Fake Steve Jobs Busted

[tarey_g]

This is one of the funniest replies in this section. I remmeber Goobi's famous reply on the iPhone nano These two really made me ROTFL. Really loved these.

hehehe , btw can you point me towards the thread where goobi replied

 

[sakumar79]

@aryayush: I find the posted content of "Regarding our new software programs" a bit ridiculous... From my personal experience (and I have met a huge number of computer-illiterate people both in India as well as in the US), most people have had an easy time starting with MS Office... I surely havent heard people "screaming" for easy to use word processor...

From the iWork website, I can see that Pages has fewer icons to work with, but the post makes it look like MS Office is so hard to work with, which clearly is not true... I personally use OpenOffice.org and even this I have convinced a few of my computer-illiterate relatives to try instead of MS Office (and they havent complained nor had they required my teaching them how to use it).

Some features that I dont find there in Pages (based on their website info, so I may be missing it) include support for macros, ODT (Open Document Format), Mail Merge (though this feature or something similar seems to be already in 06 version), etc...

Also, I would like to know if earlier version of Pages was more similar to Word ("complicated" menu layout, etc) because the indication of the post was that the "simplistic" menu layout is new in Pages 08.

I guess I will have to try Pages out sometime before I can really pass judgement on the software (watching Demos are useless in making decisions as they always tend to highlight the best and leave out the negative details) but currently, I am seeing it as more hype and gloss than substance.

Arun

 

[pillainp]

@sakumar79

This is typical of the hyperbole associated with all things Mac.

 

[gxsaurav]

From the iWork website, I can see that Pages has fewer icons to work with, but the post makes it look like MS Office is so hard to work with, which clearly is not true...

ironically, for a Mac user it is hard to work with

Some features that I dont find there in Pages (based on their website info, so I may be missing it) include support for macros, ODT (Open Document Format), Mail Merge (though this feature or something similar seems to be already in 06 version), etc...

Thats not the only problem with pages. It cannot export to blogs, cannot colloborate....its like Abiword with templates. However for some reason, still arya finds it better then Word

Also, I would like to know if earlier version of Pages was more similar to Word ("complicated" menu layout, etc) because the indication of the post was that the "simplistic" menu layout is new in Pages 08.

They also have same layout as Pages

I guess I will have to try Pages out sometime before I can really pass judgement on the software but currently, I am seeing it as more hype and gloss than substance.

Hack-in- Mac anyone :-". All Apple products are hyped

 

[aryayush]

@aryayush: I find the posted content of "Regarding our new software programs" a bit ridiculous... From my personal experience (and I have met a huge number of computer-illiterate people both in India as well as in the US), most people have had an easy time starting with MS Office... I surely havent heard people "screaming" for easy to use word processor...

From the iWork website, I can see that Pages has fewer icons to work with, but the post makes it look like MS Office is so hard to work with, which clearly is not true... I personally use OpenOffice.org and even this I have convinced a few of my computer-illiterate relatives to try instead of MS Office (and they havent complained nor had they required my teaching them how to use it).

Some features that I dont find there in Pages (based on their website info, so I may be missing it) include support for macros, ODT (Open Document Format), Mail Merge (though this feature or something similar seems to be already in 06 version), etc...

Also, I would like to know if earlier version of Pages was more similar to Word ("complicated" menu layout, etc) because the indication of the post was that the "simplistic" menu layout is new in Pages 08.

I guess I will have to try Pages out sometime before I can really pass judgement on the software (watching Demos are useless in making decisions as they always tend to highlight the best and leave out the negative details) but currently, I am seeing it as more hype and gloss than substance.

Arun

First and foremost, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is a humour column written by a fake entity. You are not supposed to take everything written there seriously. To make it humourous, the author has to exaggerate his point and make them sound outrageous. That elicits laughs. Calling Microsoft by their name is not funny, but calling them Microtards or Big Brother or the Borg is. So stop getting so worked up about his exaggerated description of Words. He wouldn't be quite so famous if he'd written everything as it is.

Second, he is right. Yes, he writes under a fake name and uses humour as his main aide, but the message is always serious. Of course, you may choose to disagree.

Third, iWork is awesome, much better than Microsoft Office. I'll repeat what I said once in another thread and was highly ridiculed for by unimportant people, "More features != better". That is, more features is not necessarily equal to better. Milind's father, who has no attachment to Apple or Macs whatsoever, prefers Pages over Word. I don't think he would have been very pleased when Milind chose to buy a Mac over other, cheaper computers. But I'm sure he is not that unhappy now that he's discovered Pages.

