The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT
My opinion after working for him (and writing this story) is he couldn’t see obvious things everyone else could see, but he could see things no one else could. I fought with him over stores as did virtually everyone on the board of Apple, and it turned out he was right. Thank God he was stubborn enough to go forward with them. We all said it drove Gateway out of business, yada.
.. And the App Store as well, Steve thought it would be best to do deals n an app by app basis. However note that in both cases he did relent. For all the stories about his intransigence he didn’t hire yes men and he did listen to the people he trusted.
Do we know that to be true? It seemed to me like they pulled the public SDK and App Store together much faster than they could have if it were a last minute change of direction.And it further seemed to me that had Apple let developers write apps from day one, the quality of apps would have been far worse, with many developers basing their iPhone apps on the designs and logic flows of their existing Blackberry/Windows CE apps.
Looking back on it, I think they did—whether by design or by accident—exactly what they should have done.
” … current distribution channels for the computer industry over the last several years have lost their ability to create demand. They can fulfill demand, but they can’t create it. If a new product comes out, you’re lucky if you can find somebody at the computer store that even knows how to demo it. So the more innovative the product is, the more revolutionary it is and not just an incremental improvement, the more you’re stuck [in getting people to try learn about it enough to try it out].”
So now we’ve seen a few Steve Jobs stores like this, including the one from John Carmack. A recurring theme is that Steve is such a bonehead that his underlings have to do things to “manage him.” Whether that be doing things behind his back, withholding information from him, controlling who he meets and talks to. You also read about people working insane hours to complete things which probably didn’t merit it, just to please steve’s whims.Since there’s a cult-of-personality around the guy, I think it’s important to remind everyone that these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership. If you work for someone like this, don’t! You’re better than that.
Not saying Steve Jobs didn’t do great things. But let’s all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.
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