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Steve Jobs' Reaction to MobileMe Launch, Life at Apple After Jobs and Other Anecdotes
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Steve Jobs created a billion dollar company. I doubt he's going to change his personality and management style. He knows what he needs to do to be successful, even if that means a few people won't like him.
That's why he has billions of dollars and you don't.
Business.
Hate to destroy your vision of the OCD, angry, mercurial Steven P. Jobs with a whip persona, but the man on a daily basis talks and commends people across all lines of work he has his interest in.
He calls a spade a spade. He is always the first to praise his staff for superb work. Do you expect him to give them all a Capri Sun and we'll get'em next time kids when they deserve to be challenged for their efforts?
There are an awful lot of multi-millionaires working at Apple ever since Steve returned.
Nearly 33% of the staff was about to take 12 week sabbaticals when NeXT took over. They were all walking out of the company.
He ended that ridiculous program and told them they can walk now.
Most stayed and realized the man had vision far beyond the stories they had read.
The rest is proof of his broad vision.
Either you are a focus person or one who needs coddling. This isn't high school.
You either speak up and find your niche working there and leave because of other circumstances [as I did] or you moan and complain about the great Tyrant Steve Jobs that only ever existed amidst people who grew up always being praised as if they were mini-gods for just being able to participate in a school sport.
Merit gets rewarded handsomely with Steven P. Jobs corporations.
You earn your pay and take pride in your work. If you have no pride to be the best, don't apply.
And that is the problem. Something every mac fan should be concerned about. Unfortunately Steve can't be around forever and in light of recent news about his health will his successor be able to drive the company in the right direction? It's concerning as someone who likes their products and should be even more concerning for those who own apple stock. Do we even want to guess what will happen to the stock when Steve is no longer able to carry on his daily role?
i would like to steve flip out... he *seems* calm on stage, but i would hate to have to answer to him for a screw a up. 
Go dig threw apple history and you will see if SJ was not fired when he was he would of kill the company so it was a good thing he was fired. This type of treatment is bad and to me tells me Jobs needs to step down. MM is a failure because it offers very little over multiple free service out there that are in many ways better.Jobs I bet he demanded they charge for that crap as well.
I never said to coddle your employees. If you have bad individual employees, fire them. If a project went wrong, you find out the reasons. Its highly unlikely due to a team of incompetent employees. There's something else wrong.
Re-read and understand what I wrote.
And that goes for others too.
Its great that companies praise employees work.. a lot of ( bad ) companies do not. Its a sign of a good employer. I've worked at a few company's, when our project team has worked a lot of overtime etc to get a project out on time. When the project is released, the management is silent. And we worked our guts out.. for each other. Needless to say, not very many of the project team stayed at that company afterwards.
Again, if and others think that "Apple should wrap its employees up in cotton wool" haven't understood a word of my post.
Re-read and understand what I wrote.
And that goes for others too.
Its great that companies praise employees work.. a lot of ( bad ) companies do not. Its a sign of a good employer. I've worked at a few company's, when our project team has worked a lot of overtime etc to get a project out on time. When the project is released, the management is silent. And we worked our guts out.. for each other. Needless to say, not very many of the project team stayed at that company afterwards.
Again, if and others think that "Apple should wrap its employees up in cotton wool" haven't understood a word of my post.
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Seems like you're seeing the relationship between Jobs and the rank-and-file employees at its worst and assuming it's always like that. Jobs is legendarily difficult to work for - he has been that way since the beginning and it's been documented plenty of times along the way. And instead chasing employees off and having problems hiring new ones, Apple has spent the last ten years cornering the market on personal media players, creating a market for tablets out of thin air and then ruling it with an iron fist, and taking out a huge chunk of the smartphone market. That all doesn't happen by accident, and it certainly doesn't happen if Apple can't manage to hire/retain their best workers.
As for EA - they were moving workers from one project in rush phase to another, overworking them and not letting up. That's what you call mistreatment... not lighting a fire under their ass.
