Not a perfect man (who, even among the great, is?), but in his own way he did his fair share for the betterment of mankind. He helped people connect with each other, he helped people do their jobs, he helped people make art. We should all be so lucky.
I'm another dev whose first computer was an apple IIgs. I don't know if I'd be a dev today if I hadn't spent far too many hours poking around in basic typing in games from magazine, modifying them, and writing my own.
For purely selfish reasons -- what could Steve have imagined next? -- he passed far too soon.
Given that it takes years for a big thing to pass through the dev cycle and come to market, you're still going to see some things that were up his sleeve.
I can see that I am not the only one whose life was changed by those early experiences with the Apple ecosystem. From my own 30-year-old memories:
On any given afternoon around 1981-1982, the geeks at my middle school could all be found gathered around a dozen Apple II+ and Apple IIe machines in the computer room. The British instructor who had set them up and taught us code fundamentals really encouraged us to explore and experiment (and fought a losing battle to keep us from bringing our game floppies into the room).
Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn’t have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. “When you’re the janitor,” Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, “reasons matter.” He continues: “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.” That “Rubicon,” he has said, “is crossed when you become a VP.
I didn't realize how sick he was. I wish his family well and I hope he was able to enjoy his successors first product launch yesterday and know that he left Apple in good hands. A sad day for everyone.
If you care to learn more about the disease and the search for a cure, check out "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Fascinating, scary and sobering.
I've become convinced that cancer is among the elite series of diseases that are, in many cases, just how people die, meaning that perhaps in many instances the medical term for "dying" is "cancer". I think it is naive to ever think we'll have a general cure, especially since "cancer" covers such a broad range of specific issues.
I understand that people die in other ways too, of course, but I think cancer is a common agent that is just how dying works. It's like getting gray hairs -- you can do things to try and stop or cover it up (and some people will get old without much graying), people can fantasize about a fountain of youth that will keep your body at age 21 forever, but the reality is that graying is just part of aging and nothing is going to change that despite any realistic effort that humans can put in. Cancer is part of dying for many, many people. It's not going to go away despite our best efforts to mitigate its effects or eradicate it entirely.
I once read the supposed confession of a medical research assistant that "cancer" as a general thing is not curable but they keep the myth alive because "cure cancer" makes a really decent slogan.
Especially since we as a species have eliminated so many other "natural" causes of death thanks to vaccines, antibiotics, sanitation etc. What we are left with are what we have not yet solved: cancer, heart disease and strokes (mostly).
http://imgur.com/6d3lK
Cancer also becomes naturally more likely as time goes on and DNA has become more damaged so as our lifespans increase, so do the odds of getting cancer.
I wouldn't agree that cancer is just a fact of life. Here's why:
1. Young people get cancer, when they are otherwise healthy.
2. Cancer is subject to epidemiological trends suggesting that there are definite causes related to lifestyle or the environment.
3. You can reduce your risk of cancer/dying of cancer by not smoking, exercise, maintaining a normal body weight, and participating in screening programs. There are no guarantees of course.
4. Some cancers are curable eg testicular cancer can be cured even if widespread, with chemotherapy. Also Hodgkin's lymphoma and of course early stage cancer of the breast and bowel.
Incidentally, Steve Jobs had a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour, which is distinct from the normal run of the mill pancreatic cancer that has a poorer prognosis.
It seems like the statement of (1) is an admission that we aren't accurate at evaluating whether someone is "healthy" or "not healthy" to an acceptable level yet, since I would include precursors to cancer in my "healthy" classification.
I've become convinced that cancer is among the elite series of diseases that are,
in many cases, just how people die, meaning that perhaps in many instances the medical
term for "dying" is "cancer".
Our bodies are machines. Biological and very complex machines, but still they follow a system of rules and their functions are defined in machine code. Cancer is a certain type of crash that can befall these machines, literally. As the cells are executing their DNA code, an error creeps into its daily routine.
