When I met with Steve Jobs to talk about Fon I found him to be both a genius and an unbearable person. I walked into the meeting in awe and I left in desperation. Steve Jobs in person was one of the biggest disappointments of my business life. And that was only after a 90 minute meeting. Other top entrepreneur who I met including Larry, Sergey, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and even Bill Gates are extremely nice people and not for that less successful than Steve Jobs. And this is not just my opinion but that of most who ever dealt closely with Steve Jobs I found out later, something that somehow the general public is not aware of. I imagine that working for Steve Jobs every day must be occasionally great but frequently a torture. And I say this writing off a Mac and with an iPhone in my pocket, my point is that you don´t need to be cruel to be successful. As a result, probably Steve´s main character flaw, which is to remind you in every other sentence what a brilliant individual he is and how unoriginal you are, partly explains the success of the new Palm Pre. In this post Scoble explains both, how fantastic the new Palm Pre is but also how it was mostly built by former Apple employees. Would this be Apple employees who couldn´t stand Steve anymore? Probably. Everyone calls Steve Jobs a genius and he certainly is a design genius. But he would be even more successful and certainly a happier person if he did not have a compulsion for humiliating other folks.
Disclosure: I own Apple shares and do not own Palm shares.