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With respect that's as blinkered a view in the opposite direction. Neither the "Jobs was a genius" nor the "Jobs was an asshole" narratives are incorrect, but neither are complete and as such neither is particularly helpful or enlightening on it's own.

To me at least, what makes Jobs most interesting is what he achieved despite being an asshole and how that played out. He undoubtedly was a thoroughly unpleasant individual and people who worked with him will queue around the block to tell you that, but he also, coming from a pretty low baseline, turned Apple into the largest company in the world by getting many of those same people who will tell you he's an asshole to build genuinely great products.

The most interesting people are rarely one thing or the other - that's what makes them interesting.



I don't know what the big deal about Apple being the "largest company in the world" is. Who was the company that they passed. Exxon Mobile? Shell? They create great products used by billions around the world. No one romanticizes their CEOs, and they're all assholes too.


It's not who they passed on the way up, it's the fact that they did it in 12 years starting from when their company was 60 days from bankruptcy after spending the preceding decade in a seemingly endless death spiral with no future. Do you not remember Apple in 1996? Blackberry right now looks positively bursting with potential by comparison.


Blackberry isn't getting a big influx of cash & business software from a competitor.


And with good reason.

Bill Gates didn't do that as some sort of goodwill gesture, he did it because he felt it was right for MS.


Huh?

Wasn't the money put into Apple part of a deal after Microsoft was found with source code for Quicktime getting into their own video software?

The "Microsoft believes in Apple" from that might be more Job's reality distortion field. :-)


Oooo, I didn't know that.

But going back to the original point, if that's true you could say that Apple was in a slightly better state than it might have appeared (in that it had leverage over MS that it could use that might not have been obvious at the time) but I don't think it significantly undermines the idea that Jobs did a fairly remarkable job in turning Apple around.

After all, MS and many other companies had far more resources than Apple even with the settlement and none of them had the same level of success Apple enjoyed during that period (or since).




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