Jobs' attention to detail was incredible. I once had to do a keynote rehearsal for him. (Presenting in front of Steve Jobs and 2 other people in a 3,000 seat auditorium in Paris is just a little bit scary.) I was showing a video game that we were bringing to the Mac platform. He noticed that one of the vehicles in the game wasn't casting a shadow. We were cut from the keynote. I was astounded that he had noticed this tiny detail.

I really, really like this speech.

Jobs' attention to detail was incredible.

Some would say anal..but I've noticed over my life that the really good and successful ones are like that. So I tend to defer to the high maintenance prima donnas in my life, if they have talent. It can be taxing for sure.

Favorite passage: "You are already naked."

> Some would say anal..

A control freak is someone who cares more than you do.

Someone who'd write a lilting melody like this, and then fire the Julliard-trained musicians who couldn't handle it... And eventually retreat to his computer to hear it performed like he wanted it.

Yes; that piece is insane. 30 years later, the drummer best known for nailing it offered a decelerated solo performance with a plodding back beat so that normal people could try to understand.

Offtopic, in memory of those who die. This is from my home state, in case you hadn't seen it.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110826/NEWS/308260040/Late-Navy-SEAL-s-dog-is-picture-of-devotion

Steve Jobs is apparently in the endgame. I don't want this to be too harsh, but the decisions he's made haven't always been entirely considerate of the needs of those who rely on Apple or its various markets.

(Is that gentle enough? Is it harsh enough? I wanna get the tone of this just right.)

He was a central figure in the most exciting industry of my generation, and he certainly deserved to be... But he was a businessman.

I like businessmen! I've been a businessman myself.

But when people speak of him with teenage, Beatle-ish admiration for the benevolence of his future-molding superpowers, it feels like they've missed the story.


"So Crid," you ask, "What's up this weekend?"

"Spa, Babe," I reply. The Belgian Grand Prix happens at Spa-Francorchamps, generally regarded as the most beautiful of the old circuits in Europe.

If you read the Formula One racing headlines this weekend, you learn that a Renault driver lost his job. He was never a great driver, but he's nearing the end of his career and might have been expected to do better. And apparently the main reason he was let go was that he wasn't providing the leadership the team needed when NOT behind the wheel. The driver who HE'D replaced after an accident was very, very good about that. He was demanding and arrogant, and he got the best out of everybody. The whole sport is like that... These super-manly champions spend a lot of their time doing emotional manipulation befitting a prom queen. (Football's like this too: Despite larger-than-life personalities in the coaching and owner's offices, men on the field look to the quarterbacks, guys who are not entirely pleasant.)

IJS... The "detail" described in earlier comments often comes from the Dark Side of the Force. We have to remember that when we're talking about businessmen. (And sometimes, musicians.)

this sounds good coming from a real slaver ho gets their stuff made by slaves, and hawked by low paid personnel, at the world class mafia owned high end shopping center establishment, however for an IBM clone, apple has done a better job than windows/microsoft, but trying to compete with ipods, iphones, etc etc etc, always something new, where you need a microscope to view the limited optical resolution they spend more on advertizing than product, when there's only the PC, designed by IBM who were not allowed to make them, by the sleazy patent tribunals, but allowed gates to shove windows, the system no one uses down everyones computer, so it liscensed the windows group, a really sleazy gang of design for obsolescense, compared to apple, a group of hard working personnel who have the best operating system of all PC's, Jobes in not the guy who did it all, or even a small part of it, he's the financial guy the NYSE cohort, always at the ready to steal the investors money, even at the end of his rich elitist life, he has the nerve to say stay hungry, and poor, when he's on a parallel with the gatses and buffetses, real slavers, who get their stuff made by slaves and sell it with lowpaid hirelings, the jobs, exported to slave countries. trying to resurrect nobility, and bring down the north america, where everything was discovered, by getting it all made by slaves, watching its customers, 80 % of americans have jobs that pay near or below minimum wage---yeah right, stay hungry, stay poor, while I live off billions putting out contracts for the body parts I need to keep slip sliding away

> always at the ready to steal the investors money

Load this web page, and note the splits. Do you hear that moist, splooshy noise? That's the sound investors make when their tears of gratitude hit the floor.

> sell it with lowpaid hirelings, the jobs,
> exported to slave countries

Are you a person who tries to save money when buying things?

I don't want this to be too harsh, but the decisions he's made haven't always been entirely considerate of the needs of those who rely on Apple or its various markets.

i.e. they've stolen technology from their vendors, bankrupted their own retailers, cheated, deceived, and undermined their own developers and generally given the shiv to all of the 3rd parties who've been stupid enough to rely on them. Apple is the North Korea of the technology world. They are very good at design, but otherwise very backwards in their developer tools and practices. I don't entirely blame Jobs for this. Apple is known for attracting an authoritarian type. But he certainly hasn't helped.

It cracks me up that far off the popular perception of Apple is from the reality.

> Apple is the North Korea

Well, that's a little harsh... The Norks don't do design, or anything except starvation, well. But I'm glad you're paying attention to the less enchanting perspectives.

Because, yeah, at Apple they do some stuff that is not pretty.... Like all businessmen! If you looked at Dell during their glory years, you'd see just as much odious behavior... But of course, no one's ever going to care about Dell that way.

Still, when you look at the guys who were industry commanders as micros took over the data processing landscape, the chief executives who really chartered the perimeter (Gates, Grove, Jobs) had almost identical powers of manipulation, intimidation, and aggression.

Jobs was certainly the most photogenic of them.

Charted, I meant. Chartered too, kinda.

_______________

Consider this description of Tim Cook, the guy's who's been selected as Apple's day-to-day leader:

For those who can take it, working for Cook is an edifying experience. "He'll ask you ten questions. If you answer them right, he'll ask you ten more. If you do this for a year, he'll start asking you nine questions. Get one wrong, and he'll ask you 20 and then 30," says Steve Doil, who worked in Cook's operations group before moving to Texas for family reasons.

Cook can be brutal in meetings. "I've seen him shred people," says a former executive who now works for another consumer electronics company and refused to be quoted by name. "He asks you the questions he knows you can't answer, and he keeps going and going. It isn't funny, and it's not fun."

I've read essentially identical descriptions for Gates and Grove AND Jobs.