Agreed, especially as he apparently took an active role during the pregnancy, even naming the chid.
I like my Apple products, admired him in some respects but this was one aspect of the man that I found reprehensible.
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'Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine' Film Debuts at SXSW, Eddy Cue Calls It 'Inaccurate' and 'Mean-Spirited'
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Agreed, especially as he apparently took an active role during the pregnancy, even naming the chid.
I like my Apple products, admired him in some respects but this was one aspect of the man that I found reprehensible.
These are cynical motivations you are postulating and should in no way be mistaken for any actual motivations Gibney may have had or has.
For someone claiming to take a wait and see approach it doesn't seem you're so interested in the waiting or seeing part.
If anything, Gibney's past docs have shown an interest in looking behind the facade of the subject or subjects he is interrogating to reveal a more complete and honest picture.
His recent interview with Variety certainly speaks to this: http://variety.com/2015/film/news/s...troversial-steve-jobs-documentary-1201452444/
Unsurprisingly this approach has won him an Oscar as well as numerous other awards.
Anyone who saw the disgust in eating other mammals is full of empathy in my book, and a decent human being heads above others. Steve Jobs was such a man.
Are you seriously comparing mass murderers to Steve ?
I'm talking about ordinary human failings and profit-making on the back of alleged negative traits. Most of which we've already heard from Steve himself in Walter Isaacson's book.
These are cynical motivations you are postulating and should in no way be mistaken for any actual motivations Gibney may have had or has.
For someone claiming to take a wait and see approach it doesn't seem you're so interested in the waiting or seeing part.
If anything, Gibney's past docs have shown an interest in looking behind the facade of the subject or subjects he is interrogating to reveal a more complete and honest picture.
His recent interview with Variety certainly speaks to this: http://variety.com/2015/film/news/s...troversial-steve-jobs-documentary-1201452444/
Unsurprisingly this approach has won him an Oscar as well as numerous other awards.
Yea, it only seems that way.
My comment was directed at the negative reviews and the obvious motivation behind it. No, he's no cynic. Did I not praise Alex enough for his other work ?
No one is beyond reproach and no one makes docs about dead celebrities just for the sake of humanity or righting a wrong.
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It doesn't really matter who you write about, it must be about the truth, otherwise the book or story is useless or a fairytale.
From someone that has been around Steve, I'll give you my take. Steve was brilliant and was brutally honest to those that worked with him. If you could not look at every fiber for yourself objectively, you did not fit in his inner circle.
IMO, he broke every MBA management rule out there, built up his own management philosophy and from that made wonderful products. He couldn't stand Bozo's who just show up at a job to be safe, push paper, listen to their boss and pay the mortgage. One of his best insults was, "You are getting comfortable." that was very well expressed in the Ashton Kutcher movie.
To those that were around him and hated him, I'm sure Steve found a flaw in their personalty, morals, scruples or believes that held back growth into a better person. When you didn't fix the problem he found in you, worst, defended you flaws, you were gone.
You needed a backbone of steel and a hide of Kevlar to work with him. He also respected a good tirade. One thing that impressed him the most is when you found him wrong and he admitted you were right. Was told that is why Johny Ive went so far with him.
I still miss that wonderful SOB.
I'd really like to understand why people get such a charge out of dredging up his failure with his first child and using that to take the high ground against him.
"What a scumbag! Who does that to their only child?" Yet when you hear about local people who abandon their kids, do you bring out the torches and pitchforks for them? If interfamilial relationships are so important to you, how about volunteering as family counselors? Or do you feel that Jobs somehow "deserves" to be raked over the coals for this because he was wealthy, successful, or ?
Even better, the two guys who have pulled out the DMM flavor-of-the-month "disorders", and are doing armchair diagnosis with it. I've got a better one for you two, from college Ethics class: "Appeal to Authority". In this case its "We don't have a clue why this guy is both successful and revered, but it makes us angry, so we're simply going to hang labels on him from a book."
