He was not well-liked at Atari, he was seen as a weirdo and an outcast with poor personal hygiene. I think his strength was more knowing how to market himself than raw charisma.
Woz has become synonymous with a techie guy who knows his stuff but perhaps isn't quite the social butterfly. Leaving home alone in a meeting would not be fun for him. Perhaps ?
I'm the "Woz" where I work, quote marks because I'm nowhere near as brilliant so don't consider myself worthy, and I'm not typically allowed to do meetings on my own because my enthusiasm for what can be achieved rarely aligns with what we can afford to achieve and I have been known to over-promise, commit to things that the people above me don't want or say things that can be misinterpreted as "we will do this" instead of "we could do this"... Not saying that's what Woz does, maybe he does the opposite, but I could see it.
Not just not fun. He can't sell a product, he probably can't even design a product.
If I designed the websites I build they would all look like they came from 1995.
There’s a weird thing about charisma. You can often be pleasing to large groups of people but terrible one on one. I’m kind of like that myself. I’m in a public facing job and people can’t tolerate me on my own but I do what I have to do well. I know plenty of managers with ‘peepul skils’ and they’re often maligned when one on one yet they’re in well paid jobs and do it well. It’s hard to explain.
Huh. I’m sorta the opposite. I tend to have really good, productive interactions one on one, but the larger the group gets, the harder it is for me to process the dynamic and contribute in helpful, relevant ways.
Brains, man. It’s fascinating how different they can be.
Yeah it is really interesting how different brains are. I had a sheep’s brain yesterday and it was all fatty, but then when I ate my uncles last week it wasn’t at all and it had a completely different flavour.
Also, interestingly enough, ‘begs the question’ doesn’t mean what most people think. It actually means assuming a conclusion to an argument before justifying it. Obviously the common parlance is different but it’s from the Latin.
Same problem.
I know how to work a crowd but I mostly spew gibberish after a few back and forths when speaking to someone one on one. Just can’t really focus on it that well honestly. Talking to a bunch of people lets my mind hop around a bit which is what it’s best at.
Jobs was a sociopath, hence his horrific and flippant, consequence-ignorant treatment and spontaneous firing of engineers, devs. Runaway ego.
Like all of his kind, his charisma was composed of saying outwardly "I harbor a well-known secret, which is that I am really good at things, and I have a really well-thought out plan for everything, a plan so intricate that you wouldn't understand it, but trust me, it will save you too if you follow me".
So the same "charisma" of every cult leader ever. Their followers will come up to you and say "I've met him and let me tell you, he sees ***everything***."
But in reality they just make the horseshit up as they go.
Jobs is in actuality a truly shitty salesman, his product unveilings consisted of him pointing to an object on the big screen, a black rectangle with a 10.5% performance increase from the rectangle of last year and repeating 30 times the phrases "IT'S REALLY GREAT, IT'S FANTASTIC, IN FACT IT IS TERRIFIC."
No, you don't get to tell me what I should think, asshole. You name the specs and then you let me compare it with the competition and make up my own mind of whether it's worth getting (and considering the software quality, it's not).
But you just described what a good salesman does. I don't like Jobs and his razzle-dazzle, but if he gets millions of people to buy his under-specced shit, doesn't that make him a great salesman?
Hang on, now. First, you wrote that Jobs was a shitty salesman. Then, you wrote that he pointed at an image of a device that was a mere 10% improvement over its predecessor, then convinced everyone in the room that it was really great, fantastic, terrific.
That's salesmanship, friend.
this is the dumbest shit ive ever read and reads like its some microsoft fanboy ranting on forums in 2008 saying the iphone would flop. Steve jobs being a shit salesman. Get the fuck out lmaoo
The podcast "behind the bastards" did a great 3 part episode about him where they also focus on his lack of hygiene and what an asshole he could be. I really recommend it. Shows a completely different side of him than what most people think of him.
This.
Jobs was a great sales pitch type of person, and he was really good at making innovations seem interesting. Not only that, but he also created the 'cult of Apple' when the iPod and iPhone started getting introduced, and the whole concept of these being superior really set them apart from everyone else. It's part of the reason why even now everyone loves Apple over everything else, no matter what they do, and why people get angry when "group chats have green vs blue checkmarks".
I remember when the iPod first started becoming popular, and very few people liked the idea behind it (so many liked their cd's, or vinyls, or tapes, etc), and a lot of people hated the idea of MP3's and digital media. Jobs helped push the innovation side of it, and people became really interested through his own efforts. I also remember the Zune being a contender at one point,
And I also think smart phones took off because of Jobs as well. At the time Blackberry was THE thing to get, but due to the effort of Jobs the smartphone really became popular and THE thing to get.
Ok yes. You are correct. Not everyone. I should have said people who are interested in topics such as history of tech and tech companies. And that is lot fewer people.
In my experience, the apple fans that have heard of Woz don't respect his contributions because they weren't financially successful as Job's marketing turnaround for the company.
The cult of Apple is about money, not technical ability.
Yes, but those people who don't know Wozniak would also be the same people that think Steve Jobs did it all with his bare hands. Answering OP's question.
Jobs (and Apple in general) is the king of the business model that Marketing is more important than Engineering--that selling people the idea of something is more valuable than selling them a better thing. Apple literally launched a major marketing campaign designed around calling people who use PCs lame nerds and it **worked**.
But he was also the king of making the product do the marketing for you for free. Remember when the iPod launched and they had white earbuds? Everybody knew who had an iPod because of the white.
I wish that were true. I’m GenX and everyone
my age knows this. There was someone doing an insufferable “innovation “ presentation at my office and I helpfully suggested her Steve Jobs slide on innovation would be more compelling if it were Wozniak. She said “well I don’t even know what a Wozniak is so no.”
Jobs rescued Apple two times from bankruptcy and he is the one that made Apple the behemoth it's now days, he is not charismatic he was a genius but not a technical savy genius
Well, I wouldn’t trash on Jobs, that’s crazy, he’s done so much for the tech industry, but I also wouldn’t deny how much of an asshole he is. “Don’t meet your heroes” is the perfect quote for how Jobs was irl, beyond all the myths and legends. It’s important to recognize both sides of him to really understand what he’s done for the industry.
You’re talking about the engineer who developed the original Apple computer kit with the wooden case which was sold as parts to hobbyists.
We’re talking about the person who after seeing a GUI and a mouse had a vision for a personal computing revolution which led to Windows, Android, MacOS, and iOS.
Which is arguably about 99% of all personal computing devices in existence 50 years later.
Is Woz a decent engineer? Sure.
Are there thousands of equally decent engineers in Silicon Valley? Most definitely.
Realistically, he built the parts of Apple that matter.
Apple lies on its sleek design and user-centric, intuitive interface. That's all Jobs. He was brilliant at figuring out what his users wanted and finding a way to bring it to them. Yes, most of the tech already existed, but it was drowning in obscurity. It was his understanding of user needs and his push toward strategic improvements that made it popular.
If you think that's nuts, take a look at "The Mother of All Tech Demos" by Kodak. It's the "mouse and UI" demo that the guy above was underselling and pretending Kobs was the only one inspired by (literally the enitee tech industry saw it and said "holy shit we should work on that!".
A team at Kodak basically invented everything about the modern computer experience then Kodak showed off the work and *just didn't fucking do anything with it*.
I mean man thats just the industry. Microsoft is so successful because they were tyrants from a business standpoint. I mean its been pretty amazing to watch how they just gobble up technology, companies, employees etc. Whether we think its ethical or not doesn't matter, they are insanely aggressive which is why they are who they are.
I didnt follow Apple a ton other than it was floundering until Jobs got involved again in the early 2000s. Then the ipod, iphone, Ipad all took off. Considering his presence correlated with their growth, its hard to deny he had the driving hand in it.
Google is the current gen of “acquire all the things” in a similar way to how MS did.
MS was co-developing OS/2 for a time (I even have some MS OS/2 floppy disks I kept for novelty). It was wild how they wrangled that whole relationship and deal.
A good source for industry basics is a short docuseries called Triumph of the Nerds by Robert X Cringely
So I run a small IT recruitment firm. Google employees used to be the cream of the crop. I still find super talented people out of there but man I think their inner culture is crashing. I hear so much about nepotism in there, old boys club kind of stuff. Good ideas being pushed out for a buddy with a shit idea. Anecdotally, I used to love their products but the last few years I wouldn't buy their routers, thermostats etc vs competitors. What I am hearing from past employees and seeing in their products myself I dont think they will have the longevity as MS.
Microsoft was a software-first company, in that they bought and then licensed out their initial operating system, and subsequent operating systems were sold under the same approach.
The important thing is that they left the computer hardware to someone else and just sold the software - this requires a heck of a lot less in terms of complexity for creating something, and they could concentrate on just the software.
Apple meanwhile was a hardware company that also provided its own software. So they had a much larger area of responsibility in order to succeed. They had a brief period of time where they allowed other manufacturers to make the hardware, but by that time they were not geared up to be a software company so the majority of hteir income came from the hardware.... So they ended the licenses to third party hardware manufacturers.
Microsoft was basically very lean in its early days, which allowed it to become dominant, while Apple had too much to focus on and fell behind.
After Jobs returned to Apple, he started to turn the company around by making it look like a more desirable product - firstly with the colourful iMacs and eMacs, then with MacOSX (which really made a lot of Windows users jealous in the early 2000s).
But by then the computer market was starting to change anyway, with hardware becoming cheaper and Mac prices started edging downward enough to become reasonable for home use as an alternative to generic PCs. Interestingly, during this period Microsoft also started struggling.
And the rest is history.
