Woz not great
In this guest post Tony Prysten argues that the thousand dollar price of seeing out-of-touch Apple co-founder Steve Wozniack on his Australian tour was a waste of money.
This week, for the cost of two iPads (yep, two) I went to the Woz Live conference in Melbourne. I was not impressed.
Having purchased my first Apple, the Steve Wozniak-designed Apple IIe, somewhere around 1980 and having owned pretty much every Apple device since then, I was excited at the opportunity to hear from the co-founder of a company that has been a big part of my creative life.
On a positive note, the catering was great.
I dunno, it was advertised as a corporate wankfest, and thats what it was. An excuse for people to get out of the office for a day, and for companies to schmooze clients. I never expected anything beyond a lovely old man telling stories of his youth, and that’s what I got.
I knew about 10 people at the Sydney event, not one of us paid. 6 of us were there as “press”, the rest were there as a gift from clients. We all paid nothing and got my money’s worth. Isn’t how these events are supposed to go?
He is a successful apple man, and apple is an amazingly successful brand. everyone expects steve jobs when they think of apple … But the reality is, there are heaps of super smart geeks behind this brand. And whilst they may not be as exciting, you will probably learn more if you try hard enough.
Sarah R: absolutely. Tech companies’ flashy images hide the messy geeky midnight to dawn hack-fests within.
I was surprised to see Woz being featured in such a manner in Australia and NZ and that companies were buying up whole tables. Several media outlets who reported on this tour have a similar under-whelming account of the man, who was certainly a man of his time (1980s). If he had enduring value to technology, Jobs would have hung on to him.
[As an aside, I worked with another Steve Wozniak at Macromedia who said that he never had a problem getting a restaurant reservation in the Bay area.]
You’ll learn more about Woz if you watch the past episodes of “My Life On The D List” with Kathy Griffin, what you see is what you get 🙂 He’s a teddy bear of a man, sweet, smart, but totally hyper focused on his passions. Riding his Segway, Engineering, and helping kids, Oh and Big Boy Hamburgers. He has very simple tastes, As a huge apple fan though I wouldn’t have gone to see him, and after reading all the reports I’m glad I didn’t. I’ve heard those stories over and over from him, read the book, and seen him on Kathy 🙂
Goodamn, why didn’t my agency invite me to this?
I know the cost is expensive, but if you can’t whack a few hours of retouching onto a invoice to cover the cost, what sort of damned suit are you??
A great opportunity for duchessing their clients and they did nothing?
It’s still better to be there and complain, than not to have been in Woz’s presence.
And at least he is a decent human being – Steve Jobs was a great businessman, but a pretty poor human being.
Anyone who knows anything about Apple would have known it’d be a sucky event.
Woz is great, but he’s not wired for that sort of thing.
This really sounds like an uncomfortable setting for both Woz and his guests. To be honest, I doubt it was even his idea. He should have ran the event as an Arduino workshop or something closer to his calling.
Oh so cynical…but I suppose it is Mumbrella. I think you get out of these things what you will. If you listened carefully I think you’d find nuggets of reflected gold in there – that’s your job to interpret, I always thought. His explanation of tech changing in a geometric pattern was useful to anyone who works in this industry as the wave of tech changes forever changes what we do and how we do it. So watch out, you’ll likely never notice a disruptive new change until it eats your lunch! I also liked what he said about innovation – that it’s only ever about making something we already do better. To me, that’s a useful yardstick when we think about the execution around supposed ‘new’, ‘big’ ideas. Was he entertaining and visionary? Maybe not. But you didn’t expect that did you…?
I would still liked to have gone.
I’ve approached his marketing people on several occasions for special Mac computer user group functions, and either received horrendously expensive quotes, or no replies at all.
I’ve seen him several times signing books and nostalgic devices in a corner of Moscone at Macworld, and it’s been a sad sight of someone trying to remain relevant in Apple’s world when he is essentially irrelevant now. You’ll learn more about him and his attitudes watching him on US torrents of “dancing with the stars” and Big Bang Theory.
Oh, and watching old Apple Keynotes when Steve Jobs slide clicker fails him and he tells stories of he and Woz playing pranks.