[tcseacliff]

sorry for the loss of jobs. he raised the bar for all to become better. he got everyone thinking out of the box. now, what would have been really cool, if he used his voice for the siri app! wow!
that is gonna be so "skynet". wait until you want to call home and your phone say's," I can't let you do that,Dave", and lock your car doors, and takes control of your car!

[mmcpher]

I don't think Steve Jobs is most accurately appreciated as an inventor, in the Edisonian sense (despite recent comparisons), or even, within the business realm, as a market maker. What he stood for was instead someone with an Olympian sense of the importance of aesthetics and on more profound than skin-deep sense. Jobs could devine the value of the devices he helped develop, not just in the utilitarian sense of how they could empower and ennoble individual effort, thought and expression, but how the things people made and experienced on his devices, reflected some core individual character, worthy of celebration.

He was a designer without peer and the world was fortunate that he had other gifts than that, in that he could recognize talent and genius in others and direct and inspire those things toward coherent and ultimately satisfying ends, so that he was able to bind state-of-the art technology and craftsmenship with an artisan's eye for beauty.

He probably is over-credited for his role in advancing UI and digital architecture. It seems a falacy to me, to suggest those back at Xerox PARC didn't forsee the ways in which their early drafts might be put to better use. I was one of those who first groped their way online during the latter Eighties when most of the world wide web seemed, even to untrained eyes without any frame of reference, to be needlessly and offputtingly ugly, and Jobs as much as anyone changed all that forever and for the better.

There were times when Jobs' masterly keen eye for sales and marketing overtook even his own deeper principles, when color and chrome crowded out truer values in Apple products but he reconciled these things as he fashioned this latter iteration of Apple. One of the things I most admired about Jobs was that his passion and mania for fully intergrated aesthetics seemed to emerge from his recognition that his products would be best judged by the content they enabled people to create and enjoy. Even inert Apple products, still encased behind display glass and cocooned inside shrinkrap, cry out for free and individual expression.

One of the most grating (although devastatingly effective marketing campaigns) was the way Appled sold so many Ipods behind those ads featuring white-eyed, walled-off and twitching zombies, tethered by those white-wired earbuds. It didn't matter what you were listening to, so long as you looked Apple-good doing it. But that was just another unrivaled demonstration of Jobs' midas marketing touch.

He learned some hard lessons (particularly so in someone with so strong a sense of self) in the world of hardcore business. When he returned to Apple sharp business practices became one more notch on his belt. But I wonder if his fantastic business legacy, as measured by the net worth of the company he leaves behind, was anywhere near as gratifying to him as his other achievements?

The analogy I always return to is to Walt Disney. Starting out in an even more solitary fashion than Jobs, creating an enduring enterprise from a sketchpad and finally presiding over a company that no one could have forseen, because it hadn't ever happened before him. Disney is not primarily remembered as a superior artist or storyteller, but as a passionate visionary who saw far down the road before anyone else, bringing to bear mult-disciplinary talents and engrafting and investing his company with his personal imprint. Disney soldiers on, five decades after Walt's passing, but it is not and never was, the same after Walt. I have a pdf on my office wall of a Disney Organizational Chart from Walt's mid-career as a business titan, and its like a dartboard with all lines running to and through the center where Walt presided. Whatever modern corporate sophistication Apple ran on, at some point there was the man in the bullseye. This has always been implicit in every marketing campaign and I distrust anyone who deems to know just how deep this loss will run.

Apple has ammassed so many assets and vast goodwill, that it will thrive in the near future almost regardless of who takes up the reigns. But its not going to be as easy as saying "This is what Steve wanted" or what he would have liked. Jobs and Apple cultivated a cult of personality and impenetrable mystery around Jobs. A big part of the fun in following Apple was the only way to really know was to wait and to watch Steve Jobs on a large, spartan stage, in front of a large blank screen, crackling with possibility, awaiting magic. That doesn't grow on trees. R.I.P.

[Shao128]

http://forums.crackberry.com/apple-i...passed-657461/
http://forums.crackberry.com/news-ru...passes-657459/