I used Pages today and within half an hour, I'd tried out all the features of the application (with the help of the tutorial videos). I'd taken a three month course for Microsoft Office and even today I can do only basic tasks in it. I can use Powerpoint quite efficiently but I am not too good at Word and I completely suck at Excel. Of course, when you have already learned Office through years of usage, when it is hardwired into your system, you'll feel absolutely at home using it. My brother can make Excel documents at such a speed, it is almost scary. If I were to hand him a copy of Numbers, he would probably not be able to do basic things at first. That is because he is jumping from familiar to new territory. But give two new users a copy of iWork and Office each and see which one makes better spreadsheets, documents and presentations.

I challenge you. Give me a topic to make a presentation one. I'll make it alone. Then give the same topic to fifty users on this forum and ask them to work together on it. Or give it to the engineer who worked on Powerpoint. I'll make a better presentation (if both are given the same data) than him. Sounds like a very far-fetched challenge? Try it out. Powerpoint simply does not have any of those transitions, effects, animations and really cool features. Nor does it have the easy of use.

Do you know how you crop images in iWork? You just click on them and a slider appears which you can move to crop the image. It is difficult to explain. You have to watch it. If you have never used iWork and see the guided tour, you'll be very skeptical. You'll be thinking, "but where did that palette appear from", "which option did he click on", "how did he do that". Believe me, it is very intuitive.

And it has lesser features than Office. But what matters is not the features, at least to me. What matters is the ease of use and the end result. I myself used to contradict goobimama's opinion that Pages is better than Word (though after having seen Keynote for five seconds, I'd known that it was something Powerpoint could never even hope to be) but after having used it today, I agree with him. Completely.


(I'm sorry for the length of this post. I don't usually go into it in so much detail but brushes with you in the past have led me to believe that you are genuinely interested in the Mac platform and are a keen learner, so I just let it flow. BTW, Pages has the macros feature and mail merge. I am not sure what ODT is though.)

 

[sakumar79]

I understand that the post is not by the original Steve Jobs, but somehow, the humour in the exaggeration did not appeal to me... Perhaps one needs to be a Mac user to appreciate the humour...

I understand that More Features is NOT ALWAYS better, but that is when you address a particular customer or a select group of customer... In general, the more features that are available in a software, the more the customer base will be... That is the concept in which most companies go... That is why cellphones evolved from simple phoning devices into multi-purpose devices and became a raging hit all over the world... (No doubt there are lots of people for whom phone is all they will use it for... Which is why many companies provide barebones models also...)

If you are using Windows for even a few months, Word feels like an extension of the OS... It is very easy to use it since the icons and feel is similar... Many people do not use the more advanced features like macros, mail merge, etc but they can type through their reports, etc without much problem (at least this has been my experience)...

Reg. your challenge, instead of taking so much time, I have a simpler way by which I can understand the power of Keynote... I am sending it by pm, please check it out...

Anyway, I hope to be able to work with a Mac in the future... My brother (in the US) now has a Mac laptop (old model) as well as a desktop (very recent model) and I have requested that if he is planning to dispose the laptop, he should give it to me for "research"... He has said that he will think about it, and also, he hasnt got any immediate plans for coming to India, so I am feeling very impatient waiting for the laptop to come...

Finally, regarding macros and ODT... 1. Please clarify - Is Pages able to work with Word macros or does it have its own macro language or does it do both?
2. ODT is Open Document format that was released by the Open Source community as a open standard for documents... It was available with OpenOffice.org ver 2.0 I think and recently, Word also came up with support for the format.

Arun

 

[gxsaurav]

Third, iWork is awesome, much better than Microsoft Office.

In what sence.? If you strip features out of Office 2007 & only give it features enough to compare to Office XP then even Office 200XP is very easy to use with the ribbon. People who use Office 2007 have nothing to learn....even my sister got used to Excel 2007 in 2 hrs.

I'll repeat what I said once in another thread and was highly ridiculed for by unimportant people, "More features != better". That is, more features is not necessarily equal to better.

Since you are not using many features then why get Office 2007? Simply stick to open office.

Milind's father, who has no attachment to Apple or Macs whatsoever, prefers Pages over Word.

Let me guess, he is a lawyer & most of the pages he makes are based on 4 or 5 type of templates, right?

