I doubt even Jobs' bitterest enemies would call him "a brilliant dunce" - a label that Stross insists, in the first sentence of his article, even Jobs' "biggest fans" would apply.

Sorry, but I don't think anybody who was around when the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, built one of the earliest microcomputers, would call either of them a dunce.

Jobs was among the first who recognized the vast potential market for a personal computer, at a time when most folks saw them as hobbyist projects for home tinkerers. He was also the first person to recognize the value of the graphical user interface as a way to make the personal computer a product that just about everybody would want to own and use -- not even wonderboy Bill Gates managed to see that, he was only able to rip off Jobs' innovation.

Stross turns these creative leaps against Jobs in this mean-spirited piece, however.

According to Stross, Jobs' transformation of the office and home automation landscape was just a flash in the pan.

Jobs' "strategic vision, which had informed the founding of Apple and the birth of the Macintosh, seemed to have deserted him," Stross writes.

In Stross' revision of Silicon Valley history, Next, the company Jobs founded after leaving Apple in the mid-80s, amounts to nothing but the sign of Jobs' post-Apple "obscurity."

Perhaps Stross missed the San Francisco launch of the Next computer, where Jobs' vision was apparent to the thousands of Silicon Valley luminaries and the international press who gathered for the debut.

Today's desktop, Mac or Windows or otherwise - with its vast silicon and optical storage, high-fidelity music, high-resolution display, and operating system software that made it all work together, linking a vast repository of text, images, music in a seamless web (years before the WWW made that an online reality) - is no more than Jobs' Next computer at a price point everybody can afford now that manufacturing advances have made the necessary components into commodities.

Jobs lucked into Pixar, Stross suggests, not realizing what he had until Disney dumped success in his lap.

Stross does give Jobs some credit for Pixar's massive success, even as he digs the Jobs-as-dunce needle deeper: "In the early years at Pixar, he had incredible technology and no idea what to do with it. But once the strategic vision came into focus, he started on a roll that is unlike any other and continues to this day."

Stross writes at length about Pixar's success compared to DreamWorks, another movie company that tried to jump on the digital bandwagon with sometimes embarrasing results. Amazingly, despite making this direct comparison, Stross seems to miss the point that not every CEO manages to hone such a strategic vision even when looking at the same technology base and studying the same audience.

Xerox, after all, didn't manage to see the value of the graphical user interface that Jobs used to revolutionize computing. And, of the many companies and people experimenting with digital movie making technology in the 1980s and early 1990s, how many besides Jobs have achieved the creative, critical, and commercial success he's enjoyed with five feature film blockbuster hits in a row at Pixar?

Stross uses Pixar's success as a club to give Jobs a final whack for not making Apple the market share monster in personal computers that Pixar is in movies.

Stross quotes a letter that Job wrote to Pixar shareholders in 1997: "It is chiseled in stone at our studio that no amount of technology can ever turn a bad story into a good one" and adds "One could add that the same maxim applies to Apple."

Apple a "bad story?"

Stross forgets his history, joining the long list of Silicon Valley water-cooler wise guys who have counted Jobs out so often in the past.

Links:

Pixar's Mr. Incredible May Yet Rewrite the Apple Story by Randall
Stross, New York Times, 24 October 2004

NeXT article in Wikipedia explains the technology breakthroughs of Jobs' project after the Mac.

Previously in Silicon Valley Watcher:

A Tale of Two Silicon Valleys by Doug Millison, examines contrasting media portrayals of Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.

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