"Business is War" was his company Motto...
Ruthless? Shrewd is more appropriate, and highly aggressive, more so
then the laid back California culture was used to.... he brought East
Coast aggressive business tactics to Atari, woke up a company that was
continually taking longer and longer and longer to release products,
generally which were only cost reduced updates with minor upgrades.
While his lack of marketing may have been his weakness, getting product
out the door on time and under cost was a remarkable feat. There are
a lot of things that are largely public misconceptions about him that
through research and access to the original mainframe emails and memo's
is quite the contrary...
The real kicker here..... myself and Marty Goldberg were supposed to
meet with Jack next week for a face to face interview for our book and
it is a shame we won't have that on tape now. Jack will speak to us
through his words from his emails, memo's and such, that will still give
us some solid insight into his thinking, but after speaking with him on
the phone just a few weeks ago, which was a remarkably enjoyable
conversation, I was very much looking forward to meeting him in person
to continue our talk.
Curt
David Riley wrote:
On Apr 9, 2012, at 3:06 PM, Keith Monahan wrote:
On 4/9/2012 2:29 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
That's a shame. His impact on computing is
frequently forgotten these
days.
It should probably be noted that Jack was a pretty ruthless business man
and made decisions that were contrary to a stable and reliable machine
and accessories.
Agreed, but I doubt the personal computing landscape would have looked
anything like it did without him. Sometimes you need ruthless SOBs to
get things done. You couldn't have had an Apple without a Commodore to
compete with (that's sophistry, perhaps, but I still believe it).
He was famous for demanding prototypes be
available for CES, accepting
orders for something that wasn't ready for mass production, and then
forcing the engineers to release a sub-standard product.
While not optimal, this got computers into people's hands who wouldn't
have been able to afford something better. It's always a pick-2 of
getting it done fast, cheap and right, no?
- Dave