[lll-o-lll]

I’m not sure “underrated” is exactly the best term here. He’s pretty much lauded as the greatest “visionary for design and innovation in the technology industry”, ever.

I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it’s a shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the world, he’s the one I’ll most fondly remember.

[icehawk]

Maybe not "underrated" but "Jobs only did marketing, Woz did all the technical work" is a very persistent comment I see on the internet when he's brought up.

[CrimsonCape]

Not to discount Jobs as a person, but the narrative in 100 years could easily be "Jobs was in the right place at the right time when technology reached a miniaturization threshold such that a computer could be in every person's pocket, the first time in human history; and Jobs led the first company to be there at the right time and capitalize."

[Turing_Machine]

Woz is a technical genius, no doubt about it.

But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.

Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.

Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.

[eru]

> But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.

Luckily, we had a spare: Leibniz (and others) covered much of the same ground as Newton.

[philwelch]

The calculus, sure, but not the physics.

[eru]

Newton didn't do everything that Leibniz did, nor did Leibniz do everything Newton did.

Other people did other stuff. Once calculus was around, much of Newtonian physics would have come naturally sooner or later.

Eg even just re-doing an analysis of Galileo's free fall experiments with calculus would have gone a pretty long way.

[zenlikethat]

That’s a great way to put it, ha ha. Toxic human, but hard to deny the results.

[1-more]

Success like he had is a filter. To be there you have to go through a lot of “sure you’ve done well so far, but you’ll never make it to the next level” conversations in your life. By the time you’re Steve Jobs, you’ve been right in the face of doubt thousands of times. Type of thing that makes someone think they can cure easily treatable pancreatic cancer with crystals or whatever.

[marcosdumay]

He was a genius that had that flaw of being a narcissist.

The problem is all the people using him as a reason to praise narcissism itself. And almost never even in people that are genial, since very few people are genial.

[cladopa]

I will not define Jobs as narcissistic (thinking on himself). Quite the opposite, Jobs was focussing on what people needed, and he was right: People needed rounded corners way more than ovals.

Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was what made him a great CEO.

Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his own people? This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.

[bityard]

> This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.

No need to ask around, lots of people who worked for Jobs have gone on the record as saying he was the worst person they have ever worked for. If you ran into him (or worse, had to present something to him), you never knew if you were going to get Nice Steve or Angry Steve. Nice Steve would thank you for your work and politely inform you of changes or refinements that he wanted you to make. Angry Steve would verbally berate you in front of your manager and peers.

He had a set of close associates that he never or rarely treated badly, it is not hyperbole to say that most everyone else got the brunt of his wrath.

Straight from Woz, if you don't want to take my word for it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...