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Steve Jobs Crowned "Person of the Decade"
longacre writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs won over 30% of the vote in an online poll published by personal finance and investing news site SmartMoney.com, enough to earn their 'Person of the Decade' title by a solid margin over luminaries such as Warren Buffett (17%), Ben Bernanke (13%) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (12%). From the article: 'Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple in the late 1990s: Not only did he revive sales at the failing computer company, he led the stock to a more than 700% increase in value, and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.'"
I can't name anyone else who could have had more of an impact on the world than these two assholes.
Steve Jobs introduced some nice toys, but that's nothing compared to the impact of dismantling the American way or life.
Say what you want about the rampant fanboyism, the DRM, and the culture of "idea X is dumb and there's no reason for us to support it HEY CHECK OUT OUR NEW FEATURE WE CALL IT iX AND IT IS TOTALLY AWESOME AND UNIQUE BECAUSE IT'S WHITE!" that permeates apple, but there are probably very few of us that wouldn't want to take a time machine back to Dec 2000 and buy a few thousand shares of APPL at $7.50.
(Of course, you could always just get hired by Apple and back date your stock option.....i keed i keed....)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
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Did you miss the part that this was from a website about investing?
Not to mention his appearances on 'Dancing With the Stars'
Oh wait, wrong Steve.
Never mind
Yeah, that bothers me too, Jobs is a classic narcissist, and stock price shouldn't be the measure of a person's worth.
Here he is.
Steve Jobs is the farmer and the current generation of fancy-clothed-hip-young-lifestyle people are his sheep.
i SERIOUSLY do not get what is so great about Apple products. All they do is take a pre-existing product, add gloss and make it look nice and the sheep come pouring in. What a stupid time we live in, Idiocracy is not far away.
BTW I'm not a M$ fan-boy, but I would take aMicrosoft product (or Linux) over Apple any day. Practicality over aesthetics I say.
The calendar has no year zero.. So first decade is year 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.. Second is 11 thru 20.. i.e. This current decade is 2001 thru 2010. The media makes the same mistake as they did with saying 2000 was the new millennium and then in 2001 go "whoops". That is what he/she is talking about!
Didn't the last decade contain Google's entire rise to dominance? The "start page to the internet" and all that? How exactly does Apple's crappy e-store compare with that achievement, exactly? One has to think that the results of the poll are about flash rather than true impact.
at the FreeBSD foundation and those among us that helped improve OS X's source via the OpenDarwin project. (And then Steve Jobs gets credit? Not in my book...)
Too dang bad Apple had to put it (the OpenDarwin project) down. As if over 90% of the kernel didn't come from the open source community...
Those guys/gals who did all that code and testing are the ones who really deserve to take a bow...
Oh, yeah, congrats Mr. Jobs.
Good job giving no credit to the grunts toiling for your profit margin...
Sorry to be a pessimist...
Just a thought, though...
--Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
Is a man a good father, good husband? Is he a positive influence on the people around him in his life? Is he happy and fulfilled? Who cares, as long as the stock options go up.
So you think we should nose into these peoples' personal lives as part of the evaluation process? I have a couple different questions to ask here. Since when did we ever care? How can we care? There's been bouts of faux morality over the millennia, but the bottom line is that collectively we don't care and most of us would hate it if the rest of world evaluated us on this criteria. Then there's matter of whether we're capable of making any such judgment. There are untold numbers of people who have improved my life. I only know a few thousand or so of them. I don't have the mental capabilities or knowledge to evaluate most of their lives.
Further, I don't see the reason why this stuff should matter. There are many ways that a person can succeed in life. Why should we expect someone to succeed in all of them?
Well I'll be damned. In any case, I blame the media for my stupidity :-D
And I think my comment was the cause for your down-moderation. My bad!
Jobs is far from being man of the decade, but if this poll is evidence of anything, it's that Jobs is a marketing guru.
So, out of a bunch of people who have done bugger all other than accumulate wealth, Jobs won.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched. I mean, Napster was up and running since around 1999 and, way before that, IRC was swarming with channels dedicated to transferring MP3 albums through DCC file transfers. The mIRC world was packed with scripts to automatically handle that stuff. Before that there was already a pretty extensive sneakernet dedicated to exchange music files through CD-Rs packed with MP3. Heck, back in 1994 I knew a group of people who were ripping CDs to WAV files and lending hard drives with that stuff (they were idiots but to each it's own). So, how exactly can a corporation "forever change the way people listen to music" if everyone was already doing exactly that for years before the company released a product?
