Scott, as much as I admire your technical articles posted recently on ZDNet, I must agree with opinions posted by "banned from zdnet" regarding this article.
Certainly, there was no need for the "tone" of this article, especially at this time.
I guess one person's choice for "Person of the Year" will always be another person's choice for a dart backboard.
Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne formed Apple Computers on April 1, 1976. The coincidence of the date should not go unnoticed. The first commercially successful home computer, the Apple II, was released a year later.
Jobs’ early years prior to forming Apple played a great part in explaining the CEO that runs Apple today. He has said that people that didn’t share his counterculture roots couldn’t understand his way of thinking. Keep in mind that his counterculture roots included using LSD, which has a history of causing flashbacks and psychosis in some cases.
Prior to forming Apple, Jobs worked at Atari, and had been tasked with creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. For each chip that was eliminated from the machine, a bounty of $100 would be awarded. Jobs had no interest in actual engineering work, so he offloaded the task to his friend Steve Wozniak with a promise to split the bonus evenly. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50. Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700 instead of $5,000, and that Wozniak’s share was $350. It was a taste of things to come.
After Apple took off, Jobs’ methods of doing business business savvy became apparent, showing a marked lack of humility. He was known as someone who ruled by force of personality, unwilling to hear viewpoints other than his own, ridiculing the ideas of others and bad-tempered outbursts. Fortunately for Apple, Jobs wasn’t running the company.
In 1978 Apple hired Mike Scott away from National Semiconductor, to be later replaced by John Sculley from Pepsi in 1983. A well-known quote of the pitch to Sculley was Jobs asking him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Steve Jobs is famously known for bragging about stealing others’ ideas (see video above). Possibly the most famous would be his visit to Xerox PARC in 1979. There he got his first glimpse of the mouse-driven GUI interface of the Xerox Alto, which was eventually to be implemented in the Apple Lisa and the Apple Mac.
Of course, Jobs’ abrasive personality didn’t make this easy. There was friction between him and the rest of the Apple Lisa team, and he was pushed out. Jobs moved to the Macintosh team and took it over. There was a turf war battle over which product would ship first. The Lisa won, but it was overpriced and had no software. It was a failure out of the gate–the largest failure since the Apple III in 1980.
The Macintosh was introduced a year later, and was initially a success. Follow-up sales, however were lackluster; again, high prices and lack of software were to blame. The LaserWriter printer and desktop publishing turned this around.
By 1985, a power struggle between Jobs and Sculley had formed. The board of directors wanted Sculley to rein in Jobs from spending money on untested products. Although he was persuasive and charismatic, Jobs had become increasingly erratic and temperamental towards his team. The working relationship between Jobs and Sculley deteriorated, and Sculley removed all managerial duties from Jobs.
Subsequently Jobs put together an attempt to oust Sculley for leadership of Apple. Sculley called a board meeting during which the board of directors sided with Sculley. His arrogrance led to his downfall, and Steve Jobs resigned from Apple later that year.