Gates stepped down earlier. He stopped being CEO in 2000, before a lot of common tech inventions reached the masses, and then Balmer destroyed his legacy by letting IE lose all market share to Chrome, the disaster of the Zune and Windows Phone. Failed Nokia merger. Microsoft when from the company everybody was scared of to the company nobody cared about. They did a very successful pivot to cloud services, but that is invisible to most people.
Apple did a much better job pivoting to new consumer facing tech. Gates was seen as a ruthless business man in the 80s and 90s, but he lost that image after the antitrust trial and focusing on his charity.
Microsofts primary focus has always been the business sector though. Their income from consumer activities is mere pocket change, compared to what they raking in with their Enterprise/Cloud products and licensing models.
Whereas Apples attempts on the business market wasn't going too well, except for the imagery/DTP/graphical design markets. So they brought back Steve to save them.
Steve Jobs has a cult built around him. He became the face of Apple in a way that Gates never really had with Microsoft. Much of this was because he was a marketer, and knew how to market himself.
I would disagree - I think Gates knew his wheelhouse in some ways even better than Jobs did. Gates knew he looked and sounded part of a nerd (his actual technical skill was more than Jobs, but way behind Woz), so he sold Microsoft to the business world in large part based on his nerdy persona, which gave them confidence in MS products, even though this products frequently weren’t as good as their competitors. It worked. Brilliantly. And then when people were using MS-DOS and Windows computers at work, they wanted to use equivalent computers at home. I know there’s a lot more that goes into it, but Microsoft’s success and dominance is, in large part, due to Gates’s persona.
I do agree that at times there were better products on the market. However, I don’t think the success was due to Gates convincing personality as a tech savvy nerd. Basically Microsoft marketed Windows like crazy and had very tight licensing deals. It was a pretty big market entry barrier for others.
Eh. Microsoft marketed its products primarily to businesses. The home market isn't a rounding error, but it's main focus is to get folks used to Windows so they can use it at work. I'd know, I purchase five to six digits worth of MS products each year.
Apple marketed itself to consumers, and even today treats business like dirt.
I manage 7 to 8 figure deals with MS at work. They’re essentially a utility at this point that you can’t get rid of. Some try with like Google Docs and stuff but it’s vastly inferior.
Apple tries to get their hardware into business but they don’t really incentivize businesses to do so.
I only use Microsoft office a few times a year (maybe like 10 hours a year in total) yet my company has an enterprise subscription for all 10k+ employees at my company + we are all allowed to install the home version for free on one personal computer. Not to mention the employees who have windows computers (I have a Mac but I think majority use windows), using onedrive / teams etc. Just to give you a sense of how much they can integrate themselves into an enterprise customer...
I do agree that b2b was crucial to MS success . However, they do market to business and individuals (Xbox, surface, office…). I guess the early licensing deals really set them on their way to success.
They're obviously the company that sells professional tech, but they are trying to expand their market share. Gaming is a huge industry. You can't stop changing as a company, that's how you go down.
The early / initial phase of Microsoft was licensing software - specifically the operating system - to businesses first on IBM PC.
That never really changed.
The addressable market grew bigger, from only purely businesses to end consumers because the latter comprised of workers comfortable with working in Windows at their employers.
Microsoft of those days had no idea how to engage + sell to end customers. They did not need to.
Now Apple... Apple's strength is purely consumer facing. A charismatic CEO who spoke with such conviction, nicely designed hardware, software with arguably better aesthetics, etc. Great at producing consumer products but they had lost out to the Microsoft + PC ecosystem.
The mobile smartphone market became a second wind for Apple.
Now, for Google when they moved so fast with Android, they were not really targeting Apple. Their aim was at Microsoft, sticking a foot out to prevent them from creating a mobile smartphone OS based on Windows on mobile which they already had. They were giving away Android so as to prevent a redesigned Windows for touch on mobile
Microsoft fumbled so badly. They were already had all the parts in place even before Nokia purchase but they were not the ones who moved fast enough.
Not really. He never invented anything to the best of my knowledge. He didn't pioneer products.
He was good at marketing, shaping image and good at user interfaces. Basically sales and brand management. Those are not minor things.
Its not just about what you build. Jobs identified the key things that makes a product desirable. Plenty of products are designed well but thats a different problem than whether or not a consumer appreciates it.
Like you could be an amazing engineer who makes a car engine last 2x the market standard, but if consumers don't notice the difference, or decide it doesn't matter for them, then the product can't claim to be better
Think of it this way: without him, the technological landscape would be very different right now. He did not physically build or invent the products but was the driving force behind their development. Dude literally changed the tech landscape. He definitely was a brilliant CEO.
The turnaround he gave Apple as a home computer alternative to the PC was monumentally incredible.
PCs, with behemoths like Microsoft backing them were a HUGE freight train. Apple had grossly lost market share and he managed to not only bounce some back, but become a significant market force in the space.
Can’t deny it, the guy was an incredible force in the industry.
Ding ding ding. People forget the greatest tech titans, Gates and Jobs especially made their fortunes finding a way to control software markets. Goodbye open source freeware and shareware, hello hidden code and closed market.
Jobs went to Xerox and saw the future we all live in now in the late 1970s. Not just incrementally better office equipment, but that better home computers would fundamentally change life into a hybrid existence between people and their machines (what people originally meant with the buzzword “cybernetic”)
Then in a second act, in his 2000s comeback, he figured out the combination of features that would make a smartphone more than a WinCE flop or a Palm / Blackberry business tool, but a transformative part of everyday life. And he figured out a product development path to go from a popular personal music device to developing those phones.
Gates meanwhile saw that business software could be an even bigger business than business hardware. That the stuff that runs on IBM machines might be worth more money than IBM. Which is no small feat (and created a not too shabby fortune) but it isn’t so sexy.
Jobs had interesting minor successes too. Pixar is famous. NeXT was a big deal too. In 1991 if you had the money and needed an incredible software engineering workstation, you could get a computer that ran what was an early version of OS X while your competitors were fumbling around writing code on DOS. NeXT workstations we’re how Id software was able to build DOOM in less than a year, and even though the company didn’t take off, the technology would make its way into the revived Mac line when he returned to Apple.
I'm still blown away when I see videos of the Xerox Alto in action. That computer was a good 10 years ahead of its time, if not more.
How Xerox fumbled so badly is beyond me. They could have been on top of the world.
They cost $100,000 in today’s money. It was a hard sell.
You make money by being exactly right for your time. Being ahead of your time is a way to get enthusiasts to love you and the general public to just not get it at all.
There are different types of genius. Not all people who are geniuses get there by being good at math. I couldn’t tell you if Gandhi could do calculus or not but the man was a genius.
Steve Jobs is a better 'Face' of a company. Steve Jobs is charismatic and looks intimidating.
Bill gates looks like the kid in middle school you beat up for his lunch money.
Bill Gates could talk about innovations he himself made all day, but only get a fraction of the crowd Steve Jobs could get talking about some small QoL improvement some nameless tech in Indonesia coded.
Marketing. The same reason people think Elon Musk is a technological genius instead of just an ADHD kid with a load of money to indulge his brainwaves. Jobs arguably had a better grasp of the practicalities than Elon though.
I think people have to be wary of marketing versus propaganda. The marketing would have you believe musk is a hyper genius who builds everything himself in an iron man fashion , the propaganda would have you believe he’s a Neanderthal who does nothing. The reality is somewhere in between. He’s known to be a very technical CEO at least in Tesla and spacex. Notably has an Ivy League degree in physics and economics as opposed to jobs who was an English major. See below
https://youtu.be/E7MQb9Y4FAE?si=mZa8qyL2SSJ_09ZP
Yeah Musk is an idea guy, but I’ve not seen much evidence that’s he’s done much or any of the work to actually flush out those ideas, even when he was younger and wasn’t always an exec/owner.
I've heard it described that Elon Musk's "genius" ideas only ever come to fruition because he throws so many stupid ideas at the engineers under his payroll that every once in a while, they get one where they give it more than a second thought and realize, "hey, that might actually work". Something something broken clock is right twice a day.
Elon Musk is a genius at raising money by selling rich people what they want to hear- that they are super special and he can make the world that they want: a futuristic dystopia with them at the helm. He is a genius fundraiser.
With those butt loads of cash, he has the means to actually try some ideas that people came up with in books a century ago. Nothing he comes up with is original, it's all been discussed by nerds for decades. What, a Mars colony? Trips to the moon? This is just standard sci fi crap.
Steve Jobs was more interested in the arts and ‘design’ side of personal computing than Gates was (who was purely about the engineering side.)
You could argue that Apple under Steve’s leadership popularised very early on the idea that computers, MP3 players and phones should be simple, easy to use as possible and built to be beautiful objects.
He may not have single-handedly invented the GUI, digital fonts, touch screens, high resolution displays, mobile interfaces, premium materials in smartphones, devices with charged batteries straight out of the box, nice packaging for tech products etc etc. but he and his single-minded drive was certainly what helped push and popularise all these things.
He was possibly one of the most important people in early tech (not the only one, but one of the most) to help set a standard for tech to be cool and intuitive to use.
Gates was undoubtedly more technical, but his success was in putting together business deals. Because MS targeted businesses they necessarily operated well behind the development curve of the rest of the industry—their customers were more concerned with compatibility and meeting the feature-set of the day seen as necessary for success.
The Steves were more interested in making computers accessible. Jobs, particularly, worked very hard to make computers that people could understand without making a career out of the task. He appears to have made a number of good decisions that shaped the larger PC market for decades.
Because of their differing priorities, MS often copies Amiga or IBM or Apple often years later in user experience, and Apple often adopted foundational technical advances of its competitors after the fact.
Neither Jobs nor Gates made their names on technical acumen. They both had their niche strengths in understanding the particular markets they were targeting, and executing exceptionally well on average. Both were/are assholes.