There is a variety of reasons those bugs can come up: for example, the codebase could have a pre-existing weakness that gets triggered in certain conditions. Sometimes, the code was copied incorrectly from one cell to its successor. Sometimes an external influence corrupts the local copy of the code.
When cellular code develops a bug, there are a number of things that can happen: sometimes, the cell just becomes bad or inefficient at what it does. Sometimes it shuts down. Sometimes, nothing happens. And other times the bug introduces an infinite loop in the cell's replication subroutines - that's cancer.
You see, cancer is neither a medical catchall term nor is it an inevitability of life. In fact, our immune system regularly attacks crashed cells, including cancer cells. If it didn't we'd all be having cancer at a very early age. However, sometimes due to the nature of the bug, the immune system is incapable of recognizing that a cell has crashed. That's when cancer breaks out, because those cells replicate and the immune system doesn't stop them. This is also precisely the point where the most promising treatment options are. We are just now figuring out how to teach the immune system to recognize those crashed cells and once we advance this research enough, we'll have the capability to simply correct these flaws in our systems and get rid of the bug completely.
I once read the supposed confession of a medical research assistant that "cancer"
as a general thing is not curable but they keep the myth alive because "cure cancer"
makes a really decent slogan.
For your sake, I really hope you don't believe this nonsense. It's right up there with "the Earth is flat" and "God did it".
EDIT: After re-reading my post, I realize that it could be perceived as condescending - but I assure you, it's not supposed to be. It's just intended as a short programmer-friendly introduction into the nature of cancer.
Cancer's definitely more of a specific thing than you think, as other comments have pointed out, but it is more or less a common failure mode of mammals, and statistically, it will eventually happen to you if nothing else does.
Thank you very much for posting the link to this book. I had never heard of it before and after seeing your comment I immediately read some reviews, started reading the sample chapter, bought the book, and am now 3 chapters in. An amazing read, and as you state also very sobering.
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
To the very end. That's incredible and sad. I don't know him personally, but knowing his biography, the kind of person he was and the impact he has on my daily life, man... i feel like having lost a close relative. Sad... :( May he rest in peace, for he have inspired us.
This is terribly tragic and don't take anything I say after this as meaning anything other than that.
But the more I think about this the more I think this is somehow the way things were meant to be. I mean, as much as we wish it wasn't true people do get diminished by age. The dashing young actor loses a little when you see him as a 60 year old. Your memory of him gets altered in the smallest of ways.
Steve Jobs is now enshrined in the world's collective memory as the magic man in a black shirt and jeans. He'll always be that now. I'd certainly trade his legend for a few more years of his life but at the same time the world needs legendary figures.
Would it have been better if Abraham Lincoln had been around for two terms? Yes. But would he have inspired generations of Americans if he'd gotten mired down in the politics of reconstruction and been forced to act like "just another politician"? I doubt it.
So it's horribly sad that Steve Jobs died but the fact that he was amazing to the very end is what will make him a legend going forward.
There's something to be said for retiring at the right time, but no, I don't think Steve Jobs' legacy would have been robbed of anything if he'd lived to enjoy thirty years of comfortable retirement.
Even dashing young actors aren't diminished by age. If Sean Connery had died young he would have robbed us of some great roles. And if Paul Newman had died young he would have robbed us of some tasty salad dressing.
Me. Right this moment, I'm in my parents house, where our little startup has moved (temporarily!) to create our MVP.
When I was a kid, my mother went back to college to finish the degree she'd abandoned when she got married. She decided to study computer science. This was my first exposure to boolean algebra, and made me want a computer. The Apple II was relatively new and visicalc was driving sales of it, and I wanted an Apple II so bad that I vowed that, if we couldn't afford one, by golly I was going to make one! I started learning electronics, I started learning circuit design, I followed a series of articles in Byte Magazine by Steve Ciarcia titled "build your own computer". I built my own computer. I laid out the PCB, and manufactured it, I stocked it, I designed a video card (using discrete chips, not one of the "video cards in a chip" choices that came out later.)
But pretty quickly, I realized that I needed to learn how to program it. I needed to learn assembly and to build an operating system, and so I put the computer hardware project on hold and started learning software.