Agreed. Mind you - this story is problem an extreme case of SJ and employee relations.
I'm sure its not always like that, at all.
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Apple aims for perfect execution. The MobileMe launch, while it didn't affect me personally, was a disaster on several levels. I'm honestly surprised that Steve didn't just kill it altogether. I guess it was one direction where he felt the company had to go because its the direction that the world is going... to the cloud. As great as many of the MobileMe services are (I've been a paying customer for 10 years), I still can't find myself using the online services that much. A pretty interface doesn't cut it for me. I need to see innovation and fixing iDisk is one thing they NEED to do for that part of the service to be useful for me.
Great more news to send AAPL lower. I swear if it doesn't go up soon, given the data, Apple will be in for a hostile take over!
What? I think you're mistaking blame for accountability. Jobs is simply holding everyone responsible for the sluggish start. When things don't work you don't keep the same employees and hope it will pan out for the best, you change it up. He's not calling specific people out, he's calling the WHOLE team out.
I don't see as many CEOs as involved as Jobs is and i'm sure any Apple shareholder will tell you, they wouldn't have it any other way. I mean just look at Sony, they've had a bevy of products that were nonsensical and unappealing and because of that they slipped in key markets.
It's even worse than that. That was 3 years ago and it's STILL a failure. Please tell me why someone should pay $99 for MobileMe when Google gives it to you all for free, PLUS, you don't actually have to see their ads if you use your own clients!
Is this the only way to communicate or manage? No. But speaking from the vantage point of having been on the receiving end of a few, it sharpens your focus very quickly, and makes you accountable for your actions. It's been that way in team sports forever--or perhaps it was just directed at me most of the time. Maybe it's more of a guy thing, but this story doesn't seem like that big of a deal. You get reamed, then you move on and tomorrow is a new day.
This can'be done all the time, but it's quite effective.
This can'be done all the time, but it's quite effective.
So Jobs admits MobileMe is crap, and then he's mad at Mossberg for telling the truth about it? What?
i'm not questioning your work background or experience, but i do question that you can speak for success in enterprise. especially when you write:
"I've worked for long enough to know what you do and don't do to your employees. Sure, you don't wrap them up in cotton wool.... of course not.. but you don't go for the other extreme as well. You find out what went wrong and handle it *maturely* without lashing out. A *good* company will *learn* from its mistakes.."
By implication:apple is not a "good" company (you'd have an argument from Forbes, Fortune Most Admired Company (4 years in a row), Harvard Business and on and on for management, design, marketing, distribution (google for more).
I have worked in a similar environment and learned more about reaching my goals, pushing myself and my self expectations than I ever learned before. It's not the appropriate culture for everyone, but judging whether a company is "maturely managed" "good" or doesn't "learn from it's mistakes" just by time passing, seems ill informed. It's so easy to criticize things that don't the way other people think they should look/act/think.
Steve should chill a bit. Yelling at the MobileMe team is highly unprofessional.
The service was crap from the beginning and is still crap now. I've been a .mac customer for years and since the MobileMe launch the service has gotten just worse and worse. Emails come with minutes or hours delay, syncing is still like playing the lottery, iDisk is slow as molasses.
So it's obviously not the peoples fault who worked on it. The entire concept is bad and blaming the people who try to get it running is unfair. He is the one to blame because he is in charge and set it up like crap.
But that's typical managerial behavior. Start some crappy flawed concept and blame the people who try to make it work. [sorry for the rant]
The service was crap from the beginning and is still crap now. I've been a .mac customer for years and since the MobileMe launch the service has gotten just worse and worse. Emails come with minutes or hours delay, syncing is still like playing the lottery, iDisk is slow as molasses.
So it's obviously not the peoples fault who worked on it. The entire concept is bad and blaming the people who try to get it running is unfair. He is the one to blame because he is in charge and set it up like crap.
But that's typical managerial behavior. Start some crappy flawed concept and blame the people who try to make it work. [sorry for the rant]