day, was developed on a Next computer then ported to DOS.
http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html
The WWW, 3D first person shooter games, and Cocoa/Touch which was the API that ignited the mobile apps ecosystem. A legacy to be proud of. It seems that a great computer can inspire creative minds just like good architecture can.
re: Lisa and Mac pricing… jobs didnt do either. he wasnt on the Lisa project, and Sculley set the price of the the Mac.
read the first-hand accounts from the mac team:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Price_Fight.txt
The original 68030 Cube was pretty expensive, but the 68040 NeXTStations released soon after were competitively priced compared to similarly-performing products like the Mac IIfx, Sparcstations, or high-end PCs.
The Mac’s price wasn’t out of line compared to a genuine IBM PC. Sure, you could get a clone cheaper, but name-brand hardware was spendy in the 80s.
I think at some point he came to realize he should rely on the genius of others in addition to his own. Perhaps his biggest talent was identifying it? I suspect he did this mostly with intuition: “this guy is sharp, why aren’t more people listening to him?”. The difference between the old Steve and the new Steve where the people he chose to sit between the already excellent engineering staff and himself and the roles he gave them.
It astounds me how little some tech companies think of their own employees based on their penchant for acquihires. Each one is a digging reminder to employees that: “you’re not giving us what we need so we have to go elsewhere”, but what it really does is say something about management, because it’s bell-curves all around, at EVERY level (facilities, programmer/engineer, management, c-level) people! Any organization of sufficient size likely already has several potential Jonnys, Steves and Cooks working for them.
It amazes me how much Mac fans think Apple is the greatest tech company in the world. A lot of the cool stuff was developed by other companies. The maps, that ended up being a blunder, probably developed by others. You think Apple developed Siri? Or the movement detection?
It’s also surprising how much people attribute to Steve Jobs. The Macintosh? Bud Tribble and Burrell Smith. MacOS X? Avie Tevanian. The Apple products wouldn’t have been so great without Steve Jobs’ input, but he didn’t create the technology that went into them. Continuing to laud Apple’s technology is just continuing the pattern of praising Steve Jobs for curating the products that he released.
But I have to believe that Apple made the Maps program. Tomtom GPS devices work. It’s disappointing that Apple could license Tomtom’s data and mangle it so badly.
Perhaps they didn’t invent absolutely everything, but they brought everything in to a whole complete product.
Reading the history of the original Mac and it was going to be quite different from how it looked. Not GUI and with a slow processor. It was imagined to be cheap, but in the end it transformed in to something amazing. It was, if anything, a window in to the future of computing.
And if you’re going to criticise Steve Jobs and Apple, which you have every right to do, then answer this question: If it was that easy why hasn’t others done the same or better? Where’s Microsoft?
Oh no, I am OK with praising Jobs for his design abilities. It’s just that praising Apple for superior tech is foolish, as it is not developed by them.
This is an argument begins to dissolve upon examination. Any product as complex as the hardware and software of a new computing system contains supporting structures worked out by various people. The person at the head of the effort needs to make wise decisions about which pieces to combine and which to leave out. Jobs chose to put his faith in Tevanian, for instance. He could have gone with someone else, but he didn’t.
I’m sure Henry Ford didn’t invent every sub assembly on the Model T either. Edison absolutely didn’t invent everything produced by his lab, but he built the lab. It’s not like Steve was some kind of suit, stealing credit from the real makers – He envisioned the products and got them built (yes, sometimes adding on to the visions of others). Giving him props does not denigrate the Raskins, Tribbles, Tevanians or Ives’s of the world.
What does being a “tech” company mean? Does it mean just coming up with bits and pieces of technology that might never get used by anyone but the people who invented them?
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Ever see what people at Apple originally saw demoed at Xerox PARC before making the Lisa/Mac interface? There was no menu bar. No scroll bars. No icons for files/folders/buttons/etc. The early designs for the Lisa interface barely look anything like the modern “desktop” UI the Lisa shipped with and that everyone now uses on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
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Some people may give Apple too much credit. A lot of people give Apple too little.
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In the end Apple’s innovations are in building a complete experience out of disparate parts and introducing those to the wider world.
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Mice and windows existed before the Lisa and Mac. MP3 players existed before the iPod. Touchscreens and mobile web browsers existed before the iPhone.
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Affordable, widely available computers with an integrated desktop OS didn’t exist before the Mac, though. Fast and easy music sync/playlist creation didn’t exist before the iPod/iTunes/FireWire integration. And desktop-class web browsing on a phone with a smooth, stylus-free multitouch interface didn’t exist before the iPhone.
