New Steve Jobs recordings from the '80s released
I dunno, I'd be more interested in long-form talks he gave when he was older, after he'd rebuilt Apple. Even though I've read his biography there's a surprising dearth of information out there about topics that seem important, at least if you want to learn management skills from his example.<p>Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreement today about it, look at the contradictory answers to this question:<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-technical?share=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-technical?share=1</a><p>And I'm always reminded of this story where he asks about the light well gathering characteristics of CMOS vs CCD:<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-thrive-in-a-technical-field-with-a-non-technical-background" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-thrive-in-a-technic...</a><p>The biographies that are out there are OK as far as they go, but they're ultimately made by people who are in love with the idea of a humanities student getting rich running a tech company and telling those nerds where to go. They don't explore how he was able to recruit and keep people with strong skills, how he could tell them apart from those who just weren't as sharp. They don't explore how involved he was with at the time radical decisions like the macOS Aqua UI, merging BSD/NeXT/MacOS Classic, what exactly shipped in the first iPhone and so on. I've heard he was very involved with all kinds of minor things like the decision to keep using Objective-C well past its sell-by date, but again, such details come out in scraps here and there.<p>If you look at other tech firms like Yahoo, after being taken over by people without a strong engineering background they went into decline and failed. Merely being "not a nerd" is hardly sufficient. To match what he accomplished requires skill in deal making, recruitment, retention, skills evaluation, technology, marketing, etc. Yet this story remains largely untold.