Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Woz) has taken to Facebook to discuss the new Steve Jobs biopic by Aaron Sorkin and has had some interesting, potentially controversial things to say about the late man.

Posting comments in response to Rackspace, Inc. Startup Liaison Officer Robert Scoble posting about the movie, and a recent documentary on Jobs’ life, Woz claimed among other things that in the early days Jobs was a failure when it came to computers and that Jobs left Apple on his own volition, and was neither pushed out of the company, nor even fired, despite Jobs for many years claiming that he had been.

“Steve Jobs wasn’t pushed out of the company. He left. I supported him in his belief that he was made to create computers. But up until then he’d only had failures at creation,” Woz wrote, before adding “He was great at productizing and marketing the Apple ][ and the revenues financed the failures Apple ///, LISA, Macintosh, and NeXT. This is not shown in the movie.”

Explaining why Jobs chose to leave Apple, Woz explained that “After the Macintosh failure it’s fair to assume that Jobs’ left out of his feeling of greatness, and embarrassment about not having achieved it. That is not shown [in the movie] either.”

Jobs as a tyrant

Woz goes on to talk about the now infamous dark side of Steve Jobs in the workplace, the side where he would in particular abuse staff and what he saw of it.

“When we started Apple, for real with money, I made the decision to be an engineer in the lab, for life. I did not want the conflict and politics of running the business. Hence, I did not see Jobs’ reactions to when things didn’t go his way,” Woz explained.

“The LISA cost too much when Jobs thought we could pull off some Woz Magic and make it cost very little. That’s only because Steve didn’t know computers and what it would take to make the right good machine.”

So it wasn’t that things didn’t go his way other than that his idea hadn’t panned out. In that case, he blamed the LISA team. Never himself… Steve felt it was the fault of lousy engineers who couldn’t find shortcuts. He would walk into meetings and tell engineers and teams that they were idiots and walk out.”

Historical accuracies

Although generally regarded as being highly successful today, particularly given the memorable 1984 themed launch commercial, what isn’t known is that the original Macintosh struggled, something Woz discussed in his comments.

“[Jobs] took over our Macintosh project because we had the few most creative sorts in the company, and headed it to being a low-cost LISA…every penny had to be saved, as it still came out a bit on the expensive side.”

“Color was out. Cleverness allowed it to use less RAM and more ROM and more floppy to save money. It had a disk file system but not a full general OS. Just a program to ‘look like’ a mouse-based computer was all Steve wanted, largely because his technical knowledge was low, on what an OS was about. The machine just had to look the way he wanted so he didn’t listen to others.”

On getting to the point where Jobs leaves after the original Mac doesn’t sell well, Woz added “One thing nobody likes to point out is that John Sculley himself, as well as almost all of us at Apple, believed that the Macintosh was Apple’s future.”

“We all sacrificed the growing personal computer market (10x over a decade and MS got all the growth) in this belief. We (Sculley leading) had to work very hard for three years to make the Macintosh as successful (in dollars) as the Apple ][ had ever been, following Jobs’ vision.”

“The choices can be argued because you can never go back and say what decisions would have what results, but it was a business decision to SAVE Apple as a company, after the stock dropped by a third in about a day when the Macintosh failed to sell due to not much software.”

While Woz doesn’t discuss Jobs’ return to Apple years later, most would consider that he did redeem himself in later years with one successful product launch after another, but despite the worship by some it’s important to remember he was still just a man, complete with all the flaws that are typical of all of us.

Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs hits movie screens October 9.

Image credit: Revolweb/Flickr/CC by 2.0