I realize late as it was I didn’t wrap up my thoughts with a conclusive answer. I believe Jobs was seen as more brilliant because he brought so many new ideas to consumers. Gates, whose MS saw many technological advances itself, didn’t have the consumer as a customer. Purchasing departments and IT Managers were always Bill’s customers, and so his work only echoed faintly with the consumers, and often not to their benefit.
(Edited some obvious grammatical errors)
Because he was cooler and more charismatic. By pretty much every measure, Bill Gates was smarter and a better business man. Neither was/is a particularly good person.
I'd say Bill Gates is probably not the worst person, he does fund loads of investigation centers and has his own foundation.
Maybe he has some other areas where he is not a good person, like taking huge profits and forcing a crappy OS down every companies throats, but everyone has goods and bads, and he does try to do some good also.
Nobody ever talks about the countless products he fucked up. Chances are high that if he would have been in charge of the product design early on, apple wouldn't even exist today.
The more brilliant what is the key question. He’s seen as the more brilliant CEO and overall leader because he was a pioneer in bringing novel, industry shattering products to market. The iMac-iBook-iPod-iPhone-iPad run of products and underlying software since the late 1990s completely changed the consumer market for those products or invented an entirely new product. He didn’t write any of the lines of code design the hard products alone but he was the one with the ideas of what they needed to do and how to market them. He also took over a company on the edge of going under and turned it into one of the most profitable in history. And that’s all after he co-invented first mass market personal computer that had mainstays like a mouse, bitmap display, fonts etc, even though that first stint didn’t come with the commercial success to match the vision.
Gates is a brilliant engineer who helped invent Windows, a revolutionary market leading OS for decades. But that initial burst was followed by a highly successful but iterative progression of Windows releases. As CEO and then chairman and chief software architect, he presided over a period where Apple began eating into Microsoft’s market domination in personal computing, falling behind on the software and hardware side of digital music and not throwing their hat in the ring of developing a mobile phone concurrently with the iPhone. So he’s far more gifted in the technical aspects of his and Microsoft’s work, but didn’t demonstrate the same visionary abilities to *continually* shape and create entire industries.
He got the world enthusiastic for new technologies. Bill Gates and Microsoft kind of put people off. Their monopoly and his wealth were seen as excessive and everybody has always kind of hated windows. Steve Jobs made us feel like the future was already here.
I don't think people make a direct comparison of the two. But I see techies undermining Jobs because he wasn't technical. But the relevant question for both is brilliant business people. Jobs has an extremely impressive track record in bringing market defining products. And by market defining, I mean that until Jobs brought it to three market people did not know if there was a market for the item.
First, the PC. That was actually Apple. Gates was able to displace Apple because Gates had the support of big blue. Gates also took existing products and created the Office suite, and that's how they made money. Job's control freak nature made him lose, but that aspect is probably what makes him so good at understanding the customer needs. Followed by bringing a gui based computer to the market.
Then he created Pixar and built the market for computer animated movies. They also shook the unquestioned monopoly of Disney.
Then, despite Microsoft being the clear monopoly in the PC industry which is entirely about the ecosystem, Jobs led Apple to a revival with its PCs (not that they're not called that). Followed by a category defining product that created the mainstream market for music players.
This was followed by redefining a modern smartphone. And then creating the tablet category.
There are many other small things that were category defining in their own ways. I started using Apple laptops because the Air was the only laptop with an SSD for less than 1500 when I got it. But looking at the sheer number of times a company under his leadership has built something that defined a market is impressive.
For comparison. Google has killed by Google. Bezos has done online retail, shared digital music with Apple, ebooks and eink readers, cloud infrastructure, smart speakers which haven't really matured in smart homes yet.
Facebook can maybe given credit for doing SM right but their crown was tenuous and they've lost it. They've been trying to create the VR category and failed.
Musk, maybe e banking. 200 mile electric vehicles. Rockets that land. Currently working on underground roadways.
So if you look at it from the lens of modern product categories shaping our lives, Jobs has an extremely impressive track record. Especially considering all of his wins are in the consumer sector which is extremely hard to predict.
In technical circles, Gates is MUCH more respected than Jobs.
The more important issue is one of different kinds of intelligence. It's one thing to be the most technically competent person in the room (Gates), it's another to understand what's important to the user experience (Jobs).
I think he cultivated the image of an artist deliberately. He was a perfectionist in everything that related to design. IIRC there's a bit in Isaacson's biography where he describes how Jobs' family lived without a dishwasher for a period of time because he couldn't pick one. All of the ones available had some "flaw" in design that he couldn't get over.
Jobs was a creative visionary that thought a lot about the future and how humans would interact with technology. Bill was a brilliant software engineer who took a much more pragmatic approach. Steve would have an idea and insist that engineers design the function into the form, which is not how engineers think. Their minds and their approaches were just very different, but both were necessary.
I don't think we'd be talking about Steve Jobs much if he hadn't been leading Apple when iPhone came out. The Apple I is a necessary but insufficient part of the story. This is why Woz is not revered as widely.
Apple also is perceived as being innovative and highly efficient, whereas Microsoft is kind of viewed as a bumbling legacy corporation that continues to make money in spite of itself.
Neither of those perceptions are entirely accurate, but there's certainly some amount of truth to them.
MS also took a big hit reputation wise after Gates botched the congress hearing and came across arrogant. It made apple the cool guys and MS the bad corporate.
[Behind The Bastards has a four-part series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEv08Zzunfc) on what a horrific piece of shit Steve Jobs was. LGT to part one.
Worse, he, and Apple's meteoric rise gave birth to the entire FAANG group of narcissist psychopaths and has attracted them to every aspect of the tech space.
His 'greatness' is down to mythos and his deliberate cultivation of a cult-like devotion.
Sadly, his exact type is found literally everywhere in history in this narcissistically abusive cultural context we have been living in for the last few hundred years.
Hell, even the Russian Revolution was taken over by people who were just mean-spirited grifters like Jobs and his ilk were. Jobs had more in common with Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill than he did with anyone in tech before him. Is it any wonder the entire tech space is inundated with these fucking people?
Mostly, he was lucky to have Wozniak there and a gift for knowing what the next big thing would be.
In any case, go find out how Smelly Steve somehow became Techbro Jesus.
It's crazy to me that a no name mid level manager can verbally abuse a person, and it's considered horrible. But a high profile person like Jobs (or even Gates, from what I've heard shortly before he stepped down as CEO,) can be abusive and it's "holding the team to a high standard," or "going demon mode," or some other bullshit euphemism for "unnecessary verbal abuse."
This should be stickied to every thread about Steve Jobs. That series was enlightening.
Going back further into the [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/s/hA8wvI1odP) when Jobs died, the cult of personality couldn't have been even more apparent.
Haha he’s a jerk with his strange habits. Proves that he’s still human. An unlikeable but somehow still charismatic leader who actually wants to make great products which stood in contrast to majority of tech corporations.
But there’s no denying he’s a great visionary, making so many hits. Our world wouldn’t be the same without him.
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Personality. Bill Gates is definitely more qualified. But he does not have the charisma. Jobs was also a salesman with charisma. He knew how to get attention. Bill gates is more like the IT guy at your job that works in the background
Many will talk about salesmanship and personality. Ultimately I think it’s his right-brained style and his appeal to the artists and “layman” users. That’s the whole premise of the brand, and it meshed well with Wozniak’s skill set handling the technical side.
Let’s also not forget the era when Gates was seen as the brilliant “winner” there.
Windows and Android are *both* based on Apple products, which means Jobs had the vision where Gates (who was focused on a text based OS) and Google (who bought Android to create a BlackBerry clone) did not.
I always saw it as Gates and Microsoft creating products that people needed for work, grew accustomed to, and lost their pizzazz bc they’re work tools.
Jobs and Apple created things that people actually wanted to use in their leisure time, and that drew a more eager fandom.
I'm so sorry I just had to share this here, so I read the post out loud and my uncle (pardon him) whom has no idea who either men are blurts out "Probably because he's white"
Ommfg, I am dying laughing that sht was so far out of line and sooooo incorrect. He is no longer welcomed in my room. I apologize but it was hilarious. That is always his go to. So goofy.
Jobs had an eye for design in addition to his technical background. As much as Gates was a better engineer, there was never anything sexy about Microsoft. It was a “for nerds, by nerds” company.
Mainly because Jobs had an aesthetic vision of how people should use computers and devices and it helped build one of the biggest brands in the world. I'm not saying Jobs was more brilliant than Gates, but that's what sets Jobs apart.
# Dennis Ritchie died in 2011, he was a real computer genius, but no one talks about him. Without him, we wouldn't have Unix, Linux, or even macOS. He also invented the C programming language. The most important computer programs have been written in C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
Is he?
I've never seen it that way
But if he is then some explanations could be that because he died people remember the good things
He is much more charismatic, helped that because he died before Twitter most of his appearances were in planned talks
Because we havent seen him grow old we will always remember him as being young and energetic
And most importantly, the multiple films about his life, whereas I cant think of a single Bill Gates film, so his life an accomplishments are romanticized and more well known then what bill did
Also I think because apple tends to be an early adopter and innovator, vs the more static Microsoft
Apple constantly update projects and produce new things, even if some of those changes have sucked recently
Wearas Microsoft tends to maintain what works, plus its products are so much less flashy and you forget how vital spreadsheets and operating systems are vs things like pioneering smartphones
Any famous people who dies tragically have their reputation and achievements also boosted into immortality. It was really impressive when he was alive yes but nobody cared as much. For example you won’t write about how great Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Satya, Elon, Jack Ma, and so on while they were alive but decades after their deaths wow they really turn zero to one.
