[quote=AN][quote=CONCHO]People tend to forget that Jobs is responsible for 2 insanely great, insanely successful companies: Apple and Pixar. He bought Pixar for $10M and sold it for over $7B 20 years later. Cha-ching.
A world without Steve Jobs? There would have been no “Toy Story” — kids wouldn’t have gotten to watch Buzz and Woody! I don’t even want to imagine such a miserable place…[/quote]
A world without Pixar, we still have Kungfu Panda, Shrek, Aladin, Lilo & Stitch, Mulan, the Lion King, etc. Doesn’t sound too miserable to me. Aladin and Kungfu Panda > Toy Story IMHO.
Jobs is great, no doubt about that, but he’s no Gates, Brin/Page, and to a lesser extent Zuckerberg. I see Jobs in similar light Jack Welch than the the guys I listed above. When Jack Welch took over GE, GE was about $1/share. When he left GE, it was about $40/share. At the peak, it was ~$55/share. When Jobs took over Apple, it was about $10/share, now it’s ~$400/share. They both have great stories of turning around nearly bankrupt companies. But Gate, Brin/Page, and to a lesser extent Zuckerberg formed a company from their “garage” and have a company that lead their respective industry. Jobs and Gates were starting out the same time and we all know how that battle turned out. At the peak, MSFT has a market cap of $488B, while Apple’s current peak is $355B.[/quote]
I’m not a techie, and know only a teensy-tiny bit about tech developments, but it would seem to me that this is far more important than Jobs’ later developments with Pixar:
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Beginning in 1979, started by Steve Jobs and led by Jef Raskin, the Lisa and Macintosh teams at Apple Computer (which included former members of the Xerox PARC group) continued to develop such ideas. The Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first commercially successful product to use a GUI. A desktop metaphor was used, in which files looked like pieces of paper; directories looked like file folders; there were a set of desk accessories like a calculator, notepad, and alarm clock that the user could place around the screen as desired; and the user could delete files and folders by dragging them to a trash can on the screen. Drop down menus were also introduced.
There is still some controversy over the amount of influence that Xerox’s PARC work, as opposed to previous academic research, had on the GUIs of Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh, but it is clear that the influence was extensive, because first versions of Lisa GUIs even lacked icons. These prototype GUIs are at least mouse driven, but completely ignored the WIMP concept. Rare screenshots of first GUIs of Apple Lisa prototypes are shown here and here. Note also that Apple engineers visited the PARC facilities (Apple secured the rights for the visit by compensating Xerox with a pre-IPO purchase of Apple stock) and a number of PARC employees subsequently moved to Apple to work on the Lisa and Macintosh GUI. However, the Apple work extended PARC’s considerably, adding manipulatable icons, a fixed drop-down menu bar and drag&drop manipulation of objects in the file system (see Macintosh Finder) for example. A list of the improvements made by Apple to the PARC interface can be read here (folklore.org) It’s hard to say which particular features were originated in which project, though. Jef Raskin warns that many of the reported facts in the history of the PARC and Macintosh development are inaccurate, distorted or even fabricated, due to the lack of usage by historians of direct primary sources.[4]
