With the death of Mr. Jobs, I was prompted to suddenly remember and think of the other Steve, namely Steve Wozniak, who, along with Jobs, were the cofounders of Apple.
If Wozniak were to die in the future, would he even get 1/10th of the attention Jobs has gotten post mortem? Would that be just? Or not? What is his legacy at Apple?
Same thing that happened with Paul Allen. Talk about Microsoft and everyone thinks of Bill Gates.
Bear in mind that most of what Jobs is being lionized for is his work after he returned to Apple in 1997. If he had retired from computers in 1985, his death would have been a footnote.
Steve Whozniak?
What he said.
I’m sure his bank account is perfectly respectful of his contributions.
Well, other than that little jaunt where he reinvented the animated motion picture industry and left Disney forced with the decision of buying it out or getting passed by and left in the dust. And a major investor in The Gap, and likely numerous ventures we aren’t even aware of. He wound up a 1/10 owner of Walt Disney Co. as a result of selling them Pixar Animation Studios, much like he became CEO of Apple by selling them the technology they developed at NEXT. Any one of these achievements in a vacuum is still quite remarkable.
But I hardly think Wozniak has been forgotten or underrated - at least not among the Apple faithful and historians/journalists.
It’s hard to really say who was more valuable or contributed more to changing the world: The guy who could build an Apple computer or the guy who could recognize the value it might have in the world 10-25 years down the line and the ability to communicate that value to the public.
Agreed. Alessan nailed it.
I’m going to go against the consensus here and agree with Alessan.
But for those of us who live in Silicon Valley, we see Wozniak a lot. I actually literally bump into him a few times a year (he lives near me). But you can’t go to a Shark’s game without seeing Woz Way. And they’ll interview him on the news all the time.
I don’t think he’s forgotten or underrated. Wozniak actually heavily influence PC design in the late 1970s early 1980s, and I think he’s received a lot of the credit for that.
Here is the thing about Steve Wozniak though, and also about Paul Allen. Both were very important in the founding of their companies. By and large the reason their fame is much diminished compared to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is because both Allen and Wozniak basically decided in the 1980s, “wow we’re fucking super rich now…we can basically stop working and do whatever we want for the rest of their lives.” Jobs and Gates were almost indifferent to their vast fortunes and were only concerned with continual success in the business world.
Paul Allen apparently had a better financial arrangement because he’s worth over $10bn today and Wozniak is worth around $100m; but both are obviously very comfortable. Jobs actually wouldn’t be as rich as he was at passing if not for his involvement with Pixar, his Disney holdings were what really catapulted him. He’s also received some large stock options while at the helm of Apple, but Jobs actually did not get nearly the money out of Apple he could have. Compare him to Ellison whose holdings in Oracle alone make him a multibillionaire (in the $30-40bn range), Ellison also regularly is reported bringing in $70-80m in compensation from Oracle so he’s really cashing in on his company. Jobs was happy to work for essentially no compensation aside from irregular stock grants and the gift of an $80m plane one time.
Another thing Allen and Woz share in common is they were both the more technically gifted. Woz basically did 100% of the technical work on building the first Apple computer. Allen was actually apparently more instrumental in arranging Microsoft’s big deal to supply the OS to IBM than Gates was. Microsoft essentially had the opportunity to supply IBM with an OS for their computers, which if they were able to get it out by deadline would have essentially insure that Gates and Allen became wealthy and Microsoft would be in business for many years to come. Unfortunately they had no ability to meet deadline, but Allen was the one who came up with the idea and did the negotiation to buy QDOS, which Microsoft’s programmers then modified to fit IBM’s spec. The rest is essentially history, as Microsoft’s DOS and their early relationship with IBM put them in a key position for essentially everything else that followed.
Also in common is Woz and Allen both left due to health reasons. Allen was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the early 80s and left Microsoft because of it. Wozniak was in a plane crash in the mid-80s that made him decide he wanted to spend his time doing things he was interested in as opposed to being responsible to Apple as a full time employee.
I don’t mean to piss on the memory of Steve Jobs just days after he died, but characterizing his involvement with Pixar as “reinventing the motion picture industry” is just not an accurate summary of the facts.
Jobs ran Pixar with the intent of making it a hardware company, and he failed. The Pixar guy who developed its moviemaking capability is John Lasseter. It’s Lasseter who made Pixar the moviemaking studio it became.
All credit to Jobs for splitting Pixar off from Lucas, but the fact is that the direction he sailed the ship in failed. It was when his first mate took the helm that Pixar became, well, Pixar. John Lasseter changed the motion picture industry. Steve Jobs, in that case, got lucky.
I think Steve Jobs would be the last to say it was pissing on his memory to make a valid point about my perhaps, overly simplified description of the impact Pixar had on Disney. It was based on the premise that A) Disney was until that time the defacto name, and industry leader in that industry and B) they were forced to buy Pixar or compete with them. And, C) Steve Jobs was right in the middle of it all and wound up owning a tenth of Disney when he walked away. His life would have made some news upon death just for that one venture without Apple ever existing. That was really my point.
In the same way that it’s said he invented the personal computer industry with the Apple, when Wozniak built it, and many other personal computers already existed, and then re-invented the personal computer industry with the Macintosh, when it was technology he found while on a tour at Xerox - and again, Woz doing the engineering - I think it can be said that he re-invented the animated motion picture business with Pixar. Didn’t John Lasseter work for Steve Jobs once he bought the studio from Lucas? Part of what he knew he was buying was Lasseter’s talent.
Yeah, it’s the people who buy people who really matter.
He didn’t buy the people he just leased their talent. And none of these huge successes would have been possible without his selection of other talent, his ability to recognize that talent, and his ability to push someone’s starry-eyed idea and pencil sketches with relentless drive and critique until they finally became real life products that could be sold for a profit. That ability was very much as important as the contributions of the employees he selected.
True. But no one not directly working with those companies gives a shit. Without Apple, Jobs would no doubt still have been highly successful. But he would not have been a celebrity, and his death would not have been noted outside of some brief mentions in the denser financial publications.
Well sure, to a point. Some people might mourn the creator of Pixar if they were fans of the movies, certainly not as many. And his death would have made at least medium-sized headlines for a few hours had that been his only accomplishment.
But I know you can’t fairly exclude Apple from the story, it was a part of his persona and credibility, making him a millionaire and allowing him to start up other companies and recruit top talent.
As far as I remember at the time though, when he returned to Apple in 1998, he was already in the news every day practically for something or other and it was a process very much in the public discussion as he made his way back to Apple during the Gil Amelio days. Something kept him newsworthy all those years he was out of the Apple fold, so it is also unfair to say all the recognition he gets now is *only *because of what he accomplished once he got back.
I’d hope he dies in the future. Not that I wish him ill, but if he didn’t that’d just be creepy.
Not as creepy as finding out that he had died at some point in the past.
I think with Allen, it wasn’t so much “I’m rich, so screw this”, it was “I’ve got cancer”. Same thing with Wozniak. He cut back his involvement with Apple because he had brain damage from the plane crash. I think in both, it was more health issues that took them away from the company than merely being satisfied that they were rich and didn’t have to work.