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How Steve Jobs' Legacy Has Changed
On the anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, reader SternisheFan sends in a story from CNN about how the Apple co-founder's legacy has changed since then.
"... in the 12 months since, as high-profile books have probed Jobs' life and career, that reputation has evolved somewhat. Nobody has questioned Jobs' seismic impact on computing and our communication culture. But as writers have documented Jobs' often callous, controlling personality, a fuller portrait of the mercurial Apple CEO has emerged. 'Everyone knows that Steve had his "rough" side. That's partially because he really did have a rough side and partially because the rough Steve was a better news story than the human Steve,' said Ken Segall, author of Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success.' ... In Steve Jobs, Isaacson crafted a compelling narrative of how Jobs' co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak, got pushed out of the struggling company a decade later and then returned in the late 1990s to begin one of the most triumphant second acts in the annals of American business. But he also spent many pages chronicling the arrogant, cruel behavior of a complicated figure who could inspire people one minute and demean them the next. According to the book, Jobs would often berate employees whose work he didn't like. He was notoriously difficult to please and viewed people and products in black and white terms. They were either brilliant or 'sh-t.' 'Among Apple employees, I'd say his reputation hasn't changed one bit. If anything, it's probably grown because they've realized how central his contributions were,' Lashinsky said. 'History tends to forgive people's foibles and recognize their accomplishments. When Jobs died, he was compared to Edison and Henry Ford and to Disney. I don't know what his place will be in history 30, 40, 50 years from now. And one year is certainly not enough time (to judge).'"
Apple has posted a tribute video on their homepage today.
And this insignificant choade is still clogging up my newsfeed.
What did he really do, other than be a CEO?
I'd much rather hear about Woz and his technical brilliance as it is what Apple was really marketing in the early days.
Damned right.
Growing up, I never met a single person with an Apple computer in the UK. Even in the US, the Apple II seemed to have occupied the same niche as Britain's BBC Micro - a "respectable" computer for the slightly-to-very wealthy, and agencies like schools answerable to the political elite.
The men who actually worked to get computers into the hands of the masses are people like Tramiel, Bushnell, and Sinclair. The computers that built the revolution were the Commodore 64, Atari X[LE], the Sinclair Spectrum, et al. Those were the machines you'd find if you skydived into a random neighborhood and broke into the first house you saw. Those were the computers we used.
I'm not dissing Jobs here but I think Apple's contribution to the revolution is severely overrated. With the PET coming out within a month of the Apple II, it's obvious there was a drive in the late seventies from multiple corners to create this market. But it's also obvious that without Apple, the revolution would have happened anyway. Without Tramiel, and the console-home computer war, I think it's unlikely the home computer would have made it into enough homes to shift it from an expensive gimmick, into a part of everyone's lives.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He said introduce, and that's what he meant. The iMac was the first computer with a USB port as standard. USB was already around as a plug in card, and because of that was rarely used, and that meant there were few USB peripherals. Apple making USB the standard port on iMacs is what encouraged manufacturers to make peripherals, and made USB a success.
Had Apple not done it, another PC manufacturer might have. But they wouldn't have done the other necessary step of removing the legacy ports.