When I went to college, I wanted to study EE (still in the hardware mode) but pretty soon ended up getting a job as a programmer for a small company. I liked the small company atmosphere, and that got me hooked on startups. So, I started my career (dropped out of college, like Steve) and worked for a bunch of startups so that I'd know what I needed to know before starting my own.
Along the way, I started dozens of small businesses. I read everything Guy Kawasaki published. I followed Apple news religiously, even in the days prior to the internet. I eventually was able to afford a Macintosh and have been using them for about 20 years now. I decided that design was important because I came to understand the Mac UI was designed. I read every crappy, money-grubbing, two-bit biography of Steve Jobs I could get my hands on.
I've never considered him to be a religious figure. I'm not a cultist. I don't worship him. In fact, as was recently revealed by Wozniak, Jobs was an admirer of Atlas Shrugged, as am I. Worship is the rejection of rationality, and rationality is what we both strived for.
As I work to build a brand new company now, having just filed the incorporation papers, I am conscious of the lessons Steve Jobs taught me.
They are not that you should make things pretty, or that marketing is more important than substance... quite the opposite.
Steve Jobs was a man of integrity. In this day and age, that is so very rare.
Apple is a company that has always done its best to do right by its customers, even when its customers didn't know what the right thing was. (Eg: nobody needed a GUI, a laser printer, built in networking, 72dpi, or 300+ dpi displays, the iPad, or a touch interface, or any of hundreds of other things that didn't exit on the market before Apple invented them.)
Steve Jobs has often been characterized as mean tempered, but I think that he is a kind person. All of the direct experiences I've had with him, he was vey kind. What other thing can it be than kindness that would drive someone to sacrifice nearly everything else in order to make a better experience for customers? The "missing" features on Apple products, especially in the 1.0 versions, are legion.
I think I'm feeling great pain right now, not because I'm an acolyte in the cult of mac, but because one of the few legitimate heroes of our age has died.
Steve Jobs was an unapologetic capitalist. He recognized that by making great products, he'd improve people's lives, and as a result, he'd improve his own.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. The prognosis is not good there, and so he knew he had limited time left. At that point he was a multi-millionaire if not already a billionaire.
How did he spend the last 8 years of his life? Enjoying himself? No. He drove himself and Apple to build the next generation of the personal computer. The iPad is as significant as the Apple II.
>> How did he spend the last 8 years of his life? Enjoying himself? No. He drove himself and Apple to build the next generation of the personal computer.
I believe it was in his commencement address that he said something to the effect of, there will be days when you look in the mirror and have to say, I don't want to work today. But you do anyway. But if there are enough of these days in a row, you know you need to make a change.
I've left two very well paying positions (one at a very reputable design company that designed some of the early Apple & NeXT products) in the past year because I did look in the mirror and realized they were not right for me.
You have to follow your passion, back it up with action, and everything else will fall into place.
Me, although it's my parents basement and not a garage. And I have the Gandhi poster framed, which I snagged when my school considered disposing those posters ...
When I heard that commencement speech he gave, I just got the idea that he sincerely meant everything that he said. In a way that someone would when they were talking to you one on one. He had lived everything that he talked about.
And that speech is a big reason that I have made the leap into doing something on my own.
What need have I to fear--so soon to die?
Let me work on, not watch and wait in dread:
What will it matter, when that I am dead
That they bore hate or love that near me lie?
'Tis but a lifetime, and the end is nigh
At best or worst. Let me lift up my head
And firmly, as with inner courage, tread
Mine own appointed way on mandates high.
Pain could but bring from all its evil store,
The close of pain: hate's venom could but kill;
Repulse, defeat, desertion, could no more,
Let me have lived my life, not cowered until
The unhindered and unchastened hour was here.
So soon--what is there now for me to fear?
