Wired on Jobs

Barn sent me a great article from Wired on Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Just this once, I urge you to read and reflect, rather than watching a clip of David Lee Roth getting hit in the nuts or some such other nonsense.

Basically, the premise is that Steve Jobs is a micromanaging tyrant, and that this is a very good thing for Steve Jobs, but also for Apple users.

It’s a great article. That said, if anyone has a clip of David Lee Roth getting hit in the nuts, however, I will of course post it immediately.

An excerpt:

When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, the company was struggling to survive. Today it has a market cap of $105 billion, placing it ahead of Dell and behind Intel. Its iPod commands 70 percent of the MP3 player market. Four billion songs have been purchased from iTunes. The iPhone is reshaping the entire wireless industry. Even the underdog Mac operating system has begun to nibble into Windows’ once-unassailable dominance; last year, its share of the US market topped 6 percent, more than double its portion in 2003.It’s hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers, the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications — kind of like the rest of the Internet, come to think of it.

Read on