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The details make all the difference, and it’s those same details that are usually discounted by Apple’s critics. It’s as much a technological feat to get all the details *just right* as it is to invent some new software algorithm, electronic circuit, magic material, or manufacturing process.
Is it safe to assume you and your RV made it home? How was the trip?
I’m beginning to think this is more about Kutcher growing up than it was about Jobs, if his acceptance speech for a recent award was any indication.
[…] I believe critics are reacting to the film the same way technology analysts react to an Apple product launch – with unrealistic expectations. Have you ever heard anyone complain about Dell putting PC’s in the same boring boxes year after year? Just as Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was criticized as incomplete despite its 656-page length (see John Gruber’s review as an example), this movie is faulted for trying to put into 2 hours what even Ken Burns would struggle to put into a 10-hour miniseries. Robert X. Cringely, despite disliking the movie, put this idea into words. […]
60 seconds of NeXT? Sounds like the Star Wars trilogy, but skipping ESB. “Oh, yeah, and Luke became a Jedi, but look, iPods, I mean, Ewoks!”
Looking like Steve Jobs and imitating his speech patterns or other idiosyncrasies is NOT acting. A real ACTOR would’ve tried to think about Steve’s motivations in life. Instead, we get the dumb-guy from That 70s show and “Dude, where’s my Car.” He’s not now and never has been a serious actor. It’s actually pretty insulting that they treated the life of Jobs like a SNL skit spin-off movie. Utter trash, no soul in its writing or in Kutcher’s acting. Pure money-grab, cashing in on the death of Steve Jobs, may he RIP.
You posit, and I agree, that something changed while he was at NeXT. Just a question to you, when did he get married, and do you think that may have been a crucial factor?
id wondered the same — i mean the man got married and started a family. he grew up and got wiser. isnt that a routine part of life…?
Kutcher is a total lightweight (almost sucks more than capitalism) who doesn’t even believe in the importance of mankind’s spirit of adventure.
See http://nasawatch.com/archives/2008/11/dude-wheres-my-space-program.html
Bet Steve did!
I think you touched on a significant point, that something did indeed happen either just before or during his time at NeXT.
I remember when the NeXT Cube was put on display for the first time. It was a magnificent machine for the time. More horsepower than many minicomputers, Display Postscript, which was an evolution of the Macintosh interface, and a sleek, sexy case. There were a lot of problems getting it just right, especially with the new and quirky Display Postscript interface. Perhaps it was the trials and tribulations of getting this beast of a workstation to market that partially tamed Steve. It was all his baby, really for the first time. It brought true WYSIWIG, UNIX, the Mach Kernel, high-resolution displays and industrial design all to a focus point. The fact that it was ultimately unsuccessful is beside the point; I think NeXT is what really made Steve Jobs who he was when he returned to Apple.
NeXT the company was unsuccessful. NeXT the technology was unbelievably successful. It lives today in all those iDevices and Macs.
Since the internet is the right place to arm chair it I’d say that Pixar happened to Steve Jobs. Pixar didn’t serve as the same proxy for self-esteam as Apple or next did. Pixar was also probably a good place to learn that a lighter touch (certainly John Lasseter would have set a great example here) works as well as the other forms of encouragement.
good call… in the Issacson bio the Pixar time was covered a bit, and he was forced to manage it differently.
Steve stared into the abyss at NeXT and for the first time questioned himself. Things got so bad, that he had no choice. He bottomed out. Then he had the same epiphany that all business men have that eventually “make the jump” from micro-manager to macro-manager – he began to allow others to influence his decision making, and more importantly, began to give others a little respect and credit.
Consider the Steve that basically “screwed” Woz out the Atri money for Break Out, and took credit and most of the money for himself. Compare that to the Steve that directed his engineering team to stand and be recognized at the iPod, iPhone, and iPad announcements. Those are two different Steves. The Jobs that founded Apple looked at everyone, with few exceptions, as a “Bozo.” The post NeXt Jobs, was much more reflective and considerate.
The second tragic act of the Apple opera is not Steve’s firing, it’s the NeXT fiasco. Cringley is right. The real Jobs story is NeXT. NeXT is where Jobs “grew up” and became a seasoned manager and a man.
