Steve Jobs I Hate You : Volume 2

 

Last week i posted Volume one of the " Steve Job i hate you" here is the second version "

Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs. After a ton of adulation and deification following his death in 2011, the allocades showered on this egocentric maniac for founding and promoting Apple products just never dies down. But there is a cottage industry of haters who know the real score, and I'm one of them. The truth is, Jobs was a stingy computer giant who treated his employees horribly, provided poor customer service for his products for decades, and nearly destroyed the computer industry in its crib when his obsession with proprietary control. And that's just for starters.

Let's back up and talk about his treatment of customers and staff. Steve Jobs was known to be a backstabber with employees. He often took their best ideas and dismissed them, only to quietly introduced them as his own short while later. He deeply underpaid or overworked many of the workers in the US, and got many of the hardware parts of his projects developed in China, a.k.a. under slave labor conditions. For years Apple was known to maintain sparse or nonexistent customer service, because Steve wouldn't shell out extra dough needed to pay for a more responsive team of representatives.

That ties into the legendary stinginess of the man. Both in his business practice and personally, Jobs held on to his money like a black hole, giving almost nothing to charity throughout his life. This is most peculiar considering his products were over priced (and still are), and even had billions to share among his friends and company visionaries, that he didn't. Everything had to flow one way, towards Jobs, vainly feeding his cult of himself. Everything that went through Apple ultimately had to have Jobs' name or finger prints on it. This is the opposite of greatness, it's a personality virus.

This ego was matched only by the compulsion to litigate. How can anybody like Apple after the injunction they obtained against Samsung, over their "all-in-one" search function? Here Jobs and co. were flexing their legal muscle to accuse their chief rivals in the market of 'stealing' its mobile device ideas, such as the search function and a sleeker form factor, when what is actually at issue is an attempt to monopolize the natural evolution of the handheld industry. In what other possible direction can the smart phone go, after all, except for a smaller, leaner form factor with added search functionality? How much different can competing TVs look, to efficiently do what TVs do?

This is why some have called Apple a retarded company, for all they do is buy patents and claim they "innovated." Beyond Jobs' selfishness and self-absorbion, his worst legacy is in encouraging the non-sharing of technological platforms, from the days of the first Mac to the iPhone. The explosion of home PCs and creative uses for them is rooted in IBM's genius decision to permit IBM-compatible architecture to flourish. Jobs may have had a better computer system, but by being so retentive about its proprietary design "he let his ice melt in the desert," so the standardized PC age passed him by.

Apple's vaunted edge in smartphones and apps is dimming, now burdened by the Jobs no-share philosophy, and the arrival of Samsung Galaxy III and other alternatives, which are surpassing Apple as the coolest, most advanced devices. Congratulations, Steve, you've managed to mess up Apple twice in a generation.by ceaselessly trying to corner the market to the exclusion of any other consideration, they find themselves trapped in their own corner. Jobs could have led by being a "radiator,' whose value translated to and enlarged others, but the Apple he delevoped leads by trying to be a "vacuum cleaner," that takes or monopolizes, without giving back.

But perhaps the tide will start turning now that some time has passed. Looks like Apple's losing all their charm now that Steve is dead. All they've got are overpriced slow-cpu phones that are getting outselled by people who do it better. "Rounded corners"? Is that all that the new iPhone is about? Samsung Galaxy is just plain better, and it has nothing to do with rounded corners. Indeed, more than 50% of iPhone components are made by Samsung. How long can Apple cling to its branded status as the sole visionary among home electronics makers, when your parts are indistinguishable from your main competition?

All of this is not to say that Steve Jobs did not contribute anything - obviously, there is the legacy of the first home computers, building the smart phone industry, Pixar and computer animation, and all the rest. This is just to say, get off your knees. But he wasn't God, and Apple isn't heaven. Let's remember his contributions in light of how many people were ripped off funding the over priced brand, and its overhyped icon.