Apple deserves credit in exploring the "pay to download music files" market, particularly by convincing record companies to authorize a new business model to sell their product. Yet, they didn't changed any habits. They realized that there was an extensive and overwhelming demand for downloading music (there was a heck of a lot of people doing that) and they invested in an attempt to capitalize from that demand. They succeeded at that. But changing the way people listen to music? No, they didn't. They were successful in riding the wave but I'm sorry to tell you, they didn't changed any habits.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I'm not really setting out to endorse him, but he is the only "luminary" in business right now one could consider that actually gave people actual products and didn't just find ways to push money around. To actually produce and still be a financial success is worth something, even if your contribution is just giving out music players to tweens. Far more than can be said for finance guys who gave out risky loans so they could buy new cars did for anyone, who the readers in this magazine no doubt also idolize.
INCORRECT! Year zero doesn't even enter into the question, because as we all know the current epoch started with the year 1970. Thus, decades in our epoch end with zeros.
Obama won a peace prize.
I assume they will back-date the award to the 90's.
You are forgetting the iMac, which was the product that changed everything at Apple.
They tend to skew towards the young, tech savvy, and vocal. I'm sure many slashdotters have voted in polls on sites that they didn't frequent because someone told them it was a good idea, and we all know how vocal Apple Fanboys are.
That aside, Jobs was very important this decade. He helped bring about a credible threat to the Windows OS (causing Microsoft to make many positive changes), he helped to reform the music industry, bringing the aging RIAA and record companies to their knees, and he has shown the direction that telcos must move in as far as mobile computing by causing AT&T's 3G network to buckle. He was very influential, especially in the field of computing, and more deserving than most.
Now, personally I would have said that GW Bush was the most influential person of the decade. He was the most powerful man in the world for 8 (technically 7, whatever) years. He made an enormous power grab for the executive branch, changed how the country views terrorism (be scared, very scared), and brought several countries into two wars, one of which is hopefully mostly over, and the other with no end in sight. Also, under his watch, the worldwide economy took an enormous tumble due to his lax policies, with considerable help from previous presidents, especially Clinton and Reagan. To me, his influence was far greater than anything Jobs has done.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
The "last decade" is synonymous with "since the late 90s".
There was no Year 0 so the indices start from 1 in this case. The second millennium ended at the end of 2000 and this decade will end at the end of 2010.
Yes and no. This decade, the first of this millennium, ends at the end of 2010. But this decade, the naughties, does however end in a matter of days. They're not mutually exclusive, various decennia can co-exist.
And there are very few of us who wouldn't want to take a time machine back to 2003 and buy a few thousand shares of GOOG.
I'd rather go to 1890 and get me a couple of shares of GOGH.
Vincent van, that is.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The summary was written in the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
Remember people, Apple is a follower just like every big corporation. In the MP3 player's case, they waited for the industry to grow 'big enough' then sold a unique-enough player with total subservience to the media conglomerates and backed it up with extreme amounts of advertising.
Could any other company do the same? Probably not. One main reason being Jobs' participation in device design. The other being an advertising budget that no rival would ever commit. That doesn't justify the overblown reference to the ipod.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
My view of Bernake, summed up in one word ...
Treason
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Look, I would have voted for Google myself as having greater impact, part of the problem is that the impact is not as widely noticed or has been forgotten since we are all used to how things are. But I think you are a little bit guilty of that with Apple as well.
If nothing else, Apple single-handedly made the entire music industry give up DRM, ironically (well not really ironically since it's an inevitable side effect of the technology) by using DRM to place Apple between customers and music labels in a way the labels could not control. We all just take DRM free music for granted but we'd not have that generally available yet without Apple, because the market would have remain too fragmented to force the need for DRM free music to get around Apple.
You may call it a "crappy store" but it was the first time selling music online ever went anywhere, and to date is far larger than any other online music presence and even most real world stores. I'm not sure how you can dismiss that out of hand as irrelevant.
And then of course they actually made smartphones a generally desirable product instead of a niche with corporate and technical users.
So in at least two areas they greatly expanded the whole range of the market, not just their own marketshare. That is why they deserve to be in the top list, even if you can quibble about who is really at THE top.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, that bothers me too, Jobs is a classic narcissist, and stock price shouldn't be the measure of a person's worth.
Yeah! You have to factor in how many shares they've got, too!