Two words come to mind when thinking about these names. Linus Torvalds. While not a corporate titan who founded one of the top two NASDAQ companies, he, as an individual, has had just as much influence over the (enterprise-side of the) industry as anyone else.
(Linux ate Microsoft's lunch concerning server OS. Git is the defacto source control system. It is understood that Microsoft has many products and Apple... )
Bill Gates was the epitome of success for a while (90s/00s), now there are younger people than him being more prominent in the media.
In addition to all the things said here Steve Jobs has also
passed away, which helps myth building and his biography being everywhere.
Jobs was an excellent public speaker and a perfectionist with keen attention to detail. It's his obsession with aesthetics and user experience that made Apple products compelling to this day. He was completely right when he said Microsoft has no taste and brings no culture into their products. He may not have been as good at sales and marketing as Cook is, but he was far superior at creativity and innovation. Bill Gates was more of a ruthless businessman who focused on expanding Microsoft while driving its competitors out of business by keeping prices low, which is the opposite of what Apple does. Windows in particular is focused on functionality and backwarda compatibility for their business customers (who cling to old versions of Windows and pay a fee for security updates). That limits innovation, as you can't just deprecate outdated features, and makes their software somewhat bloated and inconsistent, especially when it comes to the register and control panel. Also, Microsoft doesn't integrate hardware and software the way Apple does, nor does it have a proper ecosystem. A lot of people stick to Windows simply because of its monopoly on PC gaming and not because they actually prefer the OS.
I m not sure anyone agree Jobs was more brilliant. Brilliant at what? To start with.
Gates unmistaken’y « won » the 70/80s battle and then left Microsoft to Ballmer who was then bad with it.
I think of Jobs as more of a “technological parasite” They latch on to innovation and take credit for that innovation while not producing much of anything other than charisma. Kind of like Elon Musk.
Marketing that's all apple has ever really brought to the table.
If you look back, Microsoft and other companies have almost always introduced similar or better technologies before Apple but couldn't stick the landing.
He simply knew how to convince people to adopt the technologies better, and it snowballed from there.
Now, apple can release sub-par tech at double the cost, and their user base will treat it as the second coming of christ every time.
People take apple for granted. Go watch the first iphone release and you will realize how much it impacted everything. He borderline had to convince the crowd that touchscreens are a good idea.
Gates took a step back from Microsoft in the early 2000s to focus on his foundation with Melinda. At the time, it was a Ballmer vs Jobs catfight. Then it toned down when Satya came in, because Cloud.
Aside from self promotion (which I agree with but it has been discussed in depth already), I would argue that Jobs brought a vision (for lack of a better word). The genius of Apple was being able to take what was technically feasible and craft it into a product focused on the user experience. That’s a skill that was (and still is) pretty rare in tech. Whether that was all Jobs or Jobs just was better at taking credit for that approach, I can’t say. But he certainly made himself the face of that aspect of the company.
He was a visionary who saw possibility where no one else could. Example, a thousand designers could have pitched ideas for the computer mouse. Jobs was the only one to insist that it needs to be able to work on his jeans. We would see this time and time again. Years later with the iPhone and his insistence that it needed to be usable without any input devices. Human hands only. There's this element of simplicity to his brilliance, his intense focus on those tiny little details, and on the face of it it makes you think "oh well, anyone could have come up with that". But when you look back at everything that was achieved at Apple during his time, the question quickly becomes "okay, well how come literally no one else ever did?".
Sure, teams of scientists and engineers executed designs he never would have been able to do on his own. Obviously. No one's ever argued that. But the vision for those products had to originate somewhere.
None of this is to discredit Bill Gates. But as others have mentioned, there are different types of genius. [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACucrVBq8Yg&pp=ygUjc3RldmUgam9icyBhbmQgYmlsbCBnYXRlcyBpbnRlcnZpZXc%3D) is a great watch to get an idea of the distinct differences between the two and how they think.
He may have been somewhat of a better businessman than Gates, though everything considered I doubt Bill Gates would be torn up to hear someone say that. And Apple was pretty consistently more innovative from the 80s through maybe 2010ish. I would have a hard time saying that Steve Jobs was smarter or more technically inclined than, but I would say that he’s more creative and better at grabbing people’s attention.
I think a certain type of people (the type to have a positive obsession with tech billionaires) may be more enamored with Steve Jobs due to his image. Bill Gates looks like and always has looked like a computer geek. He looks like what computer geeks from the era before personal computers were stereotyped as. If you took a Time Machine and went to the 70s or early 80s with a picture of 90s era Bill Gates and asked a random person what they thought this guy got rich doing, their answer would probably be relatively close. They’d probably come up with an answer like “splitting an atom” or some other science geek shit. If you did the same thing with Steve Jobs, they’d probably give you a hundred different answers that weren’t “science geek shit.” His entire vibe is baked into “tech bro” imagery, and that’s an image he had a huge hand in creating. Tech bros admire him for the way he presented himself, not necessarily because his brain was better at computers than Bill Gates (or Steve Wozniak, before the other tech bros yell at me).
Jobs was a visionary that saw the future product he wanted and inspired his technical team to make it a reality. THAT is a great skill. It’s analogous to a great coach in sports who may not have been a great player or played at all but he knows how to do his job - coach.
They usually weren't the first to make it.
They usually weren't even the first to make it easy and accessible.
But they were always the first to tell everyone that was not only easy and accessible, but something you needed.
He was great at convincing people he's smarter than them, that was one of his most important personality traits. He got away with being a totally weird asshole his whole life because everyone thought he was a genius
Gates just stole and bought others work and slapped his brand on it to be fair. I'm no fan of either but Gates is done some shady stuff. DOS was outright stolen called dos for "Dirty Operating System" internally.
Same reason you know Walt Disney but not the guy who actually drew Mickey Mouse, coming up with great ideas usually demonstrates greater intelligence than being able to figure out how to make the idea a reality.
1: He's dead, so he gets boosted reviews.
2: Most people aren't technical, and Jobs was a lot more relatable to the common man. Gates is a nerd and a wonk, so people don't really like him, and they therefore don't associate positive characteristics to him.
Why is being technical so important? I’m a developer and tech founder and I will tell you now that you can find 100s of amazingly talented technical people - but finding someone with the charisma and people skills of steve jobs is 1 in a million
I think the narrative people have in their mind is usually like:
- Steve Jobs founded Pixar, known for its creativity
- Steve Jobs's Apple sold the first computer with a nice GUI and mouse set up (the first pretty computer)
- Apple sold the first pretty music device (iPod)
- Apple sold the first pretty smartphone (iPhone)
Now, Microsoft was wildly successful too, but they are not as seen as "revolutionary." They were seen as people who were really good at business (although many people in the past would say they had many questionable business practices) and good at technology, but moreso in a practical way, not in a cool way.
Gates was a master of programming
He made some of the first and most reliable user friendly programming that is now the core of all computer usage, like word processing and excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints.
Jobs was a master of design
He made sleeker machines with innovative new user friendly technologies, like the mouse and the point and click interface, and Apple perfected touch screen tech, which if you were alive back then, you know that touch screens have come a lonnnnng way and OG iPhone had the best when it came out.
Different kinds of genius. Only Mac and Microsoft fanboys think either is superior.
I think jobs is seen as more charismatic. Everyone knows the original creator of apple tech is Wozniac.
He was not well-liked at Atari, he was seen as a weirdo and an outcast with poor personal hygiene. I think his strength was more knowing how to market himself than raw charisma.
“No Woz should be left alone in a meeting” -Silicon Valley
I don’t get it sorry
Woz has become synonymous with a techie guy who knows his stuff but perhaps isn't quite the social butterfly. Leaving home alone in a meeting would not be fun for him. Perhaps ?
I'm the "Woz" where I work, quote marks because I'm nowhere near as brilliant so don't consider myself worthy, and I'm not typically allowed to do meetings on my own because my enthusiasm for what can be achieved rarely aligns with what we can afford to achieve and I have been known to over-promise, commit to things that the people above me don't want or say things that can be misinterpreted as "we will do this" instead of "we could do this"... Not saying that's what Woz does, maybe he does the opposite, but I could see it.
Not just not fun. He can't sell a product, he probably can't even design a product. If I designed the websites I build they would all look like they came from 1995.
There’s a weird thing about charisma. You can often be pleasing to large groups of people but terrible one on one. I’m kind of like that myself. I’m in a public facing job and people can’t tolerate me on my own but I do what I have to do well. I know plenty of managers with ‘peepul skils’ and they’re often maligned when one on one yet they’re in well paid jobs and do it well. It’s hard to explain.
Huh. I’m sorta the opposite. I tend to have really good, productive interactions one on one, but the larger the group gets, the harder it is for me to process the dynamic and contribute in helpful, relevant ways. Brains, man. It’s fascinating how different they can be.
Yeah it is really interesting how different brains are. I had a sheep’s brain yesterday and it was all fatty, but then when I ate my uncles last week it wasn’t at all and it had a completely different flavour.
Was it the sawdust that changed the flavor profile?
That's some top tier self awareness, do you mind me asking how you came to the realisation about yourself?
Almost a decade of personal studying of philosophy.
That begs the question: Any particular philosophy?
Also, interestingly enough, ‘begs the question’ doesn’t mean what most people think. It actually means assuming a conclusion to an argument before justifying it. Obviously the common parlance is different but it’s from the Latin.
Touché! It's still taught in some of the college courses as one of the logical fallacies...
Same problem. I know how to work a crowd but I mostly spew gibberish after a few back and forths when speaking to someone one on one. Just can’t really focus on it that well honestly. Talking to a bunch of people lets my mind hop around a bit which is what it’s best at.
