'Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine' Film Debuts at SXSW, Eddy Cue Calls It 'Inaccurate' and 'Mean-Spirited'

Best quote of the day. Everyone knows that Steve was no saint. At the same time he did remarkably wonderful things. Seems the haters are gonna hate.

Best quote of the day. Everyone knows that Steve was no saint. At the same time he did remarkably wonderful things. Seems the haters are gonna hate.

I was and am still looking forward to Alex Gibney's upcoming documentary on Scientology, but this Steve Jobs doc lowers the esteem I had for the filmmaker. It's great when you apply balls to the wall, muckracking investigations to an evil cult. Steve Jobs doesn't deserve that treatment. He raised the standards of everyone around him, was absolutely devoted to his work, and created an enormous amount of good in the world despite his personal flaws.

From the Hollywood Reporter review...
"according to Steve Wozniak's account, Jobs swindled him out of 90% of his share of payment for work they did on Atari's Breakout game."

Basically, Jobs split Atari’s fee with Wozniak but secretly kept the extra bonus Atari paid for minimizing the number of chips the game required. Yes, a total dick move, one which has already been covered ad nauseaum. But when compared to how most companies treat their talent, was this really such a bad deal? How likely is Wozniak to have secured the deal with Atari without Jobs? How likely is he to have negotiated equal or better payment terms, given his propensity for giving away intellectual property and rarely thinking of the business opportunities for his inventions? What percentage of profits does a developer typically receive for a product he designs which is later sold by his employer?

News flash: Steve Jobs was not the perfect humanitarian. I wonder, though, how well Gibney's public image would fare if his own life were subjected to the same level of scrutiny. I doubt we'll ever know, since his accomplishments will never merit that level of interest.

Woz is a clever guy and made significant contributions to a nascent Apple, but his talents were by no means unique, nor were they essential to Apple's birth and eventual explosive growth. To put it another way, Jobs is far more likely to have found some other smart computer geek with whom to partner than Woz was to have met up with another visionary genius like Jobs.

In the end, Wozniak had a fruitful and lucrative career at Apple, and to this day lives what appears to be a happy life of financial independence. Additionally, he (technically) remains an employee of Apple (though I doubt he's doing any actual work for them) and receives a stipend, estimated to be $120K per year.

That's more than we can say for early collaborators in some other Silicon Valley giants - for example Zuckerberg's underhanded betrayal of Saverin and others, who were tricked into relinquishing their shares of the company.