Interesting, will read up on these. There's ten years difference between early Apple and late Apple Jobs so maybe things were different for Carmack. In the end, Jobs must have been doing something right given his track record.
No doubt! It seems surprisingly difficult tease out exactly what it was, even if you trawl through all the anecdotes, histories and biographies. Perhaps it's simply that his proverbial reality distortion field held for long enough for his collaborators make the unreality reality.
There's also potential reality distortion in the other direction: how much of the early-apple lore has survived untainted by three decades of mythology, never mind the general haze of time (I know I'm telling a story from 2013 that's certainly not gotten more boring over time -- thing were crazy, but I'd not trust my self to be able to gave a 100% accurate account of exactly how crazy)? How much of it is an accurate recollection of what things were like day-to-day, and how much of it is a particularly crazy couple of week before the shareholder meeting that got amplified?
That's a very sensible concern but I think if you've worked in the field in the SFBA for a reasonable amount of time in the last 20 or more odd years, you've almost certainly heard variants of same stories and themes, sometimes from first hand participants.
Even when you allow for the indisputable fact that, say, Herzfeld or Cringley or Isaacson and others are fallible human beings with imperfect recollection and intrinsic biases, the lockstep consistency of the narratives and characterizations is striking.
Yes, he’s a terrible person to try to learn from since his methods of success were so singular. I can imagine running the “Jeff Bezos playbook” but not the Steve Jobs playbook.
