Jobs retires
What, again?
Look: I’m not an apple fanboy, and never will be. I prefer the horrors of Microsoft over the smug selfrighteousness of Apple all 7 days of the week.
I like the Imac and OS-x because they are basically PC computers running Unix. the Apple GUI is- frankly- not important. It’s the cleanliness of the OS that is what is important, and Apple had nothing to do with that, it was Bell Labs.
Bottomline, Jobs made a good living stealing the best ideas of other people (Bell labs, PARC, AT&T, etc) and packaging them in attractive packaging. They had a team of very bright people taking other people’s ideas and making them cool. They polled kids who told them the things they wanted out of computing platforms and developed things like Tablet computing. They made nerds line up to pay handsomely for the privelege of being their beta test group. They sold their concepts like religion and surrounded themselves with true believers.
I hope Job’s health does not trouble him. His money cannot buy him youth or health, and I’m sure all the money in the world will be small comfort to him.
I’m also not an Apple fanboy, and won’t be. However I prefer to think of it as the saw the greatness in the ideas of others that they themselves couldn’t see.
I read an interesting book about Xerox, and they had a scientist who liked to play with lasers in his lab. The only way he kept from being fired was to get transferred to PARC. He wound up making the first laser printer.
It’s not just Apple whose success is based on Xerox technology. 3COM and Adobe were started by former employees of Xerox PARC.
“I prefer the horrors of Microsoft over the smug selfrighteousness of Apple all 7 days of the week.”
Well put.
Yeah, the folks at PARC were pretty amazing.
If Apple had paid PARC for their work, if they’d paid for the rights to the MP3 player, I could agree with you, that they saw good things and improved on them; as it is, I will always look on it as theft of intellectual property.
If I recall correctly, Apple did actually give Xerox some stock at one point. I think this was before the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit over Windows look and feel being so much like the Mac’s.
Jobs, et cie, took the mouse from Xerox’s working model. Xerox’s version had a single control button as well.
I’ve been to a couple events at PARC, and Adobe was in effect the bastard graphic font-house love-child of Apple and PARC. Steve has a really nice house on Waverly and Santa Rita in Palo Alto, right next to where my HS buddy Jim used-to live. Jim’s dad had to move the family out-west after he did a real-estate job and made a wicked bundle in commission for Hooker Chemical in New York, selling some property to a developer for a place they called Love Canal? I dunno, something happened and they had to leave town…
iQuit.