[lbo-talk] Jobs

[// ravi]

On Oct 6, 2011, at 9:39 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> 
>> But heck, you think Tim Berners Lee (or Marc Andreessen?!) deserve to be celebrated for the Internet and email, so I am not sure this fork is worth reaping.
> 
> Remember the proprietary Internet Explorer browser had like 90% of the
> market, if not more, at some point. It was Netscape´s key decision to
> open source its browser code which sparked the creation of Mozilla.org
> (with Netscape´s programmers working on it for a number of years) that
> finally gave us Mozilla first and Firefox later.
> 

Yes, IE gained 90% of the browser market after Netscape, under Andreessen IIRC, utterly screwed up and delayed its Netscape 5 “Java” browser, and finally abandoned it, releasing the source code as a last ditch effort to stay alive (my opinion). These Netscape programmers were people like Jamie Zawinski, Eric Bina, Rob McCool… people like that… not Marc Andreessen. At any rate, none of this history has anything to do with the Internet and email which predate Netscape and the web by decades. And if you think that I owe greatly to Berners-Lee and Andreessen anyway because the web is how people know and use email, I would point out that I predate the web by a few years as well and I do not do webmail.

Listen, let’s not get into a pissing match about Internet history, CPUs and technical shit. There are lots of things to dislike about Jobs - the issue of worker exploitation, his assholish unwillingness to accept his own daughter, etc, etc. There are also lots of reasons to contest the usual hagiography about his being an innovator or visionary. But surely we can talk about Apple products as user products?

	—ravi