Steve Jobs "60 Minutes" Interview

Quote from Rehoboth:

This does not make him a visionary, it makes him a good evaluator of talent. I cant believe so many brilliant minds fell for his act. Besides the original Mac OS, Jobs or his companies created nothing new.

I think the greatest lesson that jobs leaves behind is that if a doctor tells you that you have an operable form of cancer, you dont tell them to fuck off, you get the operation.

i think your foolish he changed the world. he built the best computer from a to z. i don't think its worth the price but they are the best. he did that with the ipod, ipad, and iphone too. he changed the way you watch movies with your kids. he changed the way you buy music. whats his act?
 
The $10 million number is a popular misconception. Those were the initial numbers he committed when he bought the company. He owned the company for NINE years. Plunked many more tens of millions to keep it going. They originally envisioned the company selling hardware, then software, but realized it's greatest value was in movie making. They went through a lot of capital to eventually figure it out.

"Enter Steve Jobs. Who - in 1986 -- not only paid George Lucas $5 million but also agreed to pump $5 million of capital into this fledgling computer animation operation. Which had recently been renamed Pixar, Inc.

But here's the thing. Steve didn't believe that he was buying an animation studio. What Jobs thought he was purchasing was this sort of high-end hardware company which was then supposed to sell Pixar Image Computers. But as the short films that John Lasseter & Ed Catmull created to help demonstrate what the Pixar Image Computer was capable of began to garner more & more attention on the festival circuit, Jobs suddenly found himself in the animation business.

To his credit, Steve stuck by John & Ed as their innovative animation operation produced several award-winning shorts while it also burned through tens of millions of his dollars. Some will tell you that Jobs only hung in there because he was looking to recover all of the cash that he'd poured into Pixar Inc. Which is why Steve would periodically try and find a buyer for this then-deeply-in-the-red operation."


The smart, stubborn guy who helped to make Pixar possible


It's undisputed that Jobs was an unforgiving spirit. Whether it was design or negotiation, he made important decisions along the way to be in a position to reap the benefits. It was his idea to time the Pixar IPO to debut a week after Toy Story. At the time, if Toy Story didn't succeed, the company was done.

Quote from jprad:

What an absolute crock of revisionist history.

Jobs bought Pixar for $5MM and sunk $5MM of his own money in it, not "tens of millions." The best thing he did with them, and why it paid off so big, is that he did abso-fucking-lutely nothing. He left them alone to be creative.

As for Toy Story, it was his particular genius as an outright bastard negotiator with Disney that ultimately made him the largest shareholder of Team Mouse(tm).

Jobs had an incredible ability to identify and align himself with talent that bordered on genius -- and then he systematically screwed them over to his personal gain.

In the end, he was a brilliant capitalist and an insufferable bastard, the likes of which the Rockefellers would have envied.
 
Quote from brokerboy:

i think your foolish he changed the world. he built the best computer from a to z.

There's no question that Apple's products are stylish but, they are far from the "best" computers out there.

The ergonomics of their keyboards are horrible, but, they do look pretty.

The corners they cut on the MacBook Pro displays borders on criminal, but it comes in such a pretty package.

Glossy displays? Yeah, that's real professional. But, oh, they're so bright...

I could go on with nit after nit having to deal with my family's Apple-ware.

IMHO, I'll keep my ThinkPad, thank you very much...
 
He was an asshole. Why do people mourn assholes when they die? Jobs was essentially the marketing genius and didn't really create the apple products.

By the way that guy that invented C++ died recently and no one cares. Everybody is so sad about Jobs, but not the people that were really revolutionary.

Jobs was an outlier... was at the right place at the right time... the technology brain of Apples go to Wozniak and the engineers... Jobs was just the skilled salesman.
 
Quote from atlTrader666:

By the way that guy that invented C++ died recently and no one cares.

Actually, Stroustrup, the creator of C++ is still alive. It was Dennis Ritchie, who along with Brian Kernighan, developed C.

He also created UNIX with Ken Thompson.
 
Quote from jprad:

Actually, Stroustrup, the creator of C++ is still alive. It was Dennis Ritchie, who along with Brian Kernighan, developed C.

He also created UNIX with Ken Thompson.

Opps I apologize. So it was Dennis Ritchie who in my imo provided more value to the industry died... and no one cares about him?

I mean he created the C programming language and was a major developer for Unix... Jobs was merely a marketing guru.

Anyway Dennis passed away on Oct 12 and there's hardly any mention of him... shame.
 
Quote from lwlee:

The $10 million number is a popular misconception. Those were the initial numbers he committed when he bought the company. He owned the company for NINE years. Plunked many more tens of millions to keep it going.

You're confused. It was NeXT that he sunk tens of millions of dollars of his own money into, not Pixar. By some accounts, he put in almost $70MM into NeXT during it's lifetime.

The real coup with Pixar was when Jobs took it public. He screwed a lot of the original employees over and froze them out, which is how he ended up with a $1.5BN payday.

He truely was a heartless, arrogant bastard.
 
Nope, I updated my post with a link.

Yes he did dump a lot into NeXT. He was still in his young brash stage.

There is a book on Pixar that detailed its rise. Deeper material than what you will find in wikipedia.

Quote from jprad:

You're confused. It was NeXT that he sunk tens of millions of dollars of his own money into, not Pixar. By some accounts, he put in almost $70MM into NeXT during it's lifetime.

The real coup with Pixar was when Jobs took it public. He screwed a lot of the original employees over and froze them out, which is how he ended up with a $1.5BN payday.

He truely was a heartless, arrogant bastard.
 
Quote from atlTrader666:

Opps I apologize. So it was Dennis Ritchie who in my imo provided more value to the industry died... and no one cares about him?

I mean he created the C programming language and was a major developer for Unix... Jobs was merely a marketing guru.

Anyway Dennis passed away on Oct 12 and there's hardly any mention of him... shame.

Dennis was 70 years old, still relatively young these days but, not tragically so as was the case with Jobs.
 
Quote from lwlee:

Yes he did dump a lot into NeXT. He was still in his young brash stage.

Uh, he started NeXT several years after he purchased Pixar.

Nope, I updated my post with a link.

You need better links then.

"Lucasfilm decided to spin off the computer division, so Catmull and Smith sought a financier. That turned out to be Jobs, who paid $5 million to Lucasfilm and $5 million to capitalize the new company. They renamed it Pixar..."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...hive/2006/01/29/BUG8RGTL2L1.DTL&type=business
 
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