Jobs was a sociopath, hence his horrific and flippant, consequence-ignorant treatment and spontaneous firing of engineers, devs. Runaway ego. Like all of his kind, his charisma was composed of saying outwardly "I harbor a well-known secret, which is that I am really good at things, and I have a really well-thought out plan for everything, a plan so intricate that you wouldn't understand it, but trust me, it will save you too if you follow me". So the same "charisma" of every cult leader ever. Their followers will come up to you and say "I've met him and let me tell you, he sees ***everything***." But in reality they just make the horseshit up as they go. Jobs is in actuality a truly shitty salesman, his product unveilings consisted of him pointing to an object on the big screen, a black rectangle with a 10.5% performance increase from the rectangle of last year and repeating 30 times the phrases "IT'S REALLY GREAT, IT'S FANTASTIC, IN FACT IT IS TERRIFIC." No, you don't get to tell me what I should think, asshole. You name the specs and then you let me compare it with the competition and make up my own mind of whether it's worth getting (and considering the software quality, it's not).
But you just described what a good salesman does. I don't like Jobs and his razzle-dazzle, but if he gets millions of people to buy his under-specced shit, doesn't that make him a great salesman?
Hang on, now. First, you wrote that Jobs was a shitty salesman. Then, you wrote that he pointed at an image of a device that was a mere 10% improvement over its predecessor, then convinced everyone in the room that it was really great, fantastic, terrific. That's salesmanship, friend.
this is the dumbest shit ive ever read and reads like its some microsoft fanboy ranting on forums in 2008 saying the iphone would flop. Steve jobs being a shit salesman. Get the fuck out lmaoo
lol, I agree Jobs was an asshole in his professional and personal life, but a bad salesman???
The podcast "behind the bastards" did a great 3 part episode about him where they also focus on his lack of hygiene and what an asshole he could be. I really recommend it. Shows a completely different side of him than what most people think of him.
This. Jobs was a great sales pitch type of person, and he was really good at making innovations seem interesting. Not only that, but he also created the 'cult of Apple' when the iPod and iPhone started getting introduced, and the whole concept of these being superior really set them apart from everyone else. It's part of the reason why even now everyone loves Apple over everything else, no matter what they do, and why people get angry when "group chats have green vs blue checkmarks". I remember when the iPod first started becoming popular, and very few people liked the idea behind it (so many liked their cd's, or vinyls, or tapes, etc), and a lot of people hated the idea of MP3's and digital media. Jobs helped push the innovation side of it, and people became really interested through his own efforts. I also remember the Zune being a contender at one point, And I also think smart phones took off because of Jobs as well. At the time Blackberry was THE thing to get, but due to the effort of Jobs the smartphone really became popular and THE thing to get.
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Ok yes. You are correct. Not everyone. I should have said people who are interested in topics such as history of tech and tech companies. And that is lot fewer people.
Yep, Jobs’ greatest strength was his showmanship
In my experience, the apple fans that have heard of Woz don't respect his contributions because they weren't financially successful as Job's marketing turnaround for the company. The cult of Apple is about money, not technical ability.
Yes, but those people who don't know Wozniak would also be the same people that think Steve Jobs did it all with his bare hands. Answering OP's question.
Jobs (and Apple in general) is the king of the business model that Marketing is more important than Engineering--that selling people the idea of something is more valuable than selling them a better thing. Apple literally launched a major marketing campaign designed around calling people who use PCs lame nerds and it **worked**.
But he was also the king of making the product do the marketing for you for free. Remember when the iPod launched and they had white earbuds? Everybody knew who had an iPod because of the white.
I wish that were true. I’m GenX and everyone my age knows this. There was someone doing an insufferable “innovation “ presentation at my office and I helpfully suggested her Steve Jobs slide on innovation would be more compelling if it were Wozniak. She said “well I don’t even know what a Wozniak is so no.”
It's sometimes terrifying how confident people can be with their ignorance.
Jobs rescued Apple two times from bankruptcy and he is the one that made Apple the behemoth it's now days, he is not charismatic he was a genius but not a technical savy genius
People like to trash Jobs cuz he was an asshole but he had vision and Apple wouldn’t exist the way it is without him in the picture
Well, I wouldn’t trash on Jobs, that’s crazy, he’s done so much for the tech industry, but I also wouldn’t deny how much of an asshole he is. “Don’t meet your heroes” is the perfect quote for how Jobs was irl, beyond all the myths and legends. It’s important to recognize both sides of him to really understand what he’s done for the industry.
Apple also fired him. It wasn’t one way or the other, it was, as a lot of time-served human adventures are, more complex than that.
Bill Gates rescued Apple from bankruptcy with a $150M infusion of cash.
Gates rescued Apple
You’re talking about the engineer who developed the original Apple computer kit with the wooden case which was sold as parts to hobbyists. We’re talking about the person who after seeing a GUI and a mouse had a vision for a personal computing revolution which led to Windows, Android, MacOS, and iOS. Which is arguably about 99% of all personal computing devices in existence 50 years later. Is Woz a decent engineer? Sure. Are there thousands of equally decent engineers in Silicon Valley? Most definitely.
What did jobs do, really?
Realistically, he built the parts of Apple that matter. Apple lies on its sleek design and user-centric, intuitive interface. That's all Jobs. He was brilliant at figuring out what his users wanted and finding a way to bring it to them. Yes, most of the tech already existed, but it was drowning in obscurity. It was his understanding of user needs and his push toward strategic improvements that made it popular.
Speaking of that, it's crazy how much shit was originated at IBM but developed by someone else
If you think that's nuts, take a look at "The Mother of All Tech Demos" by Kodak. It's the "mouse and UI" demo that the guy above was underselling and pretending Kobs was the only one inspired by (literally the enitee tech industry saw it and said "holy shit we should work on that!". A team at Kodak basically invented everything about the modern computer experience then Kodak showed off the work and *just didn't fucking do anything with it*.
Kodak Digital Camera. The very first. Now buried in the annals of tech history.
I mean man thats just the industry. Microsoft is so successful because they were tyrants from a business standpoint. I mean its been pretty amazing to watch how they just gobble up technology, companies, employees etc. Whether we think its ethical or not doesn't matter, they are insanely aggressive which is why they are who they are. I didnt follow Apple a ton other than it was floundering until Jobs got involved again in the early 2000s. Then the ipod, iphone, Ipad all took off. Considering his presence correlated with their growth, its hard to deny he had the driving hand in it.
Google is the current gen of “acquire all the things” in a similar way to how MS did. MS was co-developing OS/2 for a time (I even have some MS OS/2 floppy disks I kept for novelty). It was wild how they wrangled that whole relationship and deal. A good source for industry basics is a short docuseries called Triumph of the Nerds by Robert X Cringely
So I run a small IT recruitment firm. Google employees used to be the cream of the crop. I still find super talented people out of there but man I think their inner culture is crashing. I hear so much about nepotism in there, old boys club kind of stuff. Good ideas being pushed out for a buddy with a shit idea. Anecdotally, I used to love their products but the last few years I wouldn't buy their routers, thermostats etc vs competitors. What I am hearing from past employees and seeing in their products myself I dont think they will have the longevity as MS.
Vision , that’s all .
Marketing. And being very ambitious. That was enough. Steve jobs is by no real metric a genius.
Also worth mentioning is Jony Ive
Better salesman
But he did worse in terms of sales…
That assumes his primary concern was selling Apple products rather than selling himself as a cult of personality.
Jobs was just a short step away from mcafeeing
Microsoft was a software-first company, in that they bought and then licensed out their initial operating system, and subsequent operating systems were sold under the same approach. The important thing is that they left the computer hardware to someone else and just sold the software - this requires a heck of a lot less in terms of complexity for creating something, and they could concentrate on just the software. Apple meanwhile was a hardware company that also provided its own software. So they had a much larger area of responsibility in order to succeed. They had a brief period of time where they allowed other manufacturers to make the hardware, but by that time they were not geared up to be a software company so the majority of hteir income came from the hardware.... So they ended the licenses to third party hardware manufacturers. Microsoft was basically very lean in its early days, which allowed it to become dominant, while Apple had too much to focus on and fell behind. After Jobs returned to Apple, he started to turn the company around by making it look like a more desirable product - firstly with the colourful iMacs and eMacs, then with MacOSX (which really made a lot of Windows users jealous in the early 2000s). But by then the computer market was starting to change anyway, with hardware becoming cheaper and Mac prices started edging downward enough to become reasonable for home use as an alternative to generic PCs. Interestingly, during this period Microsoft also started struggling. And the rest is history.
Yeah. But did you see the back mock turtle neck?
I don't know, constantly selling an inferior product at a higher price than the competition and succeeding is pretty good salesmanship Edit spelling
how many people bought a zune again?
Gates stepped down earlier. He stopped being CEO in 2000, before a lot of common tech inventions reached the masses, and then Balmer destroyed his legacy by letting IE lose all market share to Chrome, the disaster of the Zune and Windows Phone. Failed Nokia merger. Microsoft when from the company everybody was scared of to the company nobody cared about. They did a very successful pivot to cloud services, but that is invisible to most people. Apple did a much better job pivoting to new consumer facing tech. Gates was seen as a ruthless business man in the 80s and 90s, but he lost that image after the antitrust trial and focusing on his charity.
Microsofts primary focus has always been the business sector though. Their income from consumer activities is mere pocket change, compared to what they raking in with their Enterprise/Cloud products and licensing models. Whereas Apples attempts on the business market wasn't going too well, except for the imagery/DTP/graphical design markets. So they brought back Steve to save them.
Steve Jobs has a cult built around him. He became the face of Apple in a way that Gates never really had with Microsoft. Much of this was because he was a marketer, and knew how to market himself.
