lapcat

He had bodyguards.

I've been reading the book "Careless People," and I came upon these passages just yesterday, referring to Mark Zuckerberg in 2015:

> Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been.

> He launches into a spiel about Empereror Augustus, his favorite emperor, who led the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire.

> He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.

> But would we have what we have now without SJ?

Does the end justify the means? That's an ethical question.

Also, how much did we really need what we have now? We can ask whether dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, but in any case the stakes were extremely high, already life and death, world war. The stakes are not nearly the same when we're talking about luxury consumer tech gadgets. How much do workers need to be abused just to produce those?

> I don't really understand this comment.

I was trying to reconcile the various statements in your previous comment:

"the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money"

"Steve ended up asking for 4x as much"

"it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped"

If Jobs asked for 4x as much as JLG, and Apple went with Jobs, then clearly the ask by itself was not the problem.

And if the Apple board of directors had concluded that BeOS would never work for Apple, then my question would be, why would Apple pay anything for it?

I wasn't aware of this:

> What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen

What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?

> I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them.

The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

> OSX would certainly never have shipped.

If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

> Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make

This is literally what happened. I highly recommend the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT years.

Jobs had a vague idea—he wanted to make a computer for higher education—but that's about it. And after leaving Apple he had to promise not to compete with Apple.

The NeXT team traveled around to various universities and asked them what they wanted from a computer. Then they started to build it… but it became something else (vastly more expensive than the requested price point) because Jobs wanted the "perfect" computer.

> the engineers just so happened to make it?

Jobs was a micromanager, though not so much with the Apple II, which was definitely the baby of Woz. However, Jobs was constantly changing his mind and his requirements, much to the consternation of the NeXT engineers, and the indecision of Jobs played a big role in the failure of NeXT.

You may not consider NeXT a failure because it was ultimately acquired by Apple, but at that point Jobs had mostly given up on NeXT and moved his attention to Pixar. In fact Jobs infamously sold all of the Apple stock he got from the sale of NeXT, and the Apple board had to beg a reluctant Jobs to become interim CEO, because they couldn't find anyone else who wanted the job of rescuing a failing company.

To be fair, sales is crucial. For example, Jean-Louis Gassée totally botched the presentation of Be to the Apple board, making no effort, assuming it was already a done deal, whereas Jobs and NeXT nailed it.

Perot was an early investor in NeXT but later lamented, according to the book Steve Jobs in Exile, "I gave Steve too much dang money."

Jobs was also wary, because Perot's intended use for NeXT computers was military.

> At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life.

Specifically, their gripes were that their boss was extremely abusive. Read "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT days. After that, you may no longer feel that you missed out.