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Comment by jazz9k

20 hours ago

It's funny how many people Jobs had to fire during this period, but is still seen as a good guy to many in the tech community.

Not that different from when Musk took over Twitter.

19 comments

jazz9k

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blipvert  19 hours ago

I must have missed the bit where Steve Jobs was trying to create “legion” of his offspring, supported far-right parties in Europe and tried to foment civil war in the UK.

Guess I’ll have to buy the book

  • helloplanets  18 hours ago

    He isn't comparing Jobs to Musk in a general sense, but specifically the way Musk took over Twitter.

    Not that I agree with the point. But I wouldn't assume the poster thinks Jobs and Musk are similar in a broad sense.

    • nixon_why69  7 hours ago

      Even then, Musk didn't cut fat and then produce multiple revolutionary products. He tanked Twitter's ad revenue and wound up with a much smaller business that had to get bailed out by SpaceX, otherwise it doesn't pay for the acquisition costs.

    • blipvert  13 hours ago

      I don’t think that the good guy/bad guy reputation referred to is solely about firing a couple thousand people.

rbanffy  17 hours ago

Keep in mind Apple was dispersed across a multitude of confusing and overlapping products, from computers, to PDAs, cameras, scanners, printers (laser and inkjet), application software, servers, things made by Apple, and things that only got Apple's label, and so on. A common complaint was that not even Apple employees could figure out which Mac was more powerful just from the model number.

Jobs simplified the lineup - two sets of laptops, two sets of desktops, one professional, one personal. This shut down a significant part of the operations across the board.

PaulDavisThe1st  18 hours ago

I am no fan of Jobs, but ... his goal when he returned was to "right the ship" which is his mind translated into "create cool products". You might think that he & Apple succeeded at that, or you might not, but I don't think that you can dispute that this was the goal.

Musk had no similar goal for Twitter other than to turn it into a platform for his techno-fascist creed. The only complaints about Twitter that he wanted to act on were that too many people were mean to techno-fascists.

xp84  15 hours ago

You are implying that firing a lot of people is a bad thing, or at least that firing a lot of Apple or Twitter employees is a bad thing.

I don’t think I’m really that qualified to stand in judgment of the Twitter employees, but after the massive house cleaning, the only major negative changes to the company’s fortunes that I know about is that a lot of liberals decided to flee the platform. But that doesn’t seem connected to the layoffs - that would’ve still happened because of either their policy changes or his overall unpopularity with that crowd. We didn’t see any more notable stability problems with the platform than it had at any point in its long existence. And new features kept being shipped.

In the case of Apple, given that the company was so close to insolvency, I don’t see how anybody could seriously argue that most of management was in severe need of replacement. And when you’ve built an organization to do what turned out to be a lot of the wrong things, it’s likely that a lot of roles really do need to be replaced with different job descriptions.

The only way you can argue mass layoffs are always categorically bad is if we are viewing companies as jobs programs rather than pursuing any other mission (and I’d argue that this holds true even if that mission isn’t to make money).