Just did. Moohahahahaha! Actually, this was my mom’s iPod up till she quite running, so I have some old-timer songs left over (the Cure, Prefab Sprout) I kept them around 'cause it’s better then a lot of junk kids listen to nowadays.
I’ve been reading one of the more recent books about Jobs, well beyond the “the journey is the reward” and Guy Kawasaki days. The book is called iCon. About halfway thru, in 1986, he buys the computer graphics unit from Lucasfilm which is then named Pixar. What was very interesting, and NOT mentioned in the movie The Pixar Story, which btw is on the extended Wall•E dvd, is that George Lucas sold off the CG unit because he had just divorced and his wife was entitled to half his fortune. He needed cash fast to keep the parts of his studio which were actually profitable, and since pre-Pixar was a cash drain, it had to go to give his wife the tens of millions she would be receiving from the divorce settlement.
Lucas was doing Raiders of the Lost Ark and many other supporting digital technical projects at the same time in those years. So he sold out to Jobs for a measly $10M, to see it worth 1,000 fold that today. What was especially funny was that Disney had a solid chance of buying the unit, which included Lasseter who had been fired just 2 years before from their animation bldg. And guess who nixed the deal? it was Jeffrey Katzenberg himself! At the same time, Ross Perot was trying to buy it for GM, mostly because Jobs was bragging about it and Perot was a Next investor. But the day Perot was supposed to ink the deal for $30M, he lost his job on the General Motors board. It’s so weird to keep seeing their names popping up in the book.
Very late on this, I know.
But wow, what awful news. Without Jobs, Pixar almost certainly would’ve never taken off and become the studio they are today. He is an integral key to their success story. Whilst he will be remembered by most people as the man who gave us the iPod and so on, to me he is the man who helped bring a remarkbale studio to the publics attention, and it must be a very difficult time for his family, friends and his colleaugues at Pixar, Disney and Apple right now.
May he rest in peace.
Yeah, I actually read about this a few weeks ago on Wikipedia. I’d known that George Lucas had had problems with his wife that caused trouble on Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi and that eventually he got divorced, but I hadn’t known it affected the Pixar breakoff.
He seems to have been loved by a heckuva lotta people. I’m still flummoxed as to why, having bought so few Apple products and not owning any right now. Being such a private person, we don’t know much about his family. The funeral at Stanford a few days ago and a few miles away was pretty much closed and unreported about, except for the tight security. I feel that he genuinely felt that Pixar was doing something important to the quality of our life.
Whether all these Apple devices have led to human progress or just material progress, I’m not sure. Roy Rogers once commented about how Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line had changed our world, that at least the streets were quieter. But he pointedly avoided going so far to say that the automobile was a net plus to society, just like in our favorite movie we know that technology created wonderful creatures such as Wall-E and EVE and also horrible consequences.
In the book I’m reading, iCon, he is both loathed and loved. As I’ve mentioned in either this thread or the little one at the Wall•E subforum, Jobs was very busy with Next and seems to have let the small Pixar group do its own thing. The author says that Jobs was smart enough to know what he didn’t know and didn’t slavedrive the group into hating him, as he had done to other groups before at Apple.
What really would have happened to Pixar if left to George Lucas, or Disney (possibly under the direction of Katzenberg!), or General Motors? Would the demand of quality by Lassiter and Catmull and others been able to stand up? Would any of these entities been patient enough to stand for 10 years of unprofitability? Would they have demanded that content be sacrificed for pizzazz? Would Lucas or Perot have allowed the group to march onwards toward a full length feature, or just wallow in commercials or as an adjunct to spiff up Lucas’ films? Hmmm, poor Lasseter having to wallow in Willow…
Yeah, we have that iCon book too, but I’ve never read it.
Reading about Jobs and his eccentric ways has got me wondering about Lasseter. People who are highly creative and are visionaries are usually eccentric. And I wonder about John. To the public, he’s this genius who smiles A LOT, loves toys, cars, trains, hawaiian shirts and telling stories through animation. But I wonder if he’s really like that behind closed doors. Is there anything eccentric about him that would make people think, this guy is weird if they knew about his peculiar ways. I wonder what is he like when a director has to be fired from a film. I know he demands perfection, but how does he go about demanding it. I know all the nice stuff people has said about him, but I also know people want to keep their jobs. I’ve only read two things that goes against the public image that Lasseter puts out there. When he told a Pixar employee that he can leave after he complained about the size of the cereal bowls and I remember reading in a book about Dreamworks that after Dreamworks announced Antz, there was a company meeting at Pixar and Lasseter really ripped into Dreamworks. What he said about them was very mean spirited.
The cereal bowl thing is hard to believe. If I had complained about the cereal bowls and been given that answer I would have snooted “well, hmpppfff, then I will bring my own from home and show you what a real cereal bowl is, so there…”
The Antz debacle. Well, long before I knew much about Pixar, they had their second movie A Bugs Life and the DW picture come out during the same season of the same year. I highly suspected that it was more than just coincidental, that there was some chip on someone’s shoulder and then after coming here and reading up on things 2 years ago it seems that I was right. It was a bad content choice for DW’s first animation film and was a harbinger of things to come. Fortunately Katzenberg didn’t continue this one-upsmanship thing with every movie, it was counterproductive and the media would have talked openly about him being petty and nutty. From what I understand, Pixar was under contract with Disney to make 3 films. Katzenberg had been the main negotiator/overseer back in 1990. TS1 was released in 1995 and then Katzenberg departed Disney and joined the DW team, which now has two film divisions, one being Katzenberg’s animation arm. “I own animation” he once yelled at Steve Jobs during their first encounter and that was part of the first statement he made at Jobs, it wasn’t like Jobs was baiting him purposefully or had been initially rude. So there. I rest my case.
^ That.
Katzenberg did really low things. I would also say mean spirited things to him.
Luckily, he has adopted a healthier position in later years, and now there’s a fine equilibrium in the industry, which seems like a lasting one.
I heard Steve’s last words were ‘Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.’ 
( His sister Mona said he was looking past her shoulder or something…we can only guess at what he was seeing. He will be missed.