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Comment by jstevens85 | Hacker News Reader

According to Isaacson's biography, it was Markkula who insisted that Jobs be heavily involved in the non-engineering areas of the company.

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According to the same book, Wozniak specifically insisted at some point that he would prefer to be treated as an engineer and not be involved with high-level management.

One could also say it would be interesting how things might have turned out if Wozniak was more ambitious.

This is correct. In fact, the book said this was what finally got Woz to quit HP and go full time at Apple: One of his friends told him he could start a company without going into management, which he hadn't realized. Jobs had convinced all these friends and family to lobby him, but none of it worked until he was told he could stay an engineer.

On the subject of counterfactuals, I recently finished reading Jobs' bio and Woz's autobiography and found myself contemplating how their lives would have turned out if they hadn't met each other.

It seems easy to project the most likely outcome for Woz if he hadn't met Jobs - he'd probably still be an engineer at HP (assuming he didn't get laid off by one of their disastrous CEOs), his Apple ][ board a forgotten relic sitting in his garage. Less likely but still possible is that someone else would have helped him commercialize it, but there never would have been a Macintosh as we know it and the company would have ended up like Commodore, Tandy, and Atari.

With Jobs, though, it's much more difficult to imagine where he'd have ended up without Woz. I could see him pushing Atari into PCs (but Bushnell didn't want the Apple ][, so that seems unlikely), or he could have been a religious leader, or a burned-out hippie living in Humboldt County, or a tyrannical Silicon Valley middle manager, or any number of other things.

Here's a random theory:

They would've met each other a little later, and done the same thing. Jobs and Wozniak orbited each other a few times before they really connected professionally. If you change one little thing so they wouldn'tve met each other, they would've met each other some other way.

And if you change enough things so that they NEVER would've met each other, you'dve changed enough things that they wouldn't really be Steve Jobs and Woz anymore.

We're doing counter-factuals. So what if it's not "never met", but "never went into to business together". Is it really hard to believe that fate could have conspired in such a way that Woz and Jobs didn't become business partners? Was the universe really curved in such a way to inevitably push Woz and Jobs to start Apple together?

> With Jobs, though, it's much more difficult to imagine where he'd have ended up without Woz. I could see him pushing Atari into PCs (but Bushnell didn't want the Apple ][, so that seems unlikely), or he could have been a religious leader, or a burned-out hippie living in Humboldt County, or a tyrannical Silicon Valley middle manager, or any number of other things.

Makes me picture a variation of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Three Californias" trilogy based on your scenarios...

Interested in why you use the word "ambitious" there. Woz most likely wanted to remain in engineering. That was (and is) his love and his ambition. Senior management probably didn't interest him in the slightest.

I don't know if you've heard about the Empathizing–Systemizing theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing...) which was originally developed to explain autism, but basically engineers typically have very strong systemizing traits. Surprisingly, this also makes them good at certain aspects of high-level planning. I suspect that the current CEO Tim Cook has an excellent systemizing (as well as negotiating) mind, which would partly explain his great deeds in the supply chain operations.

Some people would argue that it was Wozniak's engineering mind that made him not want to pursue management. I would argue that the engineering mind is actually quite useful in management and that a lot of business leaders possess it (think Bill Gates). My hypothesis is that if Wozniak became as ambitious and controlling as Jobs was after the two met, the pair either would have fallen apart violently at some point or would have created an empire the size of Microsoft early on.

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