They had a long history of innovative tech design, a large music catalog, etc. If anyone should have come up with an iPod/iTunes type solution before Apple did it should have been Sony. You're completely disregarding the fact that leadership plays a huge role in good ideas getting done. He had some good ideas, which faceless techs made reality.

He was a part of it, and almost none of the tech advances were done physically by him. Like mentioned above, it's like people think he was down in the basement soldering together boards or coding OS. Yeah, overrated for sure.He did literally 1% of what you just said. again all straight from his official bio where he gave the author full access to everything.Ĭaught_clean - myersei - Eunuchorn - A contender for most overrated man of the century so far.Ĭreates one of the largest companies in the world out of his garage.Ĭreates products that revolutionize the way people use computers from the apple II to the mac to the imac to putting a computer in your pocket with the iphone.īought pixar for $5M in 1986 sold it 20 years later to Disney for $7.6BĬhanged the way we buy and listen to music forever and created the largest music distributor in the US in less than 5 years

Very weird guy with a lot of personality quirks - bizarre diet, lack of showering and stinking, refusing to put a number plate on his car, insisting on parking in the disabled spot to be a prick despite having a CEO spot reserved for him, collusion to limit employee wages and opportunities to leave despite his success being because Hewlett Packard didn't do that to him. It's definitely true that Gates and successors at Microsoft were techies who didn't give a fuck about aesthetic refinement to the software and had no interest in the hardware.the fact that all our 21st century IT is so nice in both SW and HW is definitely Jobs (and I'm typing this on an iPhone) I don't know.I remember thinking he was insane to go all in on a tablet since they'd been around for years and no one cared, now I have 2 iPads at home.so maybe? This is all straight out of his official biography he had someone wrote as he was dying. Internally at Apple they even had a name for it - 'Steve's reality distortion field' ie he would just refuse to accept reality and just keep screaming at everyone until they invented what he wanted. Right time and right place meant a lot and some very talented people who were followers were happy for him to take the lead.Įssentially, he saw already existing products from other companies that weren't very refined, had high level ideas on how to make them better, then screamed at Apple engineers until they invented and made work what he wanted. He didn't invent or code any IT product past the first Apple PC in the late 1970s and even then didn't do that much.

Was bill burr right about steve jobs