I didn't say he wasn't a jerk. Totally, and it wound up infecting every company after the iPhone success because that's the lesson people got from him - be an asshole and find success. Not the good part about being insightful, having good instincts, and seeing beyond user feedback to what people will actually want, etc. etc.

I'm simply pointing out he's not the same category of non-technical founders being discussed in this post

You have to be remarkably good to be able to afford being an asshole.

Time and place play into this as well.

We know a lot more about hardware and software development than we did even 10 years ago let alone 50.

Those of us who came into tech in the last 20 years through today did not have as many unknown unknowns to stumble through. It’s all so much more streamlined. There inherently cannot be another Jobs or Gates in IT land same as there will never be another Christopher Columbus

Idolizing the prior generation is a fools errand. The discovery phase is over. We get the maintenance phase

Well, that or own the company.

Just as everyone else did in the 80s. Judge people by the times they lived in, for you will be judged the same.

(Without a doubt, something you think is OK, and everyone else does, will be seen as a horrible monstrosity by your descendants. It won't be something you can think of, and yet you'll be judged for it as a monster by some.)

He was a pretty huge jerk to his wife and kid even by the standards of the day. He seems to have just not been a very nice guy. Jerks can invent interesting tech, right?

By all accounts Steve carried on managing the same way when he returned to Apple in 1997.

Even in the 1980s, people who intentionally parked their unregistered Porches in handicapped spaces were considered monsters. Don't try to retcon Steve Jobs into something he was not. He was a brilliant scumbag.

Don't forget that he leased them new continuously so that he always kept them unregistered and therefore wouldn't get ticketed!

A little voice in the back of my head, recalls something along the line of this.

There are a mandated number of unassigned, non-employee dedicated handicapped parking spaces per overall building size/parking spaces. And that in some cases, there are far too many for the building/business's use case.

An example? A shopping mall needs lots of handicapped parking spaces. Yet an office will assign close spots to employees with special needs, as the generic spots aren't for-use by employees. Thus there can be an excess of generic handicapped spots.

There are only so many spots available close to the building, and Jobs would obviously take one. So by using one of the many never-to-be-used generic handicapped parking spaces, Jobs was saving a high value parking space with prime location. And also allowing others to have use of a close to door space, all without depriving any handicapped person of a place to park.

It was a social hack, one he may have been quite proud of.

He did it at work, and justifying an asshole's behavior with some "social hack" explanation puts you squarely in the wrong my dude.

Clearly the handicapped are taking too many resources and we need the billionaires to have some.

The folks downvoting you would do well to listen to the recent _Behind the Bastards_ series about Steve Jobs.

Jobs' terrible attitude is at this point widely known, dissected and discussed to death here and everywhere else. Calling it out does not adding anything new or insightful to this discussion.

His terrible attitude is also entirely orthogonal to his product management sensibility. The fact that he was a jerk does not mean he must be generally canceled and his unique product development theory and insight ignored. The two are not directly related, and it is possible to appreciate one while condemning the other.