Take a look at Bob’s “Steve Jobs Lost Interview” and its context in 1995. In that interview one could see he was already well along in his personal evolution. What was one of the big things he did upon returning to Apple in 1997? Steve settled a lawsuit with Microsoft. He accepted a cash infusion from Microsoft and used it to stabilize the company, Steve had learned the art of compromise. He was willing to put aside his feelings and pride, and make the hard decisions needed to save Apple.
Indeed. Steve Jobs at Macworld Expo 1997:
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“If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again.”
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BTW, everyone focuses on the cash of Microsoft’s investment, but in the grand scheme of things their five-year commitment to continue to release Microsoft Office for the Macintosh was actually more significant. Knowing that Office was guaranteed to be available on Macs made it “safe” for people to keep buying them.
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The $150 million investment in non-voting stock was less than 1/10th of the $1.7 billion revenue that Apple earned in the previous quarter, and a bit over 1/10th of the $1.2 billion in cash they still had in the bank. Apple CFO Fred Anderson stated that Apple would use the additional funds to invest in its “core markets of education and creative content,” so that’s not “save the company” money, it’s “keep a couple projects alive that we otherwise might have killed” money.
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Cnet, “Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple” (6 Aug 1997): http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html
At NeXT Jobs started out selling gorgeous hardware, with an ambitiously designed robotic factory.
Eventually, he had to accept that as nice as the hardware was, people really wanted the software. So they dropped hardware, and ported the OS to Intel, HP PA-RISC, and Sparc (and a non-gui portion of it to DEC Alpha as a Portable Distributed Objects package).
Eventually, it became clear that, really, customers liked the OS but really wanted to be able to use the developer tools on Windows, or on the web. So the operating system was somewhat put on ice, and the development environment was made available on Windows as OpenStep for Windows, and applied to the web as WebObjects, originally using Objective-C but later converted to Enterprise Java.
Basically Steve’s whole time at NeXT was a series of decisions to cut losses, let go of things that they had worked their asses off to build, and accommodate customer preferences for systems produced by other companies.
Maybe Steve never told anyone, not even Laurene, and took the “secret” to his grave. Yes, he wanted Issacson to tell his story. But he wanted to tell a story, and that’s a different thing from the truth.
jobs had no editorial role in Issacson’s bio. that was one of the conditions Issacson set.
I think the point Francis was making wasn’t that Jobs demanded Isaacson conceal something, but rather than Jobs himself concealed something. Ultimately, any source for any work has SOME “editorial control” by virtue of his or her control over what information he or she volunteers, or keeps private.
Though, personally, I feel like the concept of some great “mystery” to Steve Jobs is largely silly. A year ago I would have felt differently. But it seems like since Jobs died, gradually the RDF effect has worn off for me. He just doesn’t seem especially fascinating, any longer. Steve Jobs was a gifted manager and salesman, who was also a callous, arrogant sociopath. I suppose that, thinking about it, one might classify Jobs along with the great patrons of the Renaissance, the Medici, et al. In a sense, the world gained some wonderful work through the effort of these people… but that doesn’t mean they’re especially praiseworthy or even, themselves, geniuses.
Jerks will always be with us; jerks who managed to make a positive contribution to the world are considerably more rare… but I still don’t see grounds for getting carried away with celebrating them as near-divine beings.
…callous, arrogant sociopath…
You’re not callous if you fire people who don’t fit in, not arrogant if you really are the smartest in the room, and not a sociopath because you upset some people.
Ronc, callous, arrogant, sociopathic, they are all ways of behaving. Being the smartest doesn’t mean someone has a right to mistreat or belittle other people.
Perhaps you have more information than I. I haven’t heard about any mistreatment or belittlement on Steve’s part but I don’t doubt he used whatever he could think of to motivate people, sort of like a master sergeant. Ever see Gomer Pyle USMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvExTo3aA4o (Check out Sergeant Carter at the beginning.)
This is a classic Hollywood mistake.
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Who is your market for this movie? Who would want to see this movie? Why? If the producers had given these questions more than a minute of thought they would have realized that a factual based, historically accurate film would have the most commercial appeal.
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Instead they took a serious topic and made a joke out of it. It won’t last long in the theaters and I doubt its TV value will be poor too.
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Sometimes fiction is a better choice. Sometimes a fictional story should be adapted or improved for the film medium However when you are working with non-fiction, it is best to keep it non-fiction.
The something that happened during his NeXT years was that he met and married his wife. 🙂
and/or possibly that he delved into his past.
To me, the best part of the movie was when they were whispering around the fire pit, “128 wasn’t enough… Needs 256, 512…” before they were interrupted by A.C.
