Joanna Hoffman

Joanna Karine Hoffman (; born July 27, 1955) is a Polish-American marketing executive. She was one of the original members of both the Apple Macintosh team and the NeXT team, and close friend of Steve Jobs.

At the time she began at Apple Computer, the Mac was "still a research project". Hoffman quickly became fluent in English and excelled in school.

She has a background in anthropology, physics, and linguistics,

Career Hoffman was on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago when she was encouraged by her friends to attend a lecture at Xerox PARC in California. While there, she had "a heated discussion after the lecture" with Jef Raskin. as part of Raskin's initial team of Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, and Brian Howard.

Hoffman had a reputation at both Apple and NeXT as one of the few who could successfully engage with Steve Jobs. In both 1981 and 1982, she won a satirical award at Apple given to "the person who did the best job of standing up to Jobs". (Jobs was aware of and liked the award.) . She resigned after Jobs decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the "Macintosh XL" . Said Hoffman, "I was furious because the Mac XL wasn't real. It was just to blow the excess Lisas out the door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned" .

During the early 1990s, Hoffman was vice president of Marketing at General Magic, retiring in 1995 to spend more time with her family. On occasion she has given public lectures discussing her early life at Apple and working with Steve Jobs.

Hoffman has a very negative opinion of Facebook.

Personal life Hoffman is married to Alain Rossmann, a native of France, who also worked on the Mac team at Apple. They have two sons. portrayed Hoffman in the 2013 film Jobs. English actress Kate Winslet portrayed Hoffman in the 2015 film Steve Jobs. Winslet won the Golden Globe Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and was nominated for the Academy Award and Screen Actors Guild Award in the same category for her performance.

On the nature of the relationship between Hoffman and Jobs, Winslet described her as Jobs' "work wife", and that "she was an extraordinary, feisty Eastern European person who was pretty much the only person who could actually knock sense into Steve".