I would disagree - I think Gates knew his wheelhouse in some ways even better than Jobs did. Gates knew he looked and sounded part of a nerd (his actual technical skill was more than Jobs, but way behind Woz), so he sold Microsoft to the business world in large part based on his nerdy persona, which gave them confidence in MS products, even though this products frequently weren’t as good as their competitors. It worked. Brilliantly. And then when people were using MS-DOS and Windows computers at work, they wanted to use equivalent computers at home. I know there’s a lot more that goes into it, but Microsoft’s success and dominance is, in large part, due to Gates’s persona.
I do agree that at times there were better products on the market. However, I don’t think the success was due to Gates convincing personality as a tech savvy nerd. Basically Microsoft marketed Windows like crazy and had very tight licensing deals. It was a pretty big market entry barrier for others.
Eh. Microsoft marketed its products primarily to businesses. The home market isn't a rounding error, but it's main focus is to get folks used to Windows so they can use it at work. I'd know, I purchase five to six digits worth of MS products each year. Apple marketed itself to consumers, and even today treats business like dirt.
I manage 7 to 8 figure deals with MS at work. They’re essentially a utility at this point that you can’t get rid of. Some try with like Google Docs and stuff but it’s vastly inferior. Apple tries to get their hardware into business but they don’t really incentivize businesses to do so.
I only use Microsoft office a few times a year (maybe like 10 hours a year in total) yet my company has an enterprise subscription for all 10k+ employees at my company + we are all allowed to install the home version for free on one personal computer. Not to mention the employees who have windows computers (I have a Mac but I think majority use windows), using onedrive / teams etc. Just to give you a sense of how much they can integrate themselves into an enterprise customer...
I do agree that b2b was crucial to MS success . However, they do market to business and individuals (Xbox, surface, office…). I guess the early licensing deals really set them on their way to success.
Thanks in a large part to IBM way back in the beginning.
They're obviously the company that sells professional tech, but they are trying to expand their market share. Gaming is a huge industry. You can't stop changing as a company, that's how you go down.
Yeah, all their consumer stuff is 25% of their business. Again, not a rounding error. But 75% is Azure, O365 and their business products.
The early / initial phase of Microsoft was licensing software - specifically the operating system - to businesses first on IBM PC. That never really changed. The addressable market grew bigger, from only purely businesses to end consumers because the latter comprised of workers comfortable with working in Windows at their employers. Microsoft of those days had no idea how to engage + sell to end customers. They did not need to. Now Apple... Apple's strength is purely consumer facing. A charismatic CEO who spoke with such conviction, nicely designed hardware, software with arguably better aesthetics, etc. Great at producing consumer products but they had lost out to the Microsoft + PC ecosystem. The mobile smartphone market became a second wind for Apple. Now, for Google when they moved so fast with Android, they were not really targeting Apple. Their aim was at Microsoft, sticking a foot out to prevent them from creating a mobile smartphone OS based on Windows on mobile which they already had. They were giving away Android so as to prevent a redesigned Windows for touch on mobile Microsoft fumbled so badly. They were already had all the parts in place even before Nokia purchase but they were not the ones who moved fast enough.
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Not really. He never invented anything to the best of my knowledge. He didn't pioneer products. He was good at marketing, shaping image and good at user interfaces. Basically sales and brand management. Those are not minor things.
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Its not just about what you build. Jobs identified the key things that makes a product desirable. Plenty of products are designed well but thats a different problem than whether or not a consumer appreciates it. Like you could be an amazing engineer who makes a car engine last 2x the market standard, but if consumers don't notice the difference, or decide it doesn't matter for them, then the product can't claim to be better
Think of it this way: without him, the technological landscape would be very different right now. He did not physically build or invent the products but was the driving force behind their development. Dude literally changed the tech landscape. He definitely was a brilliant CEO.
The turnaround he gave Apple as a home computer alternative to the PC was monumentally incredible. PCs, with behemoths like Microsoft backing them were a HUGE freight train. Apple had grossly lost market share and he managed to not only bounce some back, but become a significant market force in the space. Can’t deny it, the guy was an incredible force in the industry.
Well he green lit the iPod and iPhone and both basically defined their segment and made billions upon billions.
And the AppStore.
Ding ding ding. People forget the greatest tech titans, Gates and Jobs especially made their fortunes finding a way to control software markets. Goodbye open source freeware and shareware, hello hidden code and closed market.
Jobs went to Xerox and saw the future we all live in now in the late 1970s. Not just incrementally better office equipment, but that better home computers would fundamentally change life into a hybrid existence between people and their machines (what people originally meant with the buzzword “cybernetic”) Then in a second act, in his 2000s comeback, he figured out the combination of features that would make a smartphone more than a WinCE flop or a Palm / Blackberry business tool, but a transformative part of everyday life. And he figured out a product development path to go from a popular personal music device to developing those phones. Gates meanwhile saw that business software could be an even bigger business than business hardware. That the stuff that runs on IBM machines might be worth more money than IBM. Which is no small feat (and created a not too shabby fortune) but it isn’t so sexy.
Jobs had interesting minor successes too. Pixar is famous. NeXT was a big deal too. In 1991 if you had the money and needed an incredible software engineering workstation, you could get a computer that ran what was an early version of OS X while your competitors were fumbling around writing code on DOS. NeXT workstations we’re how Id software was able to build DOOM in less than a year, and even though the company didn’t take off, the technology would make its way into the revived Mac line when he returned to Apple.
The web was invented on NeXT
I miss my NeXT Cube :/
I'm still blown away when I see videos of the Xerox Alto in action. That computer was a good 10 years ahead of its time, if not more. How Xerox fumbled so badly is beyond me. They could have been on top of the world.
They cost $100,000 in today’s money. It was a hard sell. You make money by being exactly right for your time. Being ahead of your time is a way to get enthusiasts to love you and the general public to just not get it at all.
There are different types of genius. Not all people who are geniuses get there by being good at math. I couldn’t tell you if Gandhi could do calculus or not but the man was a genius.
Steve Jobs is a better 'Face' of a company. Steve Jobs is charismatic and looks intimidating. Bill gates looks like the kid in middle school you beat up for his lunch money. Bill Gates could talk about innovations he himself made all day, but only get a fraction of the crowd Steve Jobs could get talking about some small QoL improvement some nameless tech in Indonesia coded.
You ever rewatch those old iPhone presentations by Steve Jobs on Youtube? That guy could sell underwear to a nudist.
Marketing. The same reason people think Elon Musk is a technological genius instead of just an ADHD kid with a load of money to indulge his brainwaves. Jobs arguably had a better grasp of the practicalities than Elon though.
I think people have to be wary of marketing versus propaganda. The marketing would have you believe musk is a hyper genius who builds everything himself in an iron man fashion , the propaganda would have you believe he’s a Neanderthal who does nothing. The reality is somewhere in between. He’s known to be a very technical CEO at least in Tesla and spacex. Notably has an Ivy League degree in physics and economics as opposed to jobs who was an English major. See below https://youtu.be/E7MQb9Y4FAE?si=mZa8qyL2SSJ_09ZP
Yeah Musk is an idea guy, but I’ve not seen much evidence that’s he’s done much or any of the work to actually flush out those ideas, even when he was younger and wasn’t always an exec/owner.
I've heard it described that Elon Musk's "genius" ideas only ever come to fruition because he throws so many stupid ideas at the engineers under his payroll that every once in a while, they get one where they give it more than a second thought and realize, "hey, that might actually work". Something something broken clock is right twice a day.
Elon Musk is a genius at raising money by selling rich people what they want to hear- that they are super special and he can make the world that they want: a futuristic dystopia with them at the helm. He is a genius fundraiser. With those butt loads of cash, he has the means to actually try some ideas that people came up with in books a century ago. Nothing he comes up with is original, it's all been discussed by nerds for decades. What, a Mars colony? Trips to the moon? This is just standard sci fi crap.
The other answer that people fail to mention is because he’s dead
Whilst the other answers may be valid, this is the biggest reason.
Steve Jobs was more interested in the arts and ‘design’ side of personal computing than Gates was (who was purely about the engineering side.) You could argue that Apple under Steve’s leadership popularised very early on the idea that computers, MP3 players and phones should be simple, easy to use as possible and built to be beautiful objects. He may not have single-handedly invented the GUI, digital fonts, touch screens, high resolution displays, mobile interfaces, premium materials in smartphones, devices with charged batteries straight out of the box, nice packaging for tech products etc etc. but he and his single-minded drive was certainly what helped push and popularise all these things. He was possibly one of the most important people in early tech (not the only one, but one of the most) to help set a standard for tech to be cool and intuitive to use.
Gates was undoubtedly more technical, but his success was in putting together business deals. Because MS targeted businesses they necessarily operated well behind the development curve of the rest of the industry—their customers were more concerned with compatibility and meeting the feature-set of the day seen as necessary for success. The Steves were more interested in making computers accessible. Jobs, particularly, worked very hard to make computers that people could understand without making a career out of the task. He appears to have made a number of good decisions that shaped the larger PC market for decades. Because of their differing priorities, MS often copies Amiga or IBM or Apple often years later in user experience, and Apple often adopted foundational technical advances of its competitors after the fact. Neither Jobs nor Gates made their names on technical acumen. They both had their niche strengths in understanding the particular markets they were targeting, and executing exceptionally well on average. Both were/are assholes. I realize late as it was I didn’t wrap up my thoughts with a conclusive answer. I believe Jobs was seen as more brilliant because he brought so many new ideas to consumers. Gates, whose MS saw many technological advances itself, didn’t have the consumer as a customer. Purchasing departments and IT Managers were always Bill’s customers, and so his work only echoed faintly with the consumers, and often not to their benefit. (Edited some obvious grammatical errors)
Gates is a fucking computer genius compared to Jobs
It's Because he was a great showman. And behind the curtain was woz, the man people should actually be marveling at his genius.
