Woz

  Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo asked if they could run yesterday's piece on Jobs, and of course I said yes. It's very much a Gizmodo type piece. I like to say yes when pubs like Gizmodo or Wired ask to run my stuff. More distribution for ideas. Good for business.
  Then Woz commented, basically saying that Jef Raskin was working on the stuff I was writing about. That's what I love about Woz. He's so accessible, where Jobs was only occasionally accessible. I've seen Jobs show up at computer stores, and hang out just like a normal guy. I've even gotten phone calls from him, one-sided ones for sure. He was really good at talking, but not so great at listening. Unless he was stealing an idea. :-)
  I wanted to say a few things to Woz, and figured I might as well write a post.
  1. The insides of the Apple II were beautiful. I've written about that many times. Woz is the guy who made the insides work. Jobs is the guy who made the outside work. Both were necessary for Apple to triumph over the early hobbyist companies to become a juggernaut.
  2. Woz is an enthuisast. I remember giving a talk at a MacWorld Expo around the time of MORE. My PR person, Kandes Bregman, alerted me that Woz was in the audience. I had never met him. I gave my talk as usual. Asked for a show of hands of people who used my earlier product, ThinkTank. His hand shot straight up. I don't know why it surprised me, but it felt great to know that the guy who did all that great work that I admired so much was using my software.
  3. Woz remembers Jef Raskin was working on the innards too. And he wrote a testimony to Raskin. But like Jobs, Raskin is gone. If we want to make the innards of computers beautiful and functional and as useful as the packages they come in, we, those who are still alive, will have to do it.
  BTW, to Nick Denton, who publishes Gizmodo and is very interested in discussion software. Look at the flow here to see how commenting can work, when it's cross-domain. Any forward-looking discussion system will have to anticipate this, imho.
    The flow: 1. My post on scripting.com. 2. It moves to Gizmodo. 3. Woz comments. 4. I respond. 5. I email you a pointer.
    Important: It didn't all happen on gizmodo.com. But you want to deliver a story to readers of that site. We can do better than copy/paste.