>>>Visionary or pompous jerk?
>Either way, he accomplished part of his mission because people seem to talk about him almost as much as they talk about the products.
>
>That's a nice diversion but In the long run, does anyone think about Thomas Edison when turning the lights on?
>It's the product that endures or doesn't.
Of course that's true. But there is a reason Jobs is so indelibly associated with Apple. He and Woz started the company, literally in a garage. There are now two momentous companies that were started in garages in Northern California, the other being Hewlett Packard. Jobs is closely associated with a number of seismic Apple products -- the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and most recently the iPad -- and was also involved with the most ground breaking movie studio around, Pixar. I don't need to defend his record. It speaks for itself.
Just as there are Forrest Gump fans and Pulp Fiction fans -- classic, wildly different movies that came out the same year -- there are Jobs people and Woz people. As a gearhead by trade I am in awe of Woz's engineering prowess. In fact I wouldn't choose a favorite. Apple would not be the company it is without either of them. Woz had the know-how to build the first Apple computers but would not have been able to market and grow the company on his own. Jobs was the opposite. As they both acknowledged, they needed each other.
Woz is another of the fascinating secondary characters in Walter Isaacson's book. He was from the love, peace, and granola wing of the Bay Area at that time and the early PC movement. He built things for the engineering challenge and thought everything should be shared freely with the community. Jobs, obviously, saw things otherwise, although he had his own spacy side. As Jobs occasionally said bitterly, Woz never worked a day in his life after 1982. He didn't have to -- Apple going public made him a very rich man. One of the nice local color notes in the book is about someone posting a picture of a homeless man on an Apple bulletin board, with the caption "Woz in 1990." There are not in fact any indications of him sinking into a life of dissipation but I thought that was pretty funny.
Jobs had a heck of a time getting Woz to help him found Apple. They had met in a computer group and done some small projects like a computer card on the side. Woz had an enviable, safe job as an engineer at HP and did not share Jobs's embracement of risk. It took quite a while but Jobs eventually wore him down. Woz kept saying no and Jobs just kept coming. He even enlisted Woz's family to help talk him into it. A lifetime habit -- he wouldn't take no for an answer. I bet Woz is glad he wouldn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_WozniakUPDATE: We always need more YouTube links ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK_XEGrzHUohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scf6dV4FSf8&NR=1&feature=fvwphttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLcWatching this stuff makes me grateful once again for wandering into the field I have spent my entire career in. Computers and software are the most compelling business of our time. We are all lucky to be part of it.