"Just over two centuries ago, in 1805, it took news of the Battle of Trafalgar over a fortnight to reach London from the Mediterranean. The fact that, in 2011, the speed with which the news of Steve Jobs's death circled the globe and reached millions could be measured in seconds is a profound testimony to the connective power of the new world that he helped to create." ~ Alastair Roberts
My absolute favorite line of that entire speech is the very last, "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." I live by it and will continue to do so. What an iconic brilliant genius the world has lost.
Now I realise why this news is so sad to me. You see, I watched that speech at a time when I didn't know what to do with my life and career. He's the one who inspired me to finally quit my job and do the "foolish" thing. It's not about the products he created, it's the person he was.
I just re-watched that speech and it was enough to make me realize I'm not foolish enough. Jobs lived more than many people who reach age 70 because of this foolishness.
When I was 10 I visited my uncle’s factory in Michigan. He sat me down in front of an Apple II and fired up a video game. As I played Castle, I noticed the manual for the Applesoft programming language sitting next to the computer. I cracked it open and realized I could break into the monitor and see the source code.
I did just that, modifying the game to the point it was no longer playable. I had saved the file and effectively broke it. I shut off the computer, and never told my uncle.
The excitement of that moment stuck with me and was the enabler of the amazing life I've had since.
My first computer was an Apple IIc, on which I taught myself BASIC (which provided many memorable minor revelations). Thanks for your efforts Steve Jobs.
No, he won't. And I think you know that if you stop and think about it. Bill or Larry or Sam or people like that fit that category. However, Steve Jobs might have been the only one who gave a %!&#% about his products: what they did, how they worked and what people could do with them.
As an entrepreneur, he founded the now largest company on the planet, founded a company that sold for $400m, and took Pixar from almost nothing to a $7bn acquisition by Disney.
As an inventor, he's the main name (though with significant help and industrial design by others) behind the iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone - all dominant leaders in their respective sectors.
It's curious that you'd put Larry Ellison's achievements above all of that.
I stopped while typing and thought who was "big". I wasn't addressing the inventor portion, merely the entrepreneur. Mr. Gates or Mr. Walton had far greater impact on the world as a whole than Mr. Jobs. Mr. Ellison came to mind, as I wanted a few more names to add to the list. Guys like Buffett aren't in this category, and I could not think of other industry players of the last 20-30 years.
I'd be willing to bet that the Amazon guy might end up on this list if current trends continue, as continued Amazon success might have the hollowing-out impact of Wal-Mart. And you missed the point I was trying to make. Jobs is different because he actually saw the product as more than a dollar sign. His "score" was lower because of this, but we're all applauding his decision tonight.
And I don't count the computer or consumer electronics field as the best source of inventors. The latter, in many ways, is noise. The true inventions of the former occurred outside our date window (transistor, IC, microprocessor, ...) To me, inventions like PCR, medical/biology/chemistry/computer syntheses or vaccines are better, more significant inventions.
Hell, Sony broke the ground with the Walkman. Roddenberry thought up the iPad in a way. But, again, Jobs had taste and he made sure (a) we knew that and (b) his products were intended to be more than revenue streams.
As a postscript, I suspect there's far, far more businesses sitting on piles of Oracle software than they'd like (but they're stuck and getting nailed for it).
My dad also died of pancreatic cancer that spread to his liver (he was 55). Tough disease. Steve died before his time, but in many ways he beat the odds. Five year survivorship rate for pancreatic cancer is around 5%.
His vision will be missed. He left an indelible mark on a generation of technology users, and then did it again.
"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night, saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me."
- Inscription on Steve Jobs' star at the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame in Cambridge, Mass., unveiled on 9/16/2011: http://instagr.am/p/NPa4o/
Steve was rewarded proportionately for his contribution to the world. He (and Apple) changed millions of lives, and indirectly influenced the rest of our lives. A byproduct of his actions were his net worth.
I'll add that what's even better then giving away your money is not taking too much in the first place.
Steve Jobs was a multi-billionaire but, as Apple's stock laps the field, it bears noting that Steve's billions are a fraction of what others in similar positions are worth.
Not necessarily. Bill Gates didn't just start giving money away, he started spending it in a fairly controlled manner, trying to accomplish well defined goals.
