Jobs was a semi-decent asshole. He was simply an asshole, but had semi-decent behavior. So not a complete asshole.
I can read just a little about him on Wikipedia and know that I wouldn't work with him.. He got a $5000 bonus from Atari based on Wozniak's work and told Woz he got $700 and Woz's half was $350... I knew a guy like that, he never made it to 30yo, got run over in a hit and run.. the PD just called it an accident and closed the books on it, nobody missed him at all. The amazing thing about Apple is that an American company makes very high quality stuff.. Very few American companies make anything that is better than junk really. I like that about Apple and Jobs might be the only reason for that. Quality might decline if the bean counters get the company...
60 mins did show a little of Temple Grandin in the show. The keyboard started it all and the portable nature of the i pad is what is so cool. It you have time, view the Temple Grandin Story to see an autistic person who was extremely inventive and did get a PhD. The market is one of those places where children are able to see the patterns (autism is an advantage in this it turns out) Temple shows us all how being mentally sensitive (using her eyes to see and immediately build inference to attain), a person can work through any puzzle. In here case the cattle feeding and cutting industry. You may want to loook at the self induced heat The Oracle is finally creating for himself as a person who just can't "get it" in trading. you may also want to check in with the denver schools. there is a person there who "keeps" autisitc kids up to 21 in the same schooling. She fought a terrific battle to get there and is open to any approach what so ever to get it to work. Her husband trades a little as well.
I tend to trust, and especially encourage, the dissenting views on Steve Jobs. It is after all a quality for a trade or investor to be able to disagree from the majority, and the majority only want to hear good things about Steve Jobs. I also tend to believe the stories because I know from experience that people who start something that's never been done and complete it against all odds are egotistical assholes.
The quote I linked to earlier (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_1...rom-a-tech-giant/?tag=contentMain;contentBody) is from the writer Steve Jobs asked to write his biography (Walter Isaacson). Isaacson did over 40 interviews with Jobs. So I think its fair to say that what is written in that book includes "both sides of the story" - if anything it might be biased towards Jobs.
This does not make him a visionary, it makes him a good evaluator of talent. I cant believe so many brilliant minds fell for his act. Besides the original Mac OS, Jobs or his companies created nothing new. I think the greatest lesson that jobs leaves behind is that if a doctor tells you that you have an operable form of cancer, you dont tell them to fuck off, you get the operation.
What an absolute crock of revisionist history. Jobs bought Pixar for $5MM and sunk $5MM of his own money in it, not "tens of millions." The best thing he did with them, and why it paid off so big, is that he did abso-fucking-lutely nothing. He left them alone to be creative. As for Toy Story, it was his particular genius as an outright bastard negotiator with Disney that ultimately made him the largest shareholder of Team Mouse(tm). Jobs had an incredible ability to identify and align himself with talent that bordered on genius -- and then he systematically screwed them over to his personal gain. In the end, he was a brilliant capitalist and an insufferable bastard, the likes of which the Rockefellers would have envied.
"In so many other companies, ideas and great design get lost in the process," Ive said. "The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn't been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products." Jonathan Ive: Steve Jobs stole my ideas