[mdlug] Why I will not praise Steve Jobs

[Robert Adkins II]

> 
> Personally, it was Jobs behavior.. and its effect on Apple 
> that made me stop supporting Apple in the early Macintosh years...
> and frankly, they lost me.
> 
> The Apple II and it's culture was great.  Jobs destroyed that 
> -- watch the movie the Pirates of Silicon Valley and there is 
> a rather accurate depiction of the harm Jobs was causing to Apple.
> 
> He set the Macintosh group at war with the rest of the 
> company, completely alienating not only those employees, but 
> more importantly, the customer bases of the non-Macintosh group.
> 
> 
> How this could NOT be relevant to computing is beyond me.
> 

  The Apple II and it's culture was also tied to "Computer as an Appliance"
when the rest of the computing world was moving towards a more complicated
"Mainframe" at home, to account for better features, more capacity, etc.,
etc. that was starting to grow with MS-DOS and similar IBM Architecture
based systems.

  The Apple II and it's ilk (C-64, etc., etc.) were great systems, but they
were also more reminiscient of a smart terminal. The need to swap out
applications to specialize the machine for that one task was starting to
really get old back then.

  What Steve Jobs did by creating that wall between the two groups was
purposeful, it split them from interacting and poisoning each other's wells
with thoughts and ideas that didn't directly apply to what the other group
was doing. Maybe it did it more harsh than it needed to be done, but it did
create the wall that was needed. Whether you agree with that or not.

  -Rob