A lot of people discredit Jobs' creative vision due to disliking his personality, and, if they're engineers, like to overemphasize Woz because he's an engineer.
What do you think changed those people's minds? My feeling is that in the years post Jobs' death negative stories about his personality have been increasingly common.
For the record: I believe Jobs definitely deserves the credit, I'm just observing the mud that has been slung his way.
Stories about his negative side are likely more common because people feel more free to talk about them, now that Jobs, being dead, can no longer respond or retaliate against people with grievances, such as the daughter he disavowed [0].
I perhaps unfairly read negative connotations in your use of "revisionist", but I see nothing wrong with adding Jobs' uglier side to the historical record. It doesn't change what he accomplished, and it's something we can learn from. I do question the idea that Woz has been irrationally overemphasized. By the time the iPod was dominant, and a year before the iPhone, Woz felt so left out of the historical record that he published his autobiography to set the record straight, particularly about the misconception that Jobs himself invented/built the Apple I and ][ machine. Even then, Woz gives clear credit to Jobs for having the entrepreneurial sense and vision to make Apple a company, whereas Woz was perfectly content to work at HP for all his days.
After the iPhone, Woz became even more a part of Apple's ancient, forgotten history. He was a bit character in the Jobs' movies came out, and AFAIK, no movie yet has been made about Woz's life.
I think you and I see eye-to-eye on Woz. I feel like there's been another uptick in idol worship when it comes to him in the last few years.
As for Jobs, I was thinking more of his technical abilities. The Woz-worshippers putting him on a pedestal seem to feel it simultaneously necessary to denigrate Mr. Jobs' technical side.
Jobs knew a hell of a lot about computers. More than I, or anyone I've met, ever will. It's clear reading old interviews with him that he knew his stuff, all the way down to the circuit level. But these days the conventional wisdom is that Woz built everything and Jobs was the equivalent of P.T. Barnum.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Did he personally know how to program 68000 assembler? Maybe some, or maybe not. But did he know how the chip worked? Absolutely. And more importantly, he picked the right kind of smart people and let them (largely) do their thing. And he did something that rarely happens these days — he gave them personal credit for their technical achievements.
When I read his biography a few years ago, it reduced my respect for him. But these days, reading archives of first-hand documents and interviews, I have more respect for him than before.
I didn't use the term revisionist, I just felt like I understood where OP was coming from. People act as if Jobs' harm towards others takes away from his achievements - that's the revisionist part - when in reality those things are orthogonal.
