I couldn’t think of another title about this post by Erik Peterson that didn’t involve some sort of LOLcatz-level of cutesiness.  Erik rants about (I’m paraphrasing here) how hackers are the only important part of a startup, since “90% of the early effort is product development.”  Then he gets into a couple interesting examples.

First, he talks about how Steve Ballmer was only brought in 5 years after Gates and Allen did their product development magic.  Wait, now Bill Gates is a software genius?  To be fair, I don’t know what Erik’s prior thoughts about billg are, but the critical view is that he stole/repackaged/copied other people’s technology.  Totally false, but there you go.  The truth is that Gates is both a technical AND business genius (IMHO).  But to hear him compared to Steve Wozniak in a startup-product-development sense is sort of funny.

About Woz: EP claims (or rather, implies) that Steve Jobs was unimportant to the early success of Apple.  Blatant ridiculousness.  I’m no Jobs nuthugger, but he was as essential as Woz was, even though he was a “business guy”.  Even Woz would agree with this, I’m quite sure.  In Founders at Work, he himself says that he was content to be a product guy at HP for the rest of his life, but Jobs brought in all this energy, got funding, pushed the business idea, etc.

Now, I love Woz.  Along with Scarlett Johannsen and Teela he’s one of three people I’ve never met who I would want to have my baby.  However, EP is just wrong about Jobs’ contribution.