I referenced this piece about Steve Jobs several weeks ago. With the news of his death, it seems appropriate to link to it again:
Jobs gave people products they didn't know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.
I didn't know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn't know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn't know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.
Along the way, he changed the way we think about the corporate world -- he made business cool again:
In the 1980s, entrepreneurs became heroes, celebrities and role models. The Apple whiz kids, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were the new face of business.
Money was, of course, part of the appeal -- millionaires in their 20s! -- but there was much more to it than that. The aspirations for pleasure and self-expression that the sociologist Daniel Bell had condemned as the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” turned out to be its fuel.
“It's a neat way to play,” said Dave House, who was the manager of Intel Corp. (INTC)'s microprocessor division in 1982 when he posed for a magazine in a hot tub with his girlfriend, apparently naked. House wasn't talking about his hot-tub frolics. He was explaining why he kept working once he had more money than he knew what to do with.
The reaction to his death has seemed a little over the top, though. The outpouring of "grief" from people who never even met him is reminiscent of the empty gushing after Princes Diana's death. Founding partner Wozniak had this bit of hyperbole:
It felt a lot like you just heard that, you know, John Lennon got shot, or JFK, or Martin Luther King."
Whew. Comparing anybody's death from natural causes to the assassinations of Kennedy and King is just a tad over the top. As for Lennon, I agree with Charley Butcher, who said on WOWO this morning that Lennon may have made some nice music, but Jobs changed the way we experience music. And a few other things.
