The Logic Off Topic list

Jobs is not an engineer, inventor, or designer, but he is a visionary. He 
can see what is available, what protypes and interesting ideas are in the 
works, and shape those into something which is an inspired piece of 
technology which raises the bar, and is a commericial success. He drives 
his people with a religious fervor to outdo themselves and come up with 
something "insanely great". He done this over and over again. 

There is analogy with another genius. Before Einstein in the mid 1900's, 
for several hundred years, the word genius was always associated with one 
man - Isaac Newton - inventer of Calculus and modern physics. However, he 
actually didn't invent the ideas of limits, derivatives, or integrals. 
Those were being done a generation before. What he did was to look around 
at all the little things going on, and synthesize it all into a grand 
theory that we still study today. (The German mathematician Liebnitz 
independently developed much of the same but his name did not get 
elevated in the same way.)

What Gates does, is take something which someone else has already 
developed, and made successful, then try to buy it or steal it. Thats why 
Microsoft is always playing catch up, as is most of the PC hardware world 
maybe with the exception of a few like Sony which have a few new ideas.

>>he [Jobs] is on the record himself as saying that the best ideas
>>are stolen.
>
>Steel from one source you are a thief steal from everyone your a genius.

GAmoore@...> wrote:
>Jobs is not an engineer, inventor, or designer, but he is a visionary. He
>can see what is available, what protypes and interesting ideas are in the
>works, and shape those into something which is an inspired piece of
>technology which raises the bar, and is a commericial success.

I hope this doesn't include NeXT. Nice machines but NeXT failed bigtime .

>He drives
>his people with a religious fervor to outdo themselves and come up with
>something "insanely great". He done this over and over again.

He may have more successes than I am aware of but...
Don't count OSX,  as that is 'NeXTStep 2000" as I like to call it. If you
have ever used a NeXT  then you'll understand. And NextStep itself is just
a GUI built ontop of  a flavour of Unix.  In this respect OSX is pretty
'unvisionary". No matter how good OSX is, I don't believe that any OS based
on an almost forty year old operating system can be considered
visionary.

>What Gates does, is take something which someone else has already
>developed, and made successful, then try to buy it or steal it. Thats why
>Microsoft is always playing catch up, as is most of the PC hardware world
>maybe with the exception of a few like Sony which have a few new ideas.

Jobs, didn't develop Unix now did he? And how original is the early Mac
OS. (Think Xerox PARC for example).. So what is the difference?
Frankly, I don't know all that much  about either of these guys, but I
would say they're not as different as you have made them out to be here...
They both have a strong  entrepeneurial streak and have been pivotal in
getting a number of significant computing products to market. And in
both cases, these days at least , their sucess or otherwise is due in large
part to the ideas, sweat and labour of numerous minions...

I know a lot of people will disagree but this is my opinion. And yes,
I speak here without full biographical knowledge of either Jobs, or Gates.

BTW: I use Macs almost exclusively and avoid Microsoft Products.

There are a number of books - flattering and unflattering. Steve Jobs is 
no angel, and he can be overbearing, but he is a visionery while Gates is 
a poser/follower. 

>And yes,
>I speak here without full biographical knowledge of either Jobs, or Gates.