I used Pages today and within half an hour, I'd tried out all the features of the application (with the help of the tutorial videos). I'd taken a three month course for Microsoft Office and even today I can do only basic tasks in it.

Well, then I doubt your learning skills. I never took any course for Office 2007, I use word & outlook a lot & use power point once in a while. Stop blaming Office if you don't know how to find stuff in ribbon.

But give two new users a copy of iWork and Office each and see which one makes better spreadsheets, documents and presentations.

Thats your opinion, not ours. Your opinion is not the holy truth. He might even get confused about where is the File, edit menu.

Powerpoint simply does not have any of those transitions, effects, animations and really cool features. Nor does it have the easy of use.

If you knew how to make slides, you wouldn't be over using animations. Why don't you upload some Mock slide u have made here ? Hey, can Keynote export to removable drive after which it will run independently on any OS including Linux .

Do you know how you crop images in iWork? You just click on them and a slider appears which you can move to crop the image.

Do you know how we do it in word? Just insert an image, then You will see Picture ribbon highlighted in read which immediately attracts attention. Click on it, there u have crop icon ...click on it & then drag the side to crop the way u want. Is it that hard to do like iWork web page shows it is?

Video of Word 2007's cropping feature.

You have to watch it. If you have never used iWork and see the guided tour, you'll be very skeptical.

THe guided tour is made by Apple & will only show the good features of iWork. It won't let u do much then obviously it is easy.

And it has lesser features than Office. But what matters is not the features, at least to me. What matters is the ease of use and the end result.

This means U like iWork cos u don't know how to work on any of the Microsoft products & don't need the features of Office 2007, that doesn't mean everyone will appreciate Word. Once they start doing serious work....they will miss Office anyway.

though after having seen Keynote for five seconds, I'd known that it was something Powerpoint could never even hope to be

Thats your own personal opinion. If you don't know how to work on Powerpoint that again doesn't mean its Powerpoints fault.

I have a car, I don't know how to drive, but my gf knows that...& she drives if we go on date in car. Do I blame Maruti for not giving a gamepad like handling so that I can use the swift like NFS Most Wanted

 

[din]

hehehe , btw can you point me towards the thread where goobi replied

Which famous reply are we talking about here? iPhone Nano?

..............................................................................

Fun 1

post -

yeh the plans were leaked out by one of the employees of apple..it pissed of Steve jobs bigtime!!! ppl r now waiting for the nano!! lol!!

and reply -

How do you know? Did he call you at home to tell you how bad the employees are treating him?

That is from this thread Which said - Apple plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone in the fourth quarter that could be .........

Fun 2

post -

whts thats means

and reply -

thats means yous ares news heres, afters somes times yous wills knows whats i's wass talkings abouts..

These kinda replies really make a relief from the serious reading, thank you guys

 

[aryayush]

My lunch with Fester

So the big Ballmer meeting just went down and I'm still shaking -- with rage, not fear. Pure rage. I mean, literally, my hands are all frigged up and I can't even type. I have Ja'Red typing this for me.

*bp3.blogger.com/_pNJFZtinpKY/RsIO9bF6CgI/AAAAAAAABkw/JlWx4Q8m9b0/s320/ballmer.jpg​

Here's how it went down. He arrived with some handlers who all looked like junior versions of the Beastmaster -- same glasses, same doofy haircuts and bad clothes. Instead of having a fancy lunch brought in I took them down to the Apple cafeteria so my serfs could see me leading the enemy king around on a leash. Stepped into a deli and Ballmer goes up and tilts his head back and starts scanning the menu on the wall, going, "Unh, unh, lessee ..." and one of our guys in line shouts out, "PASTRAMI, PASTRAMI, PASTRAMI, PASTRAMI!!!!" Big laugh from the Appleites. MicroTards pretended to laugh along but they were looking uncomfortable -- like some gang dudes who just realized they'd strayed into the wrong territory wearing the wrong colors. In other words, So far so good.

After lunch -- I drank a half bottle of water and felt my soul dying as I watched Monkey Boy chow down on some kind of meat product -- we go back to the Jobs Pod and Ballmer tells his guys to sit and they all do, just like a pack of little beagles, side by side on a couch in the waiting room. Monkey Boy and I sit down in my conference room and Ballmer starts going on about how exciting it is to see Apple doing so well and gaining market share and designing such beautiful machines, and how one of his kids brought home a MacBook Pro and was loving it but unfortunately it suffered a little accident involving a Ford Explorer, boohoo.