Maybe Bill Gates ran out of ideas how to help using computers, though.
Really? Do you know what his salary was at Apple as CEO? Do you know how much money the man just through away by letting stock options expire? It seems to me that once he had a certain amount he really didn't care about money at all anymore.
Just adding my voice to the millions who will be mourning the man and the visionary. As someone who works with computers for a living, I'm thankful for the beautiful tools his company created. As an entrepreneur, I'm intrigued and moved by his example.
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For the past 10 years I've made a living developing on all kinds of Macs. Couldn't imagine work without them.
Best of all, I loved watching Steve's keynotes. No one can distort reality the way he did.
I didn't even know him, but I feel like I'll miss knowing he's there, ready to present:
"one more thing.."
I thank him for that as well.
I thank him for that as well.
I thank him for that as well.
For purely selfish reasons -- what could Steve have imagined next? -- he passed far too soon.
On any given afternoon around 1981-1982, the geeks at my middle school could all be found gathered around a dozen Apple II+ and Apple IIe machines in the computer room. The British instructor who had set them up and taught us code fundamentals really encouraged us to explore and experiment (and fought a losing battle to keep us from bringing our game floppies into the room).
The world has lost a unique and brilliant technology-business-design leader, the likes of which are few and far between.
-- Jobs (via secondary source [1])
[1] http://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-jo...
If you care to learn more about the disease and the search for a cure, check out "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Fascinating, scary and sobering.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004Q66B5C
I understand that people die in other ways too, of course, but I think cancer is a common agent that is just how dying works. It's like getting gray hairs -- you can do things to try and stop or cover it up (and some people will get old without much graying), people can fantasize about a fountain of youth that will keep your body at age 21 forever, but the reality is that graying is just part of aging and nothing is going to change that despite any realistic effort that humans can put in. Cancer is part of dying for many, many people. It's not going to go away despite our best efforts to mitigate its effects or eradicate it entirely.
I once read the supposed confession of a medical research assistant that "cancer" as a general thing is not curable but they keep the myth alive because "cure cancer" makes a really decent slogan.
Aging will probably get solved relatively soon, as will cancer, we just need the technology.
http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...
Cancer also becomes naturally more likely as time goes on and DNA has become more damaged so as our lifespans increase, so do the odds of getting cancer.
1. Young people get cancer, when they are otherwise healthy.
2. Cancer is subject to epidemiological trends suggesting that there are definite causes related to lifestyle or the environment.
3. You can reduce your risk of cancer/dying of cancer by not smoking, exercise, maintaining a normal body weight, and participating in screening programs. There are no guarantees of course.
4. Some cancers are curable eg testicular cancer can be cured even if widespread, with chemotherapy. Also Hodgkin's lymphoma and of course early stage cancer of the breast and bowel.
Incidentally, Steve Jobs had a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour, which is distinct from the normal run of the mill pancreatic cancer that has a poorer prognosis.
There is a variety of reasons those bugs can come up: for example, the codebase could have a pre-existing weakness that gets triggered in certain conditions. Sometimes, the code was copied incorrectly from one cell to its successor. Sometimes an external influence corrupts the local copy of the code.
When cellular code develops a bug, there are a number of things that can happen: sometimes, the cell just becomes bad or inefficient at what it does. Sometimes it shuts down. Sometimes, nothing happens. And other times the bug introduces an infinite loop in the cell's replication subroutines - that's cancer.
You see, cancer is neither a medical catchall term nor is it an inevitability of life. In fact, our immune system regularly attacks crashed cells, including cancer cells. If it didn't we'd all be having cancer at a very early age. However, sometimes due to the nature of the bug, the immune system is incapable of recognizing that a cell has crashed. That's when cancer breaks out, because those cells replicate and the immune system doesn't stop them. This is also precisely the point where the most promising treatment options are. We are just now figuring out how to teach the immune system to recognize those crashed cells and once we advance this research enough, we'll have the capability to simply correct these flaws in our systems and get rid of the bug completely.
