What exactly did Steve Jobs do?

[Verto]

Steve Jobs writes every line of every Mac OS release. FACT.

Steve Jobs personally designs the circuit boards inside every Mac. FACT.

Steve Jobs handles all the Apple orders over the internet and packs each Mac into its cardboard box. FACT.

Steve Jobs does all the artwork and designs and runs the Apple website. FACT.

Now you know.

 

[FragTek]

There's a movie called "Pirates of Silicon Valley" which does a pretty good job portraying the whole computer revolution and how both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were involved. It's a pretty darn good movie... I don't know if you can rent it or not, it was a made for TV production IIRC.

I have it if anyone is interested in seeing it.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Steve has VISION.

When computers were DOS and worked with keyboards, he came up with the GUI and mouse. True, he borrowed those ideas from other companies, but who brought them to fruition?

When people visualized computers mostly as business machines, who made them fun to use in the home?

When portable devices meant mostly things like Palm Pilots, who came up with the iPod?

When they said it was impossible to come up with a music-selling business model that would satisfy customers and the industry, who invented iTMS?

No, he doesn't do the work himself. But he sure as hell knows how to point the company in the right direction.

 

[Chaszmyr]

Steve Jobs writes every line of every Mac OS release. FACT.

Steve Jobs personally designs the circuit boards inside every Mac. FACT.

Steve Jobs handles all the Apple orders over the internet and packs each Mac into its cardboard box. FACT.

Steve Jobs does all the artwork and designs and runs the Apple website. FACT.

Steve Jobs can beat up Chuck Norris. FACT.

 

[Chaszmyr]

When they said it was impossible to come up with a music-selling business model that would satisfy customers and the industry, who invented iTMS?

No, he doesn't do the work himself. But he sure as hell knows how to point the company in the right direction.

I don't agree with all of your earlier points, especially the iPod one, but this one about iTMS is good. According to all the reports, Steve Jobs personally went and met with all the record industry executives to convince them iTMS was a good idea.

 

[Malfoy]

Steve has VISION.

When computers were DOS and worked with keyboards, he came up with the GUI and mouse. True, he borrowed those ideas from other companies, but who brought them to fruition?

When people visualized computers mostly as business machines, who made them fun to use in the home?

When portable devices meant mostly things like Palm Pilots, who came up with the iPod?

When they said it was impossible to come up with a music-selling business model that would satisfy customers and the industry, who invented iTMS?

No, he doesn't do the work himself. But he sure as hell knows how to point the company in the right direction.

Who brought it to fruition? MS. Apple may have had a better implementation of a GUI(and even I find that hard to swallow) but MS really brought it to the masses.

Before iPod there was Rio. They made good players. iPod just came right when Mp3s were becoming a much bigger deal. To say ipod changed portable devices is like saying mp3s were nothing before napster.

As for a model that pleases both RIAA and the industry ehhh thats a stretch. They tolerate it. I would hardly called the industry pleased with it. They are a bit too vocal to be pleased with it.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Who brought it to fruition? MS. Apple may have had a better implementation of a GUI(and even I find that hard to swallow) but MS really brought it to the masses.

Then this must be wrong:

The GUI familiar to most of us today is either the Macintosh or the Windows operating systems. Their applications originated at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratory in the late 1970s. Apple used it in their first Macintosh computers. Later, Microsoft built on many of Apple's ideas in their first version of the Windows operating system for IBM-compatible PCs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface

Before iPod there was Rio. They made good players. iPod just came right when Mp3s were becoming a much bigger deal. To say ipod changed portable devices is like saying mp3s were nothing before napster.

Yeah, there were other mp3 players, but nothing really grabbed the public's imagination like the iPod. You may feel differently. (shrugs)

As for a model that pleases both RIAA and the industry ehhh thats a stretch. They tolerate it. I would hardly called the industry pleased with it. They are a bit too vocal to be pleased with it.

Again, Steve got the music industry to go along with it when others didn't. Later arguments about profit margins are, well, later arguments about profit margins.

 

[IJ Reilly]

There's a movie called "Pirates of Silicon Valley" which does a pretty good job portraying the whole computer revolution and how both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were involved. It's a pretty darn good movie... I don't know if you can rent it or not, it was a made for TV production IIRC.

I have it if anyone is interested in seeing it.

It's entertaining, but as history, it's pretty weak, as are most TV versions of reality.

I'd suggest reading "Accidental Empires" by Robert X. Cringely. Also very entertaining, but as far as I've been able to determine, also accurate.

 

[wmmk]

Steve Jobs is much more in to ideas and making them happen rather than Wozzy who is how it all works.

partly true, but steve wozniak hasn't worked at apple for quite a while now.