My take on Steve Jobs and his relationship with his daughter Lisa, based on my limited training in psychology -
He felt abandoned his entire life because of what Abudullah Jandali did to him and his mother. He felt worthless because he was put up for adoption. He was obviously bright, very intelligent, and saw things in a way that other kids just couldn't get. That doesn't set the stage for very many deep childhood friendships. The whole thing adds up to very poor self esteem.
Such a person acts out against people that can't see his way of thinking, and even worse, that person acts out very strongly against people who try to treat them well or show them any kind of caring. They simply can't believe that someone now cares where their own birth family seemingly didn't care. So they respond with anger and recrimination, belittling those who care for them.
And the walls get higher. A person of means who has been through this kind of childhood will try to take control of their own life and the people around them in order to bend reality to their own whims.
Does all this sound familiar to anyone who has read this far?
So thirty years ago, Jobs treated people badly, he played control games at the company he founded, and he cared for it more than his own child. Lisa was a wild card, something he couldn't have foreseen or controlled, and he couldn't believe that he was having a child when no one wanted him as a child. He projected on to Lisa what he felt inside because that was all he knew. He was acting out his own version of what he thought his birth parents did to him. We are all products of our environments, Steve Jobs no less of one than any of us here on this forum. He was emotionally stunted because of what happened to him at an early age.
For all the people who say he was a repugnant scumbag because he did these things, do you stop right there and refuse to hear that he reconciled with his daughter? That he found and married a woman - Laurene Powell - who tempered his anger and hurt, and helped him see the good in himself and other people? Do any of you wonder how Lisa herself feels when she hears or reads people talking about what a scumbag her Dad was, or how Laurene feels when she hears people talking about her dead husband like he should have been burned at the stake? How about when his children with Laurene read comments like these? If you think his family doesn't come to these forums and similar ones, I have news for you.
Steve Jobs created a company, was thrown out of it, remade himself a couple of times, reconciled with his daughter, built the foundation for the largest corporate turnaround in history, created hundreds of thousands of jobs and a seriously large number of new millionaires, while leading a creative team that produced tools that enabled us to change our world. He came up with products that most of would never have realized we wanted until he showed them to us. He also found his soul mate and had a brood of kids, giving them a life most kids couldn't imagine. He did that all while living in a modest house in an upper middle class neighborhood in Silicon valley, a house with no security guards, no walls, and most of the time they never locked the doors.
"yeah, but he treated his daughter and ex-girlfriend like crap thirty years ago, so he can go to hell"
Seriously, the people in this country need to get over themselves. It seems like our number one national product now is "outrage". Everyone seems to have this incredibly thin skin that bleeds at the slightest word, or look, or ideal, that disagrees with some politically correct utopian idea of what a world should be. Jobs was no better or worse than anyone here. He was just human. Get over it.
"What a scumbag! Who does that to their only child?" Yet when you hear about local people who abandon their kids, do you bring out the torches and pitchforks for them? If interfamilial relationships are so important to you, how about volunteering as family counselors? Or do you feel that Jobs somehow "deserves" to be raked over the coals for this because he was wealthy, successful, or ?
Even better, the two guys who have pulled out the DMM flavor-of-the-month "disorders", and are doing armchair diagnosis with it. I've got a better one for you two, from college Ethics class: "Appeal to Authority". In this case its "We don't have a clue why this guy is both successful and revered, but it makes us angry, so we're simply going to hang labels on him from a book."
My take on Steve Jobs and his relationship with his daughter Lisa, based on my limited training in psychology -
He felt abandoned his entire life because of what Abudullah Jandali did to him and his mother. He felt worthless because he was put up for adoption. He was obviously bright, very intelligent, and saw things in a way that other kids just couldn't get. That doesn't set the stage for very many deep childhood friendships. The whole thing adds up to very poor self esteem.
Such a person acts out against people that can't see his way of thinking, and even worse, that person acts out very strongly against people who try to treat them well or show them any kind of caring. They simply can't believe that someone now cares where their own birth family seemingly didn't care. So they respond with anger and recrimination, belittling those who care for them.
