Comment by JKCalhoun
10 hours ago
And yet when Jobs returned to Apple he blew up ATG (the Advanced Technology Group) that gave us Quicktime, etc. He also shutdown Apple's research library (and gave all the books to Stanford, I believe).
He seemed to have little patience for "scientists" — preferred engineers that shipped shit.
I think that at best he saw research as expensive, at worst he saw it as elitist.
"real artists ship" - Jobs
Wasn't Apple burning money when he joined?
Apple was giving away the Keys to the Kingdom by way of licensing Macintosh clones, among other things. If ATG were responsible for hemorrhaging cash I am not sure why they did not re-appear then when Apple was firing on all cylinders. Only Jony was crowned.
And there's no way the library and its books were a cost — unless perhaps it was attracting snooty engineers who were reading Foley and van Dam when they should have been fixing bugs. ;-) (That actually might have been me.)
And yet, he went to Xerox PARC and copied their research.
He also didn’t seem to have an issue borrowing Unix, which obviously has a rich history of research and academia.
I could be putting too fine a point on it, but my impression was that he was kind of jealous of "academia". Not only did he not graduate from but even seemed to eschew higher learning. And to be sure he would have had a harder time bullshitting an expert in a given domain. They had a kind of power of knowledge that he lacked.
At the same time he was clearly enamored with Avadis, very much the academic — appeared to be grooming him for role of Apple CEO. He must have been very disappointed when Avadis left the fold.
Indeed, however many people are too young to remember that he looked down into UNIX, as a bunch of greybeards without taste.
"Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible."
https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...
"That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo"
> They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them.
From https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....
The value proposition NeXT found on UNIX, was the same as Microsoft (after they let go of Xenix, thanks to MS-DOS golden goose deal with IBM), a means to an end, the market of companies and universities that wanted something with UNIX in the box.
"NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
Note that he wasn't at Apple when A/UX and MkLinux efforts took place.
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