The Fascinating Bromance Between Steve Jobs and Ross Perot (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Fascinating Bromance Between Steve Jobs and Ross Perot (2018)

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75 pointsrfreytag21 comments

> I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is — nothing. You figure, the snake hasn't bitten anybody yet, so you just let it crawl around on the factory floor. We need to build an environment where the first guy who sees the snake kills it.

I can't help but read this quote in Ross Perot's voice. Hilarious and illuminating at the same time.

Now wondering whether the following is true...

> In a sufficiently large team/group/organisation, it is a hard problem to differentiate between a snake (imminent catastrophic showstopper) and someone else's "autonomous robot without wheels" (experimental feature).

Hmmm?...

I can imagine this actualy occurring between the low-level employee who spots the snake, and the game of telephone that occurs as the news travels up the command hierarchy to reach someone with authority to do something about it

Which is the tradeoff issue with hierarchies; you want the person at the bottom to be sufficiently autonomous to deal with the problem, as he’ll have the most information about it, but at the same time, its the person at the top who has the global knowledge to determine how it actually effects the rest of the ecosystem. But as the information travels up the chain, it gets (necessarily) aggregated and details are lost

Context makes this quote even better--Perot was a GM board member.

Speaking of his hilarious voice, how about when Jim Carrey channeled him?

https://youtu.be/m6d5vhJUGH0

The comparison itself is wonderful too

I love coming across posts like these. There are historical narratives, and then there are these anecdotes, which add flesh and color from people who were there.

Much better read than the title alone suggests.

> Perot: “Or, our customer has a problem with our computer we don’t know about. Why don’t we call them and ask, if ya ain’t buyin’, why ain’t ya buyin’? If ya tell us why ya ain’t buyin’, we can fix it so you can buy it!”

This seems anathema to what we've heard about Jobs' MO, which was "Apple knows best". They won the MP3 and smartphone wars (more or less), so I'm not questioning their judgement. But I am curious as to what Apple's customer research process was like during the microcomputer era compared to the post-2000 era.

When it comes to the iPod and iPhone the discussion may be a different one. The problem wasn't that Apple wasn't selling enough of them but that the product and market weren't there at all. Once the market is there and you still can't sell enough then you should start asking "why?".

And these 2 aspects of business (creating vs. maintaining a market) are as different as a startup and an established business, with different targets and different leadership styles.

From reading half of Steve Jobs' self(-ish) biography (wouldn't read all of it, too dark reading to me at the time) I figure Steve had bromances with many people by virtue of narcissistic bonding.

Both of them were iconoclasts tolerated by establishments because of talent and success, so it makes sense they became friends.

Have to ask though: Does bromance mean friendship, except somehow inferior as the result of being tainted by a backhanded implication of homoeroticism, or just viewed through the lens of it? That one seems like a candidate for some unwrapping.

Friendship, yes. Inferior or tainted, no.

Wikipedia has a good definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromance

Thank you for reference. That description seems to be a wiki article that deconstructs friendship and then reconstitutes it with hooks for critical theory elements designed to imply empowerment of the critic over the subject. I'd say that's a load of crap. :)

Huh. So that's what Steve Jobs looked like before he adapted his famous closet full of black turtlenecks.

Just say "Romance". Men can love too.

I think "Bromance" more accurately translates to just "Close Friendship". Which seems even worse to me - forget romance, we even see a simple close friendship between two men as "unusual" enough to warrant a separate term.

Don't you think that romantic love and being close friends are completely different things?

I don't know whose fucked up brain came up with the word 'bromance'.

Unless you’re suggesting something very unusual, I don’t think Perot and Jobs had what is normally described as “romance”.

What do you mean by this? Why would that be unusual?

> What do you mean by this? Why would that be unusual?

I think philwelch meant that it would be an unusual suggestion because the historical record doesn't support the existence of this particular romantic relationship, not that it would be unusual for two men to have (or to have had) a romantic relationship.

It would also be unusual for either Jobs or Perot personally, and would probably be unusual in the context of an investor/executive professional relationship as well, though one never knows for sure.

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