And the walls get higher. A person of means who has been through this kind of childhood will try to take control of their own life and the people around them in order to bend reality to their own whims.
Does all this sound familiar to anyone who has read this far?
So thirty years ago, Jobs treated people badly, he played control games at the company he founded, and he cared for it more than his own child. Lisa was a wild card, something he couldn't have foreseen or controlled, and he couldn't believe that he was having a child when no one wanted him as a child. He projected on to Lisa what he felt inside because that was all he knew. He was acting out his own version of what he thought his birth parents did to him. We are all products of our environments, Steve Jobs no less of one than any of us here on this forum. He was emotionally stunted because of what happened to him at an early age.
For all the people who say he was a repugnant scumbag because he did these things, do you stop right there and refuse to hear that he reconciled with his daughter? That he found and married a woman - Laurene Powell - who tempered his anger and hurt, and helped him see the good in himself and other people? Do any of you wonder how Lisa herself feels when she hears or reads people talking about what a scumbag her Dad was, or how Laurene feels when she hears people talking about her dead husband like he should have been burned at the stake? How about when his children with Laurene read comments like these? If you think his family doesn't come to these forums and similar ones, I have news for you.
Steve Jobs created a company, was thrown out of it, remade himself a couple of times, reconciled with his daughter, built the foundation for the largest corporate turnaround in history, created hundreds of thousands of jobs and a seriously large number of new millionaires, while leading a creative team that produced tools that enabled us to change our world. He came up with products that most of would never have realized we wanted until he showed them to us. He also found his soul mate and had a brood of kids, giving them a life most kids couldn't imagine. He did that all while living in a modest house in an upper middle class neighborhood in Silicon valley, a house with no security guards, no walls, and most of the time they never locked the doors.
"yeah, but he treated his daughter and ex-girlfriend like crap thirty years ago, so he can go to hell"
Seriously, the people in this country need to get over themselves. It seems like our number one national product now is "outrage". Everyone seems to have this incredibly thin skin that bleeds at the slightest word, or look, or ideal, that disagrees with some politically correct utopian idea of what a world should be. Jobs was no better or worse than anyone here. He was just human. Get over it.
Ahh, the psychoanalysts come out to play now
Before you jump to the wrong conclusion, let me state upfront, that I agree with most of your words. I'm just not sure if the analysis is of your own mind or you read Walter Isaacson's biography and extrapolated the rest ?
Yes, Steve was a flawed individual with some unique circumstances, aren't we all ? The main difference is, he was rich & famous and most of us are not.
So public figures flogging is a national sport and I for one find it distasteful when MR lounge chair lizards stick out their tongues and join in the stoning of a man they only knew through his products and what they read in books or magazines.
Your conclusion is spot on though. I would only add, that the national product "outrage" is fostered by the other national product "the internet" and the ease by which everybody can nowadays share their opinion without filters.
You concluded the post I quoted suggesting that people should take Gibney's doc with "a grain of salt" and congratulated Eddy Cue who condemned it.
Further, above (quote) you conclude as well by casting suspicion on Gibney's character so I'm failing to see how you square that with taking a wait and see approach or passing yourself off as anything less than dismissive and biased towards the film.
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You just described every major American business titan from Cornelius Vanderbilt to today's Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Mark Cuban, Bill Gates III, Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs. You can't get to the top unless you're willing to act ruthless to your competitors and sometimes even to your friends. Personally flawed Jobs was in a number of way, you can't fault the fact in his two stints running Apple, he shepherded the creation of landmark products: Apple II, Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. And some of his stances ended up being way ahead of their time: the decision to not include a floppy drive on the first iMac (note most Windows-based computers ended up getting rid of their floppy drives by the early 2000's), the decision to not allow Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight to run on the iPhone and eventually iPad (which forced accelerated development of the HTML 5.0 standard by the W3C) and approval of the development of the Lightning connector on the iPhone 5 shortly before his passing (gee, I wonder why the USB Type C connector seems to borrow a lot of the ideas pioneered by the Lightning connector).
