More on Jobs

Jerry Pournell of BYTE has a column on Steve Jobs:

Bill Gates concentrated on the intellectual side of computing. When he went to graphics it was strictly for the utility of it. Steve Jobs was after elegance:  

People generally credit Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and the Apple II for sparking the computer revolution. When commentators list the most influential people of all time, Steve Jobs is usually right on top. And often Microsoft CEO Bill Gates isn't even on the list. That's not really the way it happened. In 1984, when Apple aired its famous NFL Super Bowl commercial and rolled out the Macintosh, the world was moving away from Jobs and Apple and toward Bill Gates' utilitarian vision: Alas, the technology was not up to what Jobs envisioned back then. The Mac was at the edge of the possible. Given Moore’s Law, that wasn’t a fatal flaw. But back then there were Jobs’ whims, such as the, let's say, mistaken view that 128K of memory would be enough for a computer that could do all the things the Macintosh could do. That it wouldn’t need a specialized graphics chip. Jobs said it could all be done by clever software using the CPU. And the Mac wouldn’t need a fan. Too noisy. The result was what I called in a BYTE piece "a great operating system tied to a toy computer". Steve Jobs never forgave me for that remark. But it was true: the Mac was elegant but, in 1984, it was too expensive. And too slow to get much real work done. Not long after that, Steve Jobs and John Sculley had a power fight. Ex-Pepsi chief Sculley was the man Jobs hired to come in and run Apple as a business. He could see that Jobs wasn’t really interested in business. He could see Jobs was interested in elegance and that he was utterly inflexible. Jobs famously confronted his technical crew’s suggestions about adding memory or a fan to the Mac, insisting, "that sucks and I’m adamant." When Sculley interfered with what Jobs thought was the core vision for Apple, Jobs tried to fire him. Jobs lost that fight and Apple turned him out. Apple struggled along, but there was no commanding vision. And, by 1997, Apple was on the rocks. It was finished, headed for the scrap heap. Meanwhile, Bill Gates built Microsoft on a simple principle: think of something just achievable. Write the software and ship it. It will be slow and clunky, but the technology will keep advancing and bail you out. It was a realistic picture of the world at the time. In the 1980s, Jobs didn’t seem to understand that principle. The hardware wasn't up to what he wanted, that elegance. He turned out being adamant about that. He toiled in the wilderness for a dozen years, and what he learned turned him into the great innovator we see today. In 1997, Steve Jobs came back with new ideas. Only now the technology was advanced enough to make them practical. In ten years, Apple was the biggest technology company in the world. Gates achieved his remarkable vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Once that looked all but inevitable, Gates let go and turned to the work of The Gates Foundation. It was just about then that Jobs came back to Apple with a new vision: an elegant computer for every pocket. His generation grew up with the idea of pocket-sized computers in popular science fiction. The iPhone is that pocket computer. The iPad brings us even closer. Every iPhone and iPad iteration moves us nearer to the time when there will be an elegant computer in everyone's hand. Steve Jobs can let go with the certainty that this, too, will come to pass. We must all wish him well.  

Jerry Pournelle is BYTE's senior technologist, and an award-winning science fiction author and columnist.

Rico says it's good to have the history laid out clearly; Sculley was a pompous idiot, and Apple was lucky to survive him...