Technology columnist and occasional Cult of Mac (CoM) contributor Mike Elgan was on Macbreak Weekly Tuesday talking about his recent CoM piece, “In Defense of Steve Jobs.” The story led to an interesting dialogue between he and Leo Laporte, one with a Jobsian twist I’d never heard before.
Essentially, Mike says many of the horrendous grievances Jobs affected on others, the ones we hear about like him ripping off Steve Wozniak, were the cause of youth and ignorance. Elgan argues, Jobs’ infamous lack of empathy, his selfishness in business dealings, these are the traits of many 20-something males and certainly not exclusive to Jobs.
Elgan’s point, in my words: Steve may have started life as a jerk, but the years changed him; his family; his cancer; changed him. And by the end, though obviously not perfect, he was not the mean spirited, penurious Steve from those stories of legend we so often hear.
Erfon Elijah is the producer and host of The CultCast. When not editing podcasts or watching Mrs. Doubtfire, you’ll find him on Xbox Live hunting CoD Ghosts foes like the Predator. Here are his tweets…
23 responses to “Mike Elgan on Macbreak Weekly: Jobs Wasn’t Evil, He was a Work in Progress”
Yeah, Elgan’s posited this “20 year olds lack empathy” argument before. That would be a compelling argument if Isaacson’s bio didn’t make it clear that Jobs could be a downright evil bastard right into his 40s and 50s. “His family changed him?” Bullshit: the guy still pointedly wouldn’t even pick up the phone and try to patch things over with the daughter he abandoned when she was an infantl
I asssent, having made this argument before. A Wittgensteinian type transition isn’t uncommon.
By-the-way, CoM on an iPhone is very poor.
If you had read the book, you’d know that Jobs not only established contact with his daughter, she moved in with him in her early teens. But that would have required effort on your part.
If you had paid attention to the book you’d know that the relationship was still rocky, he could still be cold and mean (which, I might add is precisely what the poster above is talking about). Plenty of people that did amazing things were highly flawed though. There’s no reason to expect that Jobs, because of what he did, would have a superior moral character. You can even like apple products and not like Jobs the man. [wow, imagine that?]
The poster identifying Jobs as “an evil bastard”, not capable of “pick(ing) up the phone to patch things over with the daughter he abandoned when she was an infant”? Yea, I guess I didn’t read it as a statement about Jobs’s well-documented coldness, maybe because he didn’t write it.
It’s nauseatingly clear that Mike Elgan just wants to create a career by spouting opinions. Nothing he says or writes is enlightening. I actually worry that by posting here, telling the world how crappy his opinions are, I may be bumping up his credibility, just because it’s another post to add to the count of responses he gets. What a sucky way to make a living – being an advertising troll – and what a sucky kind of person to be, thinking that the response-count means anything positive.
I’m an opinion columnist, so yes. I want to create (and have created) a career “spouting” opinions.
Mike, I think you can do better. Why be satisfied with creating opinion pieces that don’t add to the quality of thought about Apple or business or life in general? Why be the butt of Macalope jokes? Is that a measure of success to “opinion-spouters” ? Gee our old La Salle ran great.
You can do better, Mike. There is nothing snarky I want to convey to you. You have it in you to do better.
Apple is going to have a blow-out quarter. Horace Dediu will come out with a graph that shows it historically. Why be caught flatfooted in the blogosphere? It is up to you to decide if your contrarian web hits are worth the loss of credibility. Who do you want to be? Someone mentioned by the Macalope or someone who is actually germane to the conversation about Apple and the computer industry in general. It is really up to you. It’s rather obvious what will happen when earnings reports come out.
You can still be a person of merit, a person of good repute. This COM entry is buried by now, so this comment will be hidden. I am talking to you, Mike., not to the forum.
The emperor that doesn’t have clothes is not Apple anymore, as was thought when Steve Jobs returned to the company so many years ago. The emperor without clothes, instead, is the cohort of Apple detractors. And it isn’t a cult of Apple, but simple smart business practices that are made visible by Apple so inexorably that make naysayers look like idiots. Apple isn’t a company run by wingnuts, it’s a company run by the very best and brightest who apply everything smart and savvy about rigorous business practices, who bring them to bear in actuality, who make Apple detractors look like business dolts. Get it clear in your head – Apple is a killer business-savvy enterprise.
What many other companies consider good business practice is just a load of crap. They have no clue about how they are about to die. They can’t see it coming. They are already dead, they just don’t know it yet. Apple is that huge, that overwhelming. So it is up to you, Mike, if you want to be short-sighted or not. Opinions are a dime a dozen. You can be a part of the idiot cohort who can’t read the writing on the wall, or you can understand how everything has changed because of Apple and the application of astute business practices.
It really is all about astuteness, not the Apple brand, you know. A shark by any other name…
[To me, the obvious reply would be a comparison with Microsoft. To which, I would say, look at Horace Dediu’s analysis of how Apple creates new markets and thereby disrupts entrenched enterprises. The disruption isn’t head to head, it’s oblique. New market disruption is driving most of Apple’s growth. Entrenched companies have no products to put into those new markets (iPhone, iPad). Entrenched companies can’t create products to compete on features (Mac Air). They just don’t have product development in the pipeline, so they are off balance and years behind. Microsoft? Microsoft is not even a competitor. It’s as Steve Jobs said, that it is wrong to think that in order for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. Apple computers are actually a new market for Windows licenses.]
I agree. While I do think Jobs was a bit more of a jerk than your typical twenty something, it’s obvious to me that he changed over the course of his life. Basically he grew up and matured and left behind the selfish, careless ways of his twenties, which is a storyline I think all of us older folks can see in our past to one degree or another.
Wow, why you being so nasty?
What an ignorant douche. Know what you’re talking about before you start judging someone. Obviously you did not actually read Isaacson’s bio. As others have replied to you, he not only patched things up with his daughter, but she lived with him in her teenage years and he sent her to Harvard.