In short, don't expect an "angel" in terms of personality if you're talking about a business titan. Jobs fits in the same mold of ruthlessness that was the hallmark of all the titans before his time.
Ok. This entire post is a load or horse manure. I came from a broken home and I am not happily married with children who will grow up knowing love from their dad.
I know first hand that the things you do to your children in their formative years stay with them for the rest of their lives. And unless they are willing to not let that shape them, they grow up broken adults.
Steve Jobs purposely stopped fighting his parental obligations right before he KNEW Apple was going public and he would be worth millions. Under Cali law that means his daughter's mother could not petition to increase child support for his new income.
THAT IS ****** BEYOND BELIEF!!!!!!!!!
I have no obligation here to square your vision, but I give a lot more credence to Eddy Cue's characterization of SJ than your ability to place strong words into people's mouths.
You don't need to square anything with me but rather with yourself as you are in conflict when you present statements like "I'll reserve judgement" - and then proceed to pass judgement, stating:
"Good on ya Eddie!
I'd take A.G.'s doc with a grain of salt and an understanding of the motivation behind it.
...no one makes docs about dead celebrities just for the sake of humanity or righting a wrong."
Feel free to point out anything I may have wrongfully put in your mouth but you are in denial of your own bias if you can't or won't see the contradiction.
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Gee, thanks for keeping it short
Nothing you said had a point or made any sense at all.
So? Why do you make this so important?
Those things would have happened with or without jobs. Certainly different, perhaps better perhaps worse.
I would rather see at what he actually did for society with apple. I dont really care he made someone millionaire or about floppy drives . I do care he created an "us against them" "we are better" cult that almost seems brainwashed and is so hooked on its products trough marketing (and that he was brilliant in) I care apple seems to find the need to pay its employee as little as possible while trying to minimise its taxes, I care that its pouring more and more money in lobbying trying to buy its legislation it wants,...
Link to a great interview with Jobs by Schlender in 1998
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/11/09/250880/index.htm
It's very inspiring to listen to Steve and you can tell that he really tried to grow as a person throughout life.
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/11/09/250880/index.htm
It's very inspiring to listen to Steve and you can tell that he really tried to grow as a person throughout life.
The first book of Jeffrey S Young (circa 1987-89) is pretty good at telling the story before this period. I know this is not what you are looking for and SJ himself didn't like much the author, but there's no faulting this book really. It recounts all the events with much detail from the beginnings and all subsequent books borrow more or less from this one. The auhor went through ethical dilemma in the handling of SJ personal info (some names, facts on siblings, etc) and the efforts are noteworthy.
My comment was addressing this:
Originally Posted by freediverx View Post
The fact that it was an entirely negative attack piece that paints the distorted image of a psychopath when by most accounts he was a complex character whose good qualities outweighed the bad?
There are no facts in that quote.
I already addressed that bias you mentioned here: https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20847506#post20847506
That's a fairly low bar for him to rise above. Because I'm not 500 pounds doesn't mean that I'm not fat. Jobs was not a nice man and deserves criticism for that, if this movie points that out I'm OK with it. That doesn't mean that we need to put his professional accomplishments on the same level.
I saw a documentary some years ago that stated the traits and brain patterns of clever criminals and successful business people are identical.
What differentiated the two was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time and sheer luck as to which side of the tracks you came down on.
As said previously why so many people especially in the U.S. give SJ this god like status is a total mystery. The rest of the world has moved on.
Personally I think Gates has done and continues to do far more good with his wealth than Jobs ever did or ever would have done had he lived.
What differentiated the two was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time and sheer luck as to which side of the tracks you came down on.
As said previously why so many people especially in the U.S. give SJ this god like status is a total mystery. The rest of the world has moved on.
Personally I think Gates has done and continues to do far more good with his wealth than Jobs ever did or ever would have done had he lived.