Comment by ghostly_s
8 years ago
I love Woz, but he's demonstrated no ability to create an impression in the marketplace since his time working with Jobs (arguably an unfair assessment as he largely retired). Jobs turned Pixar into an animation studio and gave Lasseter a place to practice his talents. Ive was working at Apple for years before Jobs came back and put his talents to use (not to mention that Ive's design efforts are only one of a huge swath of things Apple started knocking out of the park after Jobs was back in the chair). That's not just success-through-association.
Woz had the ideal of giving everything away for free. Of course he had no business sense.
Pixar wanted to be a studio, Jobs wanted it to be a hardware/software company. The people of Pixar forced Jobs into letting it be what it is today.
Jobs recognized Ive for what he is and then Apple became what it is today.
Like I said, Jobs was good at latching on to people with vision and genius to make what him what he is.
> The people of Pixar forced Jobs
Jobs had a controlling interest in Pixar. Nobody forced him. Pixar would have gone bankrupt without Jobs. Apple would have gone bankrupt without Jobs. Apple would never have existed and we'd have never heard of Woz without Jobs.
Nobody is that lucky. It's like winning the lottery 3 times. Once is luck. 3 times means there's a guiding finger on the roulette wheel.
Latching on is an odd way to describe something that happened repeatedly. You're dismissing Jobs singular talent: assembling groups of skilled people and giving them an environment that let them create incredible things. He was genius level at this.
I think Woz is down on Jobs, but Lasseter, Catmull, Ive, Cook, Fred Anderson and others all spoke highly of him.
I'm not dismissing that talent, I'm pointing it out.
It was his vision that made him such a joy to be "latched onto." It's too easy to dismiss building collaborative environments with extreme talent underneath you. People aren't just cattle you can find and latch onto. It's often a reciprocal relationship.