For your sake, I really hope you don't believe this nonsense. It's right up there with "the Earth is flat" and "God did it".EDIT: After re-reading my post, I realize that it could be perceived as condescending - but I assure you, it's not supposed to be. It's just intended as a short programmer-friendly introduction into the nature of cancer.
June 12th 2005 Stanford commencement speech
Text: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
But the more I think about this the more I think this is somehow the way things were meant to be. I mean, as much as we wish it wasn't true people do get diminished by age. The dashing young actor loses a little when you see him as a 60 year old. Your memory of him gets altered in the smallest of ways.
Steve Jobs is now enshrined in the world's collective memory as the magic man in a black shirt and jeans. He'll always be that now. I'd certainly trade his legend for a few more years of his life but at the same time the world needs legendary figures.
Would it have been better if Abraham Lincoln had been around for two terms? Yes. But would he have inspired generations of Americans if he'd gotten mired down in the politics of reconstruction and been forced to act like "just another politician"? I doubt it.
So it's horribly sad that Steve Jobs died but the fact that he was amazing to the very end is what will make him a legend going forward.
Even dashing young actors aren't diminished by age. If Sean Connery had died young he would have robbed us of some great roles. And if Paul Newman had died young he would have robbed us of some tasty salad dressing.
Not sure about anyone else, but the quote above does a lot for me, no matter how many times I've reread it.
while the tech scene will miss him a lot, my thoughts go to his family who'll miss him most.
Right now, theres someone working on his own startup in their garage because he was inspired by Steve Jobs.
When I was a kid, my mother went back to college to finish the degree she'd abandoned when she got married. She decided to study computer science. This was my first exposure to boolean algebra, and made me want a computer. The Apple II was relatively new and visicalc was driving sales of it, and I wanted an Apple II so bad that I vowed that, if we couldn't afford one, by golly I was going to make one! I started learning electronics, I started learning circuit design, I followed a series of articles in Byte Magazine by Steve Ciarcia titled "build your own computer". I built my own computer. I laid out the PCB, and manufactured it, I stocked it, I designed a video card (using discrete chips, not one of the "video cards in a chip" choices that came out later.)
But pretty quickly, I realized that I needed to learn how to program it. I needed to learn assembly and to build an operating system, and so I put the computer hardware project on hold and started learning software.
When I went to college, I wanted to study EE (still in the hardware mode) but pretty soon ended up getting a job as a programmer for a small company. I liked the small company atmosphere, and that got me hooked on startups. So, I started my career (dropped out of college, like Steve) and worked for a bunch of startups so that I'd know what I needed to know before starting my own.
Along the way, I started dozens of small businesses. I read everything Guy Kawasaki published. I followed Apple news religiously, even in the days prior to the internet. I eventually was able to afford a Macintosh and have been using them for about 20 years now. I decided that design was important because I came to understand the Mac UI was designed. I read every crappy, money-grubbing, two-bit biography of Steve Jobs I could get my hands on.
I've never considered him to be a religious figure. I'm not a cultist. I don't worship him. In fact, as was recently revealed by Wozniak, Jobs was an admirer of Atlas Shrugged, as am I. Worship is the rejection of rationality, and rationality is what we both strived for.
As I work to build a brand new company now, having just filed the incorporation papers, I am conscious of the lessons Steve Jobs taught me.
They are not that you should make things pretty, or that marketing is more important than substance... quite the opposite.
Steve Jobs was a man of integrity. In this day and age, that is so very rare.
Apple is a company that has always done its best to do right by its customers, even when its customers didn't know what the right thing was. (Eg: nobody needed a GUI, a laser printer, built in networking, 72dpi, or 300+ dpi displays, the iPad, or a touch interface, or any of hundreds of other things that didn't exit on the market before Apple invented them.)
Steve Jobs has often been characterized as mean tempered, but I think that he is a kind person. All of the direct experiences I've had with him, he was vey kind. What other thing can it be than kindness that would drive someone to sacrifice nearly everything else in order to make a better experience for customers? The "missing" features on Apple products, especially in the 1.0 versions, are legion.