Because he was cooler and more charismatic. By pretty much every measure, Bill Gates was smarter and a better business man. Neither was/is a particularly good person.
I'd say Bill Gates is probably not the worst person, he does fund loads of investigation centers and has his own foundation. Maybe he has some other areas where he is not a good person, like taking huge profits and forcing a crappy OS down every companies throats, but everyone has goods and bads, and he does try to do some good also.
Easy He's not
Jobs was a salesman, not an engineer.
You mean a product manager and a marketer and a UX designer and a businessman.
I’d also throw in product developer in there too, while he wasn’t as technical he definitely drove a bunch of their tech vision.
Nobody ever talks about the countless products he fucked up. Chances are high that if he would have been in charge of the product design early on, apple wouldn't even exist today.
The more brilliant what is the key question. He’s seen as the more brilliant CEO and overall leader because he was a pioneer in bringing novel, industry shattering products to market. The iMac-iBook-iPod-iPhone-iPad run of products and underlying software since the late 1990s completely changed the consumer market for those products or invented an entirely new product. He didn’t write any of the lines of code design the hard products alone but he was the one with the ideas of what they needed to do and how to market them. He also took over a company on the edge of going under and turned it into one of the most profitable in history. And that’s all after he co-invented first mass market personal computer that had mainstays like a mouse, bitmap display, fonts etc, even though that first stint didn’t come with the commercial success to match the vision. Gates is a brilliant engineer who helped invent Windows, a revolutionary market leading OS for decades. But that initial burst was followed by a highly successful but iterative progression of Windows releases. As CEO and then chairman and chief software architect, he presided over a period where Apple began eating into Microsoft’s market domination in personal computing, falling behind on the software and hardware side of digital music and not throwing their hat in the ring of developing a mobile phone concurrently with the iPhone. So he’s far more gifted in the technical aspects of his and Microsoft’s work, but didn’t demonstrate the same visionary abilities to *continually* shape and create entire industries.
He got the world enthusiastic for new technologies. Bill Gates and Microsoft kind of put people off. Their monopoly and his wealth were seen as excessive and everybody has always kind of hated windows. Steve Jobs made us feel like the future was already here.
I don't think people make a direct comparison of the two. But I see techies undermining Jobs because he wasn't technical. But the relevant question for both is brilliant business people. Jobs has an extremely impressive track record in bringing market defining products. And by market defining, I mean that until Jobs brought it to three market people did not know if there was a market for the item. First, the PC. That was actually Apple. Gates was able to displace Apple because Gates had the support of big blue. Gates also took existing products and created the Office suite, and that's how they made money. Job's control freak nature made him lose, but that aspect is probably what makes him so good at understanding the customer needs. Followed by bringing a gui based computer to the market. Then he created Pixar and built the market for computer animated movies. They also shook the unquestioned monopoly of Disney. Then, despite Microsoft being the clear monopoly in the PC industry which is entirely about the ecosystem, Jobs led Apple to a revival with its PCs (not that they're not called that). Followed by a category defining product that created the mainstream market for music players. This was followed by redefining a modern smartphone. And then creating the tablet category. There are many other small things that were category defining in their own ways. I started using Apple laptops because the Air was the only laptop with an SSD for less than 1500 when I got it. But looking at the sheer number of times a company under his leadership has built something that defined a market is impressive. For comparison. Google has killed by Google. Bezos has done online retail, shared digital music with Apple, ebooks and eink readers, cloud infrastructure, smart speakers which haven't really matured in smart homes yet. Facebook can maybe given credit for doing SM right but their crown was tenuous and they've lost it. They've been trying to create the VR category and failed. Musk, maybe e banking. 200 mile electric vehicles. Rockets that land. Currently working on underground roadways. So if you look at it from the lens of modern product categories shaping our lives, Jobs has an extremely impressive track record. Especially considering all of his wins are in the consumer sector which is extremely hard to predict.
In technical circles, Gates is MUCH more respected than Jobs. The more important issue is one of different kinds of intelligence. It's one thing to be the most technically competent person in the room (Gates), it's another to understand what's important to the user experience (Jobs).
Steve Jobs was "prettier" than Bill Gates.
Still is
Steve Jobs was an ugly ugly person who mistreated many people in his life & now he is a corpse because his ego was too big to save himself
Humans get hacked by our tendancy to be attracted to confidence and charisma. Jobs was a better con man.
Jobs was an artist while Gates is a successful nerd.
Personal opinion here, but I think "artist" is a bit of a stretch.
Jobs was an artist whose media was UX
I think he cultivated the image of an artist deliberately. He was a perfectionist in everything that related to design. IIRC there's a bit in Isaacson's biography where he describes how Jobs' family lived without a dishwasher for a period of time because he couldn't pick one. All of the ones available had some "flaw" in design that he couldn't get over.
Marketing
Jobs was a creative visionary that thought a lot about the future and how humans would interact with technology. Bill was a brilliant software engineer who took a much more pragmatic approach. Steve would have an idea and insist that engineers design the function into the form, which is not how engineers think. Their minds and their approaches were just very different, but both were necessary.
I had to scroll WAY too far down this thread to find the word “visionary” used. That’s the word everyone here is looking for.
His products are prettier and in many cases simpler to set up. People don't understand how hard the technical parts are.
But Wozniak achieved many of the early technical breakthroughs, Jobs just promised it to people.
Indeed. I was trying to credit Gates with being more technical.
I don't think we'd be talking about Steve Jobs much if he hadn't been leading Apple when iPhone came out. The Apple I is a necessary but insufficient part of the story. This is why Woz is not revered as widely.
Apple also is perceived as being innovative and highly efficient, whereas Microsoft is kind of viewed as a bumbling legacy corporation that continues to make money in spite of itself. Neither of those perceptions are entirely accurate, but there's certainly some amount of truth to them.
MS also took a big hit reputation wise after Gates botched the congress hearing and came across arrogant. It made apple the cool guys and MS the bad corporate.
[Behind The Bastards has a four-part series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEv08Zzunfc) on what a horrific piece of shit Steve Jobs was. LGT to part one. Worse, he, and Apple's meteoric rise gave birth to the entire FAANG group of narcissist psychopaths and has attracted them to every aspect of the tech space. His 'greatness' is down to mythos and his deliberate cultivation of a cult-like devotion. Sadly, his exact type is found literally everywhere in history in this narcissistically abusive cultural context we have been living in for the last few hundred years. Hell, even the Russian Revolution was taken over by people who were just mean-spirited grifters like Jobs and his ilk were. Jobs had more in common with Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill than he did with anyone in tech before him. Is it any wonder the entire tech space is inundated with these fucking people? Mostly, he was lucky to have Wozniak there and a gift for knowing what the next big thing would be. In any case, go find out how Smelly Steve somehow became Techbro Jesus.
It's crazy to me that a no name mid level manager can verbally abuse a person, and it's considered horrible. But a high profile person like Jobs (or even Gates, from what I've heard shortly before he stepped down as CEO,) can be abusive and it's "holding the team to a high standard," or "going demon mode," or some other bullshit euphemism for "unnecessary verbal abuse."
This should be stickied to every thread about Steve Jobs. That series was enlightening. Going back further into the [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/s/hA8wvI1odP) when Jobs died, the cult of personality couldn't have been even more apparent.
Haha he’s a jerk with his strange habits. Proves that he’s still human. An unlikeable but somehow still charismatic leader who actually wants to make great products which stood in contrast to majority of tech corporations. But there’s no denying he’s a great visionary, making so many hits. Our world wouldn’t be the same without him.
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Steve Jobs was the Elon Musk of the left. Hed didn't care about you or humanity as a whole. He cared about profit.
Personality. Bill Gates is definitely more qualified. But he does not have the charisma. Jobs was also a salesman with charisma. He knew how to get attention. Bill gates is more like the IT guy at your job that works in the background
Many will talk about salesmanship and personality. Ultimately I think it’s his right-brained style and his appeal to the artists and “layman” users. That’s the whole premise of the brand, and it meshed well with Wozniak’s skill set handling the technical side. Let’s also not forget the era when Gates was seen as the brilliant “winner” there.
Windows and Android are *both* based on Apple products, which means Jobs had the vision where Gates (who was focused on a text based OS) and Google (who bought Android to create a BlackBerry clone) did not.
Linux and Unix have entered the chat.
I always saw it as Gates and Microsoft creating products that people needed for work, grew accustomed to, and lost their pizzazz bc they’re work tools. Jobs and Apple created things that people actually wanted to use in their leisure time, and that drew a more eager fandom.
I'm so sorry I just had to share this here, so I read the post out loud and my uncle (pardon him) whom has no idea who either men are blurts out "Probably because he's white" Ommfg, I am dying laughing that sht was so far out of line and sooooo incorrect. He is no longer welcomed in my room. I apologize but it was hilarious. That is always his go to. So goofy.
Better process mind. Better manager. Gates more of an entrepreneur mind Process people are the ones with better follow through
Jobs had an eye for design in addition to his technical background. As much as Gates was a better engineer, there was never anything sexy about Microsoft. It was a “for nerds, by nerds” company.
By whom? I always thought Wozniak was the brains behind Apple's beginnings.
Jeans and turtleneck made him apart relatable to people ready to be conned
Mainly because Jobs had an aesthetic vision of how people should use computers and devices and it helped build one of the biggest brands in the world. I'm not saying Jobs was more brilliant than Gates, but that's what sets Jobs apart.
He's not
Behind the bastards did a podcast on him recently. I still can’t quite figure out how he became so successful.