This made me laugh because I had a 128k Mac – and the first thing I did with my next $400(!) was to take the board out of the Mac with the special screwdriver and send it to a company that upgraded it to 512k.
People don’t remember that MS Word ran in that memory, on an 800k floppy that also included the OS.
It was an awesome time.
Even more impressive was that both the original 128K Macintosh and later 512K “Fat” Mac only actually had 400K floppy drives! 800K floppies weren’t introduced until the Macintosh 512K enhanced in 1986.
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In context, though, 5.25″ PC floppy drives of the time only held 360K per side. PCs were more likely to have hard drives installed, however.
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Mac 400K floppies were single-sided and couldn’t be flipped. The 800K drives added a second read/write head so data could be stored on both sides at the same time.
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As far as RAM, the full 1 MB of RAM in the Lisa (8 to 16 times the more common 128K or 64K of typical computers in 1983) contributed significantly to its $9,995 price tag. It might have been more successful if it’d had only 512K and it was priced a lot lower.
The Macintosh Toolbox helped a lot with the memory pressure. The original MacOS didn’t need to load everything from those awfully slow floppy disks into that expensive RAM, because a lot of the operating system was burned onto cheap ROM. The more hyperbolic people would say that the original Mac effectively had 192 kB of RAM, but if you wanted your program to run well, you had to use the routines in the ROM. That also helped make the system consistent and responsive, though not fast compared to today.
So unlike these days, when random parts of programs are prone to being swapped out of memory, and the Office team has its own GUI in defiance of the Windows team.
“Office team has its own GUI in defiance of the Windows team.” If Adobe can have its own gui,why not Office?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. 🙂
Perhaps neither is wrong and they are each appropriate for the intended purpose. Windows isn’t even an application but rather a platform for others to use to display their application. However, personally I also prefer a uniform gui as most efficient; just like the Dvorak keyboard, the old File, Edit, View, Help menu, and the Start Menu. Once you learn how to use something, even if it’s not intuitive, it eventually becomes the most useful.
What’s unfortunate is that, since Jobs wasn’t much in the public eye during the NeXT years, and was somewhat dismissed in the industry as a has-been, it’s highly unlikely that the NeXT years will get much attention.
(Search Google for the cover of Upside magazine which depicts Jobs as Pinocchio sitting on a NeXTStation. Or consider the highly-skeptical – almost a hatchet job – treatment of Jobs in books like “Steve Jobs And The NeXT Big Thing”.)
Bob,
I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with you on the important points. Sure, the casting might have been messed up – and Woz had a Casio calculator watch on which was a recent model 😉 and things like that… but the important things were the exact points that I felt the movie brought out, and brought them out in a very artistic way. Sorry, but I just have to disagree with you on pretty much every point there bud.
@Jeremy: What important points are you talking about that make you disagree with Bob?
Are you disagreeing about points of fact? If so, what are they? If not, do you disagree about Bob’s insight into Steve? What insight do you have on Steve Jobs that someone who was there – who knew Steve, who interviewed him – does not?
(It’s not all that important, but I was there too, and I can tell you this film is just like most of the comments sections of articles like this one on Steve – loads of people with the mistaken idea that they understand either Apple or Steve because they think they understand Steve’s psychology. Such ideas make it wonderfully easy to project whatever you want onto the man and the company – whether those theses have any connection to reality or not. Let me boil it down: if you think you really understand why things happened the way they did over the entirety of Apple’s history, you don’t.)
Look, disagree with Bob all you want. But if you’re going to make public comment on Bob’s blog, is it too much to ask that you tell us what you disagree about? (In a little more detail than “the important points” or “the exact points that I felt the movie brought out” – what points are you talking about?)
If I had to put money on it, I’d say that it wasn’t Steve Jobs time at NeXT that lead to growth, it was his time at Pixar. At Pixar, he literally _couldn’t_ do the product, so he had to make the ”business” the product. That’s he put himself into.
Apple 2.0 is when Steve cared as much about making the product successful as he did about the product itself. And thanks to Pixar (and to a much lesser degree, NeXT), he finally had the skills to deliver on both.
Excellent insight, I’d love to read a book just about his time at these two companies.
I spent 5 years working for Steve at NeXT, starting when he was forced out of Apple. I think the experience at NeXT changed him. He learned how difficult it was to create a new computing platform — ironically that platform is still the foundation for Apple products today.