I think I'm feeling great pain right now, not because I'm an acolyte in the cult of mac, but because one of the few legitimate heroes of our age has died.
Steve Jobs was an unapologetic capitalist. He recognized that by making great products, he'd improve people's lives, and as a result, he'd improve his own.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. The prognosis is not good there, and so he knew he had limited time left. At that point he was a multi-millionaire if not already a billionaire.
How did he spend the last 8 years of his life? Enjoying himself? No. He drove himself and Apple to build the next generation of the personal computer. The iPad is as significant as the Apple II.
When he was a kid, Steve Jobs...
Make no mistake: he loved every minute of it.
I've left two very well paying positions (one at a very reputable design company that designed some of the early Apple & NeXT products) in the past year because I did look in the mirror and realized they were not right for me.
You have to follow your passion, back it up with action, and everything else will fall into place.
When I heard that commencement speech he gave, I just got the idea that he sincerely meant everything that he said. In a way that someone would when they were talking to you one on one. He had lived everything that he talked about.
And that speech is a big reason that I have made the leap into doing something on my own.
RIP Steve.
AEneid, iv. 604.
What need have I to fear--so soon to die? Let me work on, not watch and wait in dread: What will it matter, when that I am dead That they bore hate or love that near me lie? 'Tis but a lifetime, and the end is nigh At best or worst. Let me lift up my head And firmly, as with inner courage, tread Mine own appointed way on mandates high. Pain could but bring from all its evil store, The close of pain: hate's venom could but kill; Repulse, defeat, desertion, could no more, Let me have lived my life, not cowered until The unhindered and unchastened hour was here. So soon--what is there now for me to fear?
-- Edward Rowland Sill
The dots will connect one day. Even if others don't believe you, because you will die one day anyway.
It's inspirational and great.
I did just that, modifying the game to the point it was no longer playable. I had saved the file and effectively broke it. I shut off the computer, and never told my uncle.
The excitement of that moment stuck with me and was the enabler of the amazing life I've had since.
Thank you Steve Jobs. RIP.
As an inventor, he's the main name (though with significant help and industrial design by others) behind the iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone - all dominant leaders in their respective sectors.
It's curious that you'd put Larry Ellison's achievements above all of that.
I'd be willing to bet that the Amazon guy might end up on this list if current trends continue, as continued Amazon success might have the hollowing-out impact of Wal-Mart. And you missed the point I was trying to make. Jobs is different because he actually saw the product as more than a dollar sign. His "score" was lower because of this, but we're all applauding his decision tonight.
And I don't count the computer or consumer electronics field as the best source of inventors. The latter, in many ways, is noise. The true inventions of the former occurred outside our date window (transistor, IC, microprocessor, ...) To me, inventions like PCR, medical/biology/chemistry/computer syntheses or vaccines are better, more significant inventions.
Hell, Sony broke the ground with the Walkman. Roddenberry thought up the iPad in a way. But, again, Jobs had taste and he made sure (a) we knew that and (b) his products were intended to be more than revenue streams.
As a postscript, I suspect there's far, far more businesses sitting on piles of Oracle software than they'd like (but they're stuck and getting nailed for it).
His vision will be missed. He left an indelible mark on a generation of technology users, and then did it again.
- Inscription on Steve Jobs' star at the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame in Cambridge, Mass., unveiled on 9/16/2011: http://instagr.am/p/NPa4o/
Honestly, how many people care about how much is in their bank account after they die? Probably not very many.
Plenty chase riches while they're alive, however. And good old Steve was no exception.
Don't even get me started.
Jobs hadn't run out of ideas though.
I'll add that what's even better then giving away your money is not taking too much in the first place.
Steve Jobs was a multi-billionaire but, as Apple's stock laps the field, it bears noting that Steve's billions are a fraction of what others in similar positions are worth.
Steve Jobs is 110. It's really quite reasonable if you put it into context.
Maybe Bill Gates ran out of ideas how to help using computers, though.