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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.
Not to mention his appearances on 'Dancing With the Stars'
Oh wait, wrong Steve.
Never mind
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.
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?
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 assume they will back-date the award to the 90's.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sick of the ridiculous assertion that anybody who buys a mac is a hipster. I'm a CG artist. I've been raised around computers since my parents bought me and my brother a commodore 64c. I bought Windows 95 the day that it came out. I install Ubuntu every major release and have used Windows 7 RC and every Windows that has come before it. For the past 2 years, though, my primary machine has been a Mac. For me, it's not about the aesthetics, but about the practicality. It works faster, and better. I'm a lot more productive on it and I actually enjoy using it a lot more than both Linux or Windows. When I use Windows at work and have to change some obscure network preference, it takes me a few minutes to find the hidden window inside the obscure preference panel. When I need to do the same thing on Mac OS, I can usually find what I need in 30 seconds. That's practicality. Hipsters might be the face behind Apple fanaticism but most of the people who I've convinced to buy Macs weren't hipsters but regular non-computer people who want a nice, easy, clean operating system that doesn't get bogged down with the bullshit that Windows does. My girlfriend bought a macbook last year and I haven't had to help her with it at all, meanwhile my neighbor's Windows XP machine has been destroyed by spyware and malware to an almost unusable state. That's practicality. If all Apple had to offer was a pretty way to minimize Windows, nobody would be interested. Ubuntu has better eye candy than Mac OS at this point. It's got flashy cube desktop switchers and transparent windows and a bunch of other flashy shit that people love seeing on YouTube but then don't use because it's not practical.
I could even say the same thing about the iPhone. 3 years ago I only had a cell phone to make emergency calls and I rarely used it. Then the iPhone came out and I didn't want to join in on the hype so I bought a Palm Treo. The thing was absolute fucking garbage. It crashed 3 or 4 times a day and even after over 10 years of Palm OS being on the market, there wasn't a single application that I was interested in. The 3G came out and I decided to switch to iPhone. Now it's glued to my hand. It's changed the way I live my life. I need a restaurant nearby, I look to my iPhone. I want to look up something that we're talking about in everyday conversation, I check my iPhone. Yeah, other phones now have similar features, but Apple paved the way for it. Other smart phones focused on getting your e-mail to you wherever you are. Apple focused on getting the internet to you wherever you are. Now people constantly ask me to check my iPhone for some information. That's practicality. I don't give a shit that it looks pretty. It's a plus, but again, if all Apple could do was make a nice looking phone then they'd be out of business. No, they made a phone that's useful and that's why they've taken up half of the cell phone market-share. It's not just hipsters buying them.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.