The Steve Jobs I Knew
allthingsd.comThe Gates anecdote is really neat (edited for brevity):
For our fifth D conference, both Steve and Bill Gates agreed to a joint appearance. But it almost got derailed.
Earlier in the day, before Gates arrived, I did a solo onstage interview with Jobs, and asked him what it was like to be a major Windows developer, since Apple’s iTunes program was by then installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs.
He quipped: “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell.” When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged.
In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs: “So I guess I’m the representative from Hell.” Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water he was carrying. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph.
This is a perfect story about Jobs. The ipod was brilliant, but iTunes is a truly terrible program. It is by far the worst program that I use on a regular basis. But the greatness of the ipod (or iphone and ipad) outweighs putting up with iTunes.
I've always wondered how Jobs could put up with iTunes being so bad. But now everyone is perfect and he obviously had a blind eye when it came to iTunes.
Notice how its 10.5 with the iOS 5 betas and not 11?
At first, when I read the headline...I rolled my eyes...and thought either Kara or Walt are just re-hashing what everybody else is saying.
But then I read it, and it was surprisingly amusing.
This paragraph had me dying:
After his liver transplant, while he was recuperating at home in Palo Alto, California, Steve invited me over to catch up on industry events that had transpired during his illness. It turned into a three-hour visit, punctuated by a walk to a nearby park that he insisted we take, despite my nervousness about his frail condition.
He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn’t know CPR and could visualize the headline: “Helpless Reporter Lets Steve Jobs Die on the Sidewalk.”
I can just imagine how terrified Walt must have been.
My favorite part:
"He looked at me like I was crazy, said there’d be many, many stores, and that the company had spent a year tweaking the layout of the stores, using a mockup at a secret location. I teased him by asking if he, personally, despite his hard duties as CEO, had approved tiny details like the translucency of the glass and the color of the wood.
He said he had, of course."
That made me think of humanism: as a humanism, nothing human is strange to me. Steve Jobs would be a humanist CEO. As the CEO, no detail of my company is strange to me.
Beautiful article from a true gentleman. I love how he still used the present tense at the end of the clip. Personally, these news haven't sunk in yet.
This was a really nice piece, it was disappointing to discover there was no page 2.
This was such an insightful article, a great way to remember Steve in life. Well done Walt. Way to keep it classy while keeping it real.