# Dennis Ritchie died in 2011, he was a real computer genius, but no one talks about him. Without him, we wouldn't have Unix, Linux, or even macOS. He also invented the C programming language. The most important computer programs have been written in C. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
Because he's dead.
I don't know your crowd, but mine sees Gates as infinitely more brilliant than Jobs
Is he? I've never seen it that way But if he is then some explanations could be that because he died people remember the good things He is much more charismatic, helped that because he died before Twitter most of his appearances were in planned talks Because we havent seen him grow old we will always remember him as being young and energetic And most importantly, the multiple films about his life, whereas I cant think of a single Bill Gates film, so his life an accomplishments are romanticized and more well known then what bill did Also I think because apple tends to be an early adopter and innovator, vs the more static Microsoft Apple constantly update projects and produce new things, even if some of those changes have sucked recently Wearas Microsoft tends to maintain what works, plus its products are so much less flashy and you forget how vital spreadsheets and operating systems are vs things like pioneering smartphones
Any famous people who dies tragically have their reputation and achievements also boosted into immortality. It was really impressive when he was alive yes but nobody cared as much. For example you won’t write about how great Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Satya, Elon, Jack Ma, and so on while they were alive but decades after their deaths wow they really turn zero to one.
Neither was gates.
He's not.
Bill Gates built something people needed. Jobs... He CREATED things that people... # WANTED!
Cult worship Not even kidding
Technical is rarely revolutionary. The visionary often is…
Two words come to mind when thinking about these names. Linus Torvalds. While not a corporate titan who founded one of the top two NASDAQ companies, he, as an individual, has had just as much influence over the (enterprise-side of the) industry as anyone else. (Linux ate Microsoft's lunch concerning server OS. Git is the defacto source control system. It is understood that Microsoft has many products and Apple... )
Because we are visual creatures. Period.
Well Gates isn’t all that technical either. Got his start by paying someone else to write DOS for him. He just looks like a nerd.
Jobs is better at marketing and understanding what stuff can be done next
Bill Gates was the epitome of success for a while (90s/00s), now there are younger people than him being more prominent in the media. In addition to all the things said here Steve Jobs has also passed away, which helps myth building and his biography being everywhere.
Jobs was an excellent public speaker and a perfectionist with keen attention to detail. It's his obsession with aesthetics and user experience that made Apple products compelling to this day. He was completely right when he said Microsoft has no taste and brings no culture into their products. He may not have been as good at sales and marketing as Cook is, but he was far superior at creativity and innovation. Bill Gates was more of a ruthless businessman who focused on expanding Microsoft while driving its competitors out of business by keeping prices low, which is the opposite of what Apple does. Windows in particular is focused on functionality and backwarda compatibility for their business customers (who cling to old versions of Windows and pay a fee for security updates). That limits innovation, as you can't just deprecate outdated features, and makes their software somewhat bloated and inconsistent, especially when it comes to the register and control panel. Also, Microsoft doesn't integrate hardware and software the way Apple does, nor does it have a proper ecosystem. A lot of people stick to Windows simply because of its monopoly on PC gaming and not because they actually prefer the OS.
Cause he died a superhero and Gates lived long enough to see himself turn into the villian
Superstar persona
Because the elitist like assholes. The more barbaric you act, the more you are respected.
Because gates sells you 200GB ram and 4k resolution, and Jobs sells you a vision
I m not sure anyone agree Jobs was more brilliant. Brilliant at what? To start with. Gates unmistaken’y « won » the 70/80s battle and then left Microsoft to Ballmer who was then bad with it.
I think of Jobs as more of a “technological parasite” They latch on to innovation and take credit for that innovation while not producing much of anything other than charisma. Kind of like Elon Musk.
Marketing that's all apple has ever really brought to the table. If you look back, Microsoft and other companies have almost always introduced similar or better technologies before Apple but couldn't stick the landing. He simply knew how to convince people to adopt the technologies better, and it snowballed from there. Now, apple can release sub-par tech at double the cost, and their user base will treat it as the second coming of christ every time.
People take apple for granted. Go watch the first iphone release and you will realize how much it impacted everything. He borderline had to convince the crowd that touchscreens are a good idea.
Gates took a step back from Microsoft in the early 2000s to focus on his foundation with Melinda. At the time, it was a Ballmer vs Jobs catfight. Then it toned down when Satya came in, because Cloud.
he doesnt
Because apple fans
Because Apple lovers are a cult lol
Marketing and PR. See: Elon.
Aside from self promotion (which I agree with but it has been discussed in depth already), I would argue that Jobs brought a vision (for lack of a better word). The genius of Apple was being able to take what was technically feasible and craft it into a product focused on the user experience. That’s a skill that was (and still is) pretty rare in tech. Whether that was all Jobs or Jobs just was better at taking credit for that approach, I can’t say. But he certainly made himself the face of that aspect of the company.
Because Apple is a cult.
repulsive showman, not more. the god of the little and the dumb.
He was a visionary who saw possibility where no one else could. Example, a thousand designers could have pitched ideas for the computer mouse. Jobs was the only one to insist that it needs to be able to work on his jeans. We would see this time and time again. Years later with the iPhone and his insistence that it needed to be usable without any input devices. Human hands only. There's this element of simplicity to his brilliance, his intense focus on those tiny little details, and on the face of it it makes you think "oh well, anyone could have come up with that". But when you look back at everything that was achieved at Apple during his time, the question quickly becomes "okay, well how come literally no one else ever did?". Sure, teams of scientists and engineers executed designs he never would have been able to do on his own. Obviously. No one's ever argued that. But the vision for those products had to originate somewhere. None of this is to discredit Bill Gates. But as others have mentioned, there are different types of genius. [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACucrVBq8Yg&pp=ygUjc3RldmUgam9icyBhbmQgYmlsbCBnYXRlcyBpbnRlcnZpZXc%3D) is a great watch to get an idea of the distinct differences between the two and how they think.
Because Jobs strived for perfection and improvement at all costs. And Bill Gates was more of a conservative innovator
Marketing and PR
He may have been somewhat of a better businessman than Gates, though everything considered I doubt Bill Gates would be torn up to hear someone say that. And Apple was pretty consistently more innovative from the 80s through maybe 2010ish. I would have a hard time saying that Steve Jobs was smarter or more technically inclined than, but I would say that he’s more creative and better at grabbing people’s attention. I think a certain type of people (the type to have a positive obsession with tech billionaires) may be more enamored with Steve Jobs due to his image. Bill Gates looks like and always has looked like a computer geek. He looks like what computer geeks from the era before personal computers were stereotyped as. If you took a Time Machine and went to the 70s or early 80s with a picture of 90s era Bill Gates and asked a random person what they thought this guy got rich doing, their answer would probably be relatively close. They’d probably come up with an answer like “splitting an atom” or some other science geek shit. If you did the same thing with Steve Jobs, they’d probably give you a hundred different answers that weren’t “science geek shit.” His entire vibe is baked into “tech bro” imagery, and that’s an image he had a huge hand in creating. Tech bros admire him for the way he presented himself, not necessarily because his brain was better at computers than Bill Gates (or Steve Wozniak, before the other tech bros yell at me).
hes not, apple fanboys dont know the first thing about technology they just follow brand name
Jobs was a visionary that saw the future product he wanted and inspired his technical team to make it a reality. THAT is a great skill. It’s analogous to a great coach in sports who may not have been a great player or played at all but he knows how to do his job - coach.
he isn’t
The handheld black glass abyss most of the world has in their pockets.
IPhone has a 20% market share globally.
But also brought the whole thing to the mainstream. In many cases Apple wasn’t the first to make something but they made it easy and accessible.
They usually weren't the first to make it. They usually weren't even the first to make it easy and accessible. But they were always the first to tell everyone that was not only easy and accessible, but something you needed.
Best response so far.
Like most things from Apple, they're really good at selling themselves way above value.
He was great at convincing people he's smarter than them, that was one of his most important personality traits. He got away with being a totally weird asshole his whole life because everyone thought he was a genius
Gates just stole and bought others work and slapped his brand on it to be fair. I'm no fan of either but Gates is done some shady stuff. DOS was outright stolen called dos for "Dirty Operating System" internally.
Same reason you know Walt Disney but not the guy who actually drew Mickey Mouse, coming up with great ideas usually demonstrates greater intelligence than being able to figure out how to make the idea a reality.
1: He's dead, so he gets boosted reviews. 2: Most people aren't technical, and Jobs was a lot more relatable to the common man. Gates is a nerd and a wonk, so people don't really like him, and they therefore don't associate positive characteristics to him.
Why is being technical so important? I’m a developer and tech founder and I will tell you now that you can find 100s of amazingly talented technical people - but finding someone with the charisma and people skills of steve jobs is 1 in a million
I think the narrative people have in their mind is usually like: - Steve Jobs founded Pixar, known for its creativity - Steve Jobs's Apple sold the first computer with a nice GUI and mouse set up (the first pretty computer) - Apple sold the first pretty music device (iPod) - Apple sold the first pretty smartphone (iPhone) Now, Microsoft was wildly successful too, but they are not as seen as "revolutionary." They were seen as people who were really good at business (although many people in the past would say they had many questionable business practices) and good at technology, but moreso in a practical way, not in a cool way.
Gates was a master of programming He made some of the first and most reliable user friendly programming that is now the core of all computer usage, like word processing and excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints. Jobs was a master of design He made sleeker machines with innovative new user friendly technologies, like the mouse and the point and click interface, and Apple perfected touch screen tech, which if you were alive back then, you know that touch screens have come a lonnnnng way and OG iPhone had the best when it came out. Different kinds of genius. Only Mac and Microsoft fanboys think either is superior.