I'm glad they mentioned NeXT and how much of a failure it was. There's a meme developing where people treat Jobs like he lived a charm life of constant victories but that really isn't the case. When I started High School people were telling Steve Jobs jokes in Usenet. He was the fallen genius who never lived up to his potential (the Mac was all but dead at this point and Apple was licensing the OS in a desperate attempt to save it)<p>In that way I think the story of Steve Jobs is one of the most inspirational for people. Almost everything people associate with Jobs today are things he did after his 40th birthday. Even the Mac (OSX is really NextSTEP repackaged)<p>In an industry that obsesses over people in their 20s there's a lesson to be learned there.
<i>“He was not filtered with his input. If he was in a meeting that was boring him, he would be blunt. He’d say, ‘I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.’ And we would. He didn’t suffer a fool.”</i><p>Uhm, that's considered being blunt? I would call that being good at leading a meeting. Saying when information (or so detailed information) is not needed is crucial and necessary in order to keep meetings tight amd relevant.
Not only this, but I've read stories that in the early days of his return, you could get into an elevator with him and not have a job any more when you got out. If he asked you what you did and you said marketing, you were out. If you were an engineer on a misguided technical project, also out.<p>Jobs had respect for the engineers who had slogged over many years, squeezing all the life and functionality they could out of the classic Mac OS under the direction of misguided marketers who innovated by writing a feature list then implementing it, rather than by seeing if it was technically feasible then writing it.<p>He had no respect for the marketing people who came up with these bullshit feature lists and bullshit adverts and bullshit product lines and encouraged ridiculous R&D projects. (Taligent, Copland, HyperCard 3, etc.)
Being close to any "VIP" type executive, politician, etc is often awkward.<p>I had the bad fortune of being in an environment where I found myself in the sights of a psychotic, two-bit political appointee from time to time. Not fun.
> A little known-fact Dhuey recalls is that Jobs has hearing loss.<p>> “When we did the iPod we had to make sure it would be loud enough for Steve to hear the music,” says Dhuey. “We had to balance his need for volume with a French law against things that were too loud."<p>Well, that explains a lot. It's a pity that Jobs needing to have music louder to be able to hear it has led to a generation of people who are getting hearing loss from having their music turned up too loudly.