So I tell him flat out to quit blowing sunshine up my ass and get to the point because I know he isn't here for a chit chat. Trust me, when the Borg sets up a meeting, it's because they've found something of yours that they want and they think they've found a way to steal it from you. If you're small and/or stupid they'll pretend they're super interested in what you're doing and tell you how cool you are and promise to form a partnership with you and make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.

If you're Steve Jobs, they usually just come to the point because there's no sense in pretending that either of us ever intends to play nice. Nevertheless the Monkey Man still keeps beating around the bush, saying what a great relationship Microsoft and Apple have had for so many years now, and he quotes that Beatles line about how we have memories longer than the road that stretches on ahead and how that was so beautiful when I said that at D and he got all teary backstage. He says Microsoft just loves selling Office on the Apple platform and really wants to continue being Apple's biggest app vendor, and I'm like, Of course you like it, because you get early access to our OS technology that you can copy and put into yours. He says there's no need to be all angry and confrontational, and besides the OS group at Microsoft is completely separate from the apps group, they don't share information, blah blah, and by the way since I brought up the subject of OS technology being "borrowed" he can't help but mention that some things in Leopard look a lot like stuff in Vista.

Which brings me to my point, he says, but unfortunately it doesn't really bring him to his point because he starts going about intellectual property and how our two companies could both benefit from sharing our patent portfolios and cross-licensing our technology, and Apple has lots of great stuff and so does Microsoft and maybe we could find a way to work together in a new way that could be a model for the industry and this kind of bridge-building and interoperability is really what customers are crying out for and Microsoft has been reaching out to the Linux community and now that Apple is getting so much traction and market share it's important that Microsoft work well with our stuff and make sure that everything work together in the best interest of customers, blah blah mwah mwah.

I'm like, Fester, trust me, there's nothing you guys have that we want. I'm sorry but it's just the truth. We roll our own and we like it that way.

He's like, Yeah, well, see, that's kinda what I want to talk about, and see, I didn't want to just send our lawyers to have this conversation without at least talking to you about it personally, CEO to CEO, you know? But see we've gone through our huge patent portfolio and it looks like there's about a hundred major patents of ours that you guys are infringing upon and some of them are for really big fundamental stuff that you can't just work around. And, well, we feel that you'll agree with us that respecting intellectual property is one of the most important things for a big company like Apple.

For a moment I just sit there. I'm kind of stunned, frankly. Then I go, Well, okay, so let's look through this portfolio and see what you've got. Fester says he doesn't have that material with him, he just wants to have a talk, and I say, Okay, fine, have your lawyers show the stuff to our lawyers and we'll talk again. But he says, Oh, well, see, we can't actually show you the patents. They're totally secret and proprietary. I'm sure you understand.

I'm like, So you want me to pay you a licensing fee for patents that you won't even show me, and you think that's something I'll understand? He says they don't necessarily want a licensing fee, but more like a cross-licensing agreement, sort of a bridge-building collaboration cooperation type thing where we share technology with each other and we could reassure customers that we really have their best interest at heart.

I go, So basically you want us to give you all of our cool OS technology and other technology in exchange for some stuff that you won't even show us or even tell us what it is? Stuff that may or may not even exist? Let me tell you something. Here at Apple we have a standard response for this kind of request. It's called siooma. Have you heard of it?

He says he hasn't heard that word before, is it some kind of Hindu word from Tibet or something? So I explain to him that it means "Suck It Out Of My Ass." Then I go on to explain to him that seriously, all joking aside, he should go sit in a room and slam chairs against a wall, or whatever else he does for fun, but if he thinks I'm going to make a deal with him then he must be out of his ****ing mind.

He gets real calm. He waits a long time. Then he says, in a very soft voice, Jobso, I'm not out of my mind. I'm the CEO of a company called Microsoft. Have you heard of it? I've got a $270 billion market cap. I've got more money in my back pocket than your entire company takes in in a year. So take some free advice, hippie. Don't fight me on this. Okay?

He smiles and gets up and leaves. And here I am, still seething.

Beastmaster, Monkey Boy, and all the rest of you in Redmond, listen close and hear what I'm about to say: We will fight you on the desktop. We will fight you on the Internet. We will fight you in the browser space, and in desktop productivity apps. We will fight you in music players and smart phones. We will never surrender. We will never make peace. We will never stop fighting. Never, ever, ever.

Siooma, mother****ers.

[Emphasis added.]

[Via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs]


This, IMHO, was the best FSJ post ever. Keep it going, Steve!