Analysis Of Pirates Of Silicon Valley

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Craig Friedman
MGMT Tech and Innovation
An Analysis of Pirates of Silicon Valley
Pirates of Silicon Valley, directed by Martyn Burke in 1999, depicts the story of two brilliant young entrepreneurs and their quest to revolutionize the way humans interact with society and technology. The two stars, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, both came from similar backgrounds that introduced each one to electronics. More importantly, as evidenced by Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, both of these brilliant college kids where in the right place at the right time. Both Jobs and Gates were blessed with meeting intelligent people who would help guide them along their journey to create the best personal computer possible. Throughout this paper, I will analyze each of the tech-savvy people separately, as I do not think it fair to couple them together when considering the following factors: internal or external innovation, preparation for the industry, and lastly, marketing and technology considerations.
Steve Jobs lived in close proximity to Stanford, allowing him to be engrained in the new tech hub of the United States, allowing him to meet tech-hippy people like himself. Thus, he was introduced to Steve Woznikak, a programmer who would assist jobs in creating Apple. The two college kids incorporated the company in Jobs’ garage in Los Altos, California. Even though Jobs had knack for internal innovation, he needed assistance to bring Apple to the forefront of the tech boom during the late 1970’s. Jobs had the mindset of a brilliant marketer and in my opinion (saw how technology could adapt through time and eventually change the way humans interact with each other); however, Jobs was very spiritual and at times lost touch with reality. To counter this ...

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...as a winner. As evidenced by the movie, Gates won the majority of times when he played his peers in poker. He demonstrated the same competitive nature when he conducted business. In a Atari interview in April 2000, Kevin Savetz stated that when a developer showed Gates a game he created , and Gates insisted that that they play against each other, Gates lost the majority of the time; however, when the two colleagues met again, Gates won.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both had a knack for winning and beating the competition. Gates was quoted saying, “You know how to survive, you survive because you make people need you,” while Jobs exclaimed “What we’re doing is opening doors, you have to be careful which one you open.” Each CEO had similar objectives the wished to achieve ( beating the competition) , but both pursued their intentions in completely different manners.

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