This seems appropriate for this discussion thread.
http://skreened.com/render-product/m/a/v/maveeamaiuhaahcqvapa/never-judge-a-book-by-its-movie.american-apparel-unisex-athletic-tee.athletic-grey.w760h760.jpg
Lets try this again.
Wait… You mean “cinema verite” is all a LIE?
It wasn’t the NeXT years but the Pixar years that changed Jobs. Oh and he got married ’91!
Till ’94 Jobs and his two companies were hemorrhaging money.
Both Pixar and his wife could not be treated as he treated Woz and the Apple/NeXT workers or they would have walked out! Pixar because artistic genius is different to code writing. And wives are nitroglycerine.
Jobs had to pray that things would change. It was the first time in his life that he was not in control of his destiny he had to take into consideration his wife’s ideas and Pixar producers’ ideas and later Gil Amelio to see that NeXTOS was better than BeOS. If “Toy Story” failed and Gil didn’t buy NeXT Jobs would have been bankrupt faster than Apple in the 1990’s.
And finally his kids taught him he could not be ruthless. Even in the 2000’s he could not learn from his kids.
Which lead to his motto “You’ve got to find what you love”, but that is what he found serendipitously even if the dots were joined! All the above is between the lines of his story! How do you film between the frames?
I have a male character theory called after the first person who I saw it in “the Paul Newman complex”.
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You believe you are your image and your image is you. Joanna suffered a long time till Paul lost it.
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Well Jobs had that in spades. His wife, kids and Pixar got rid of most of it. But Jobs’ idiotic beliefs were too deep to change – his bizarre eating habits for one, or his pre-WWI yacht design against all fluid dynamics theory, amongst many. That he was successful shows a Darwinian redundancy that allowed tons of faults and yet survival and prospering. And reflection is difficult in movies. “Last year in Marianbad” is all reflection and no one understands it.
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So every film would not be honest to the man – the best approximation to Jobs is maybe Howard Hughes.
Nice review. I was disappointed that the movie didn’t capture the value of product management and design as well as Isaacson’s book – which was a great read. I noticed the gap too on his years away from Apple in that book, but it wasn’t as empty. I read between the lines that Jobs was mentored while on the Disney Board.
WE DON’T REALLY NEED A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE ABOUT STEVE JOBS !!!!! That’s all !
If you read “Accidental Empires” (and you should!) you have a wonderful collection of stories of folks who caught lightning in a bottle. Steve Jobs differed from them in that where these creative geniuses did one great thing that changed the world, Jobs caught lightning multiple times.
First was Apple Computer, where he and Steve Wozniak helped launch the personal computer business. Their success with the Apple II is what caught the eye of IBM, and their “garage tech” method of doing it inspired Big Blue to go outside of their normal procedures, giving Don Estridge a free hand to out-source the components to build the IBM PC. That effort itself launched Microsoft, Corel, WordPerfect, etc. etc. etc.
Jobs realized that Apple was growing into something too big for him to manage, he had no experience in large complex organizations, so he sought out John Scully. Scully brought organization to Apple, and also the coup that pushed Jobs out.
Unlike the other “Lightning Catchers” though, this was not the end of Jobs’ story. He started up NeXT. Never a consumer success like early Apple, it was a developer’s dream platform, and its adoption of UNIX as the kernel of its OS proved to be revolutionary later.
Looking at what computers could do, PIXAR, Jobs’ next project changed the way movies were made and viewed. Animation was once again affordable, but even more interestingly, more fun than live actors. A string of hits made PIXAR the leading force in motion pictures.
When Apple turned once again to Jobs when they were on the verge of collapse, the Jobs who came back was indeed a changed man. He had learned, in his exile, the workings of a complex organization, and combining that with his creative eye and attention to detail took Apple from near death to the product of choice. he also had the guts of an operating system for the networked world: NeXT-OS became the guts of Apple OS/X, offering a solid and secure operating system for the 21st century.
This was not really lightning in a bottle, but good management and leadership. Lightning did strike again when it struck outside of personal computers, in the music industry. The iPod was a nicely designed MP3 player, but its connection to the PC and to iTunes revolutionized the music industry.
Maybe Jobs’ biggest bolt caught in a bottle was the iPhone/iPod/iPad triumverate. This changed not only music, telecommunications, book sales, and personal communication but has launched the end of the PC era. We’re in the childhood of such devices and we see them changing the way we do everything. A bigger revolution than the PC.
To try and capture all of that in one movie would yield a script that even Hollywood would say was not believable! It will be interesting to see how his life is hashed and rehashed over.
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