Bow-ties are cool.
They typically are pretty skewed towards young people. Young people are much more likely to be out of touch with current events and much more in touch with technology. Now I'm not going to bash Jobs by any means! He has started the downfall of Windows or at least has taken a nice bite out of M$'s market share. He has changed the music industry for the better--think iTunes where you can almost get a song for what it's worth for once! He has produced the most popular, most advanced phone on the planet. He has made so many simple "why didn't I think of that?" products that still have not been paralleled even by copying. Every Apple product is distinctly an Apple product!
I personally would have said that Bush was the most influential person of the decade. He was the most powerful man in the world for eight years. He made an enormous power grab for the executive branch, changed how the country views terrorism (be scared, very scared), and brought several countries into two wars, one of which is hopefully mostly over, and the other with no end in sight. Also, under his watch, the worldwide economy took an enormous tumble due to his lax policies, with considerable help from previous presidents, especially Clinton and Reagan. To me, his influence was far greater than anything Jobs has done.
I listen to mobile music from a walkman (Sony) to a minidisc(sony) to a CD(philips) that eventually could play MP3(Fraunhoffer) and then my first HD MP3 player (Creative) then expanding to OGG/FLAC capable players (iRiver) and finally settling on my current one (Cowon).
And I bought my music first on tape, then LP then CD then Mini-Disc and then got it via Usenet and then Napster and now via Torrents.
Where is Apples involvement? Now I would disguss further, but the RIAA wants a word with me.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, it was the first time in US history that was ever done.
Further, he paid for those two wars using borrowed money, and using "emergency appropriations" instead of putting the wars in the budget, so that it would seem like the budget deficit wasn't as bad as it really was.
By the way, those two wars, over 6 years, cost more than the Health Care Reform legislation will cost over the next ten years.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He took the country into two wars while simultaneously lowering taxes.
Forgetting that one war was foisted on him, how does that actually break the economy. Are you saying that running a federal deficit is bad for the economy? Government spending is supposed to be stimulative, isn't it?
If the deficit is so terrible, and I agree that its bad, then, isn't Mr. Obama three times worse the President Bush was, just from the sheer weight of debt?
This is my sig.
There was no Year 0 so the indices start from 1 in this case.
I'm always amazed how on a forum brimming with computer scientists, there's always an ample supply of pedants willing to insist that whatever calendar Gregory XIII pulled out of his ass in 1582 by papal fiat is somehow intrinsically less arbitrary than demarcating decades by years that end in zero.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
There is a difference between a) improving infrastructure, providing support for people so that they don't go into foreclosure/bankruptcy (costing *more* money), and other things that can facilitate growth and b) blowing up an entire country and then paying to rebuild it. One of these involves spending money to make money. The other involves throwing your money into a fire.
You're simplifying matters... Drastically.
For example, without the release of the iMac in 1998, apple surely wouldn't have survived long enough to release an iPod.
Without OS X (admittedly in development before SJ's return) it probably wouldn't have got there either.
Without the revamp of apple's laptop line in general to make them into arguably the best laptops money can buy did a good amount too.
Without the iPod, it probably wouldn't be in the enormously successful state it's in now.
Without the iPhone, it probably wouldn't be looking too rosy right now either – iPod sales are slipping now.
Essentially what I'm saying is – there's significant vision and management going on here. It's not *one* hit product that someone got lucky on, it's a history, since he came back of *every* part of the company improving what it's doing, and becoming generally more appealing.
No, nobody made you say it. You wanted to say it, and it's meaningless bullshit.
There are lots of companies with designers, but please explain the worthless crap so many of them put out. The ultimate authority is Steve. Designers make a design, Steve throws it against the wall and tells them to do it again, only this time with no buttons. Programmers put things together, and if Steve doesn't like it, they do it again.
He then approves the ads, which have also won many awards and have sold a lot of stuff. He gives fantastic keynotes, and everyone has heard of the Distortion Field.
Look, like Apple or not -- I'm guessing you don't -- but give the man his props. It was close to bankruptcy. It now is one of the great American corporate stories. Design is at the center of it.
Oh, and his best choice of all was making OS X run on Intel, the most dominant chip in the market. Apple, and Jobs, had resisted that for years, but he recognized finally that he was wrong, and then the company produced a very graceful transition to the Intel world. It's when you could run Linux and Windows on Macs as well as OS X that the computers really took off.
I'm writing this on a 27" iMac quad. Fantastic.