[Luis Dias]

Jobs was a masterful marketer who convinced the media and public that his products were of a much higher quality and level of innovation than they actually were. He is one of many people that a secular cult developed around fueled by sycophantic tendencies of the media, who want nothing more than to extoll the supreme virtues of a goddamn salesman.

I won't negate any of this. I personally have quit the urge to deconvert people from their religious beliefs, such as the one espoused here against all evidence and facts. You simply do not understand Apple and why their products are good and innovative, because in your mind "innovation" = "specs". This is all too common amongst people that work in programming, must be a cultural thing.

While I know little of him personally, I am quite capable of noticing how the image of him was warped and distorted into something that scarcely resembled the reality of him or his company.

Ok, gimme one example of such.

As such, while I am sad for his death as I am sad for any man's death, I think it's a good idea to burst the bubble of everyone who wants to use his death to turn the hero worship of him up to eleven. Because I despise the industry of false hero-making, and it would be to the benefit of everyone if that industry were discredited so only actual, deserving individuals should get such praise. So I agree with Bobboau in that he attempted to do this. I did not condone the particular language he used.

What he did is immature and idiotic. We can all do what he did, the question is if we are still 4 year olds with such urges or not. Jobs was quite a different CEO from mostly everyone else (look at HP's last CEO for comparison, or Elop, or Google's ridiculous CEO for years, etc.), and he took a company that was in shambles in 97 and turned it into the most valued company in the world, by innovating and pushing the industry forward with their computer designs (were it not for apple we would still be using beige boxes and dull monitors), their ipods, the iPhone and the ipad.

Is this an "altruistic" company? FFS. It's a corporation. Let's get some proportion here. Just because Apple has been doing an amazing job the last ten years, does that mean we should expect them to embrace linux and open source for everyone, etc.?

Happy? Of course not, because I'm not allowed to state an opinion as long as you consider it to be ignorant bashing.

I'm not happy, and I don't ****ing have a clue on how you got the idea that you "aren't" allowed to state your opinion, when you just did and legitimately so. Don't whine me at how your "free speech" is being oppressed when it's ****ing clear it isn't. What you cannot do is force me to agree with you and accept that some comments here are anything more than childish.

[The E]

As I am typing this on my phone, browsing the net while laying in the bathtub, I can't help but feel grateful for the work Jobs did. Sure, he didn't personally invent the idea of the smartphone, or the graphical user interface, but he was the catalyst that turned these things into products for the mass market. He was, together with Bill Gates, responsible for shaping the current hi-tech market.

I don't want to say that all of the stuff that came out of this development are positive. But just like not all consequences of turning the automobile into a mass-market product have been positive, those consequences that are should not be underestimated. For me, Jobs is in the same category as Henry Ford and other industrial pioneers. Not entirely because of what he did, but also due to the way he shaped, or helped to shape, the world we live in.

[Raiden]

You got a way with words, The E. You summed it up nicely for me.

[karajorma]

Until you remember that Ford was a Nazi.

[The E]

...

Yes, he was. That doesn't lessen the impact of his innovations. Also, what is it about the internet that brings out the nitpickers?

[swashmebuckle]

There's plenty of time for honest evaluation of the guy's career and choices;

These opinions were never exactly secrets. They were expressed while the man was alive. Attempts to censor them out of "respect for the dead" are at best misguided.

It is more important to speak the truth of a man after he is dead, so that his legacy may be properly understood.

My mistake for using the word time--I meant to say that even if you believe that the end of Jobs' direct influence on the world is a good thing, partying is not a constructive way to communicate your opinion of his legacy.  I wasn't trying to suggest that anyone censor their feelings on his career, just saying that celebrating his death doesn't accomplish anything besides making the poster sound really awful, particularly when it's immediately after the fact.

[Pred the Penguin]

Some people, I think, are forgetting Steve Jobs' past contributions...

[Mr. Vega]

We are not celebrating. That's rediculous. Steve Job was a brilliant marketer for a company that builds products that are often inferior and no more innovative to their competition but sold much better because of such marketing, and has its share of borrowings and other unethical buisness practices just as Microsoft does. Much of the worship he recieved, both before and now after his death, is based upon the image of him as an inventor of genius. I'm within my rights to burst that bubble. He had a hand in many wonderful developments, such as the creation of Pixar- of that I have no doubt. But treating him like he's the modern day Edison Tesla is just rediculous, which is what's happening right now.

Here's a fun little article by Orson Scott Card from 2005, deconstructing Apple's image through the years:

I don't know about you, but I'm about fed up with all the free -- and ridiculous -- advertising and publicity Apple Computers gets. If they decided to bottle air and sell it, calling it, no doubt, "PowerAir" or "AirMac" or "AirPod," they'd claim that they had invented air. Then all the articles about the new MacAir would treat that claim as if it were true and suddenly start treating other air-packagers as mere imitators, playing "catch-up" with Apple.

I remember years ago, when Apple came out with their PowerBook notebook computer. I was at a meeting with an extraordinarily dumb young movie producer who kept going on and on about all the cool things his PowerBook could do. "It can sign on the internet and get email! I can carry it with me on planes and it runs on batteries!"

Finally I got fed up and just showed him my Toshiba laptop. "I can do all those things, and this computer cost me a thousand dollars less than yours."

It was a cruel thing to do, I thought, to take the wind out of his sails like that. But no, I had forgotten: He was an Apple user! He gave me a withering look and said, "Yes, but mine is an Apple."

Well, yes, but he said it as if that were a good thing.

Think about it. All the rigid, corporate-determined uniformity and buy-it-from-us-or-drop-dead attitude of Microsoft, but you have to buy your hardware from them, too. I watch Apple users attempt to manipulate their clunky operating system -- click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, just to get where I can go with a single action on my keyboard -- and I hear them raving on and on about what wonderful things Apple is finally deigning to make available to them, but which PC users have had for years, and it all makes me vaguely sad.

"Windows crashes all the time," they say with a smirk. Then, when they're talking among themselves and they don't think you're listening, they reveal the evil truth: Macs crash too. And Mac software has bugs and flaws and security gaps and stupidity built in, just like Windows.

What Macs don't have is any competition. Once you've bought into the hype and forked over your money, they've got you and you can't get free without completely replacing everything.

The same thing has happened now with the iPod. I had been using wonderful MP3 players for years. My Rio Riot held twenty gigs of music. My little Panasonic E-Wear, and later my Rio Cali, let me take incredible amounts of music with me when I exercised or took long flights.

Then the iPod comes out and it doesn't do anything that I needed and didn't already have. Not only that, but it was deeply ugly, a plain ivory-colored box with pathetic controls that looked like it should hold generic earswabs. Compared to my Rio Riot, it was a piece of junk and looked like a piece of junk.

And now it seems to have taken over the world. Everything is geared toward iPods. I still have MP3 players with more capacity and better interface than the iPod, and people talk and write as if the iPod had invented the whole class of machine, and all the others were just imitations.

Even the current PC World magazine has been suckered into this Apple mystique. They had a "brave and daring" front-of-book essay about how PC makers ought to learn to do things more like Apple. And do you know what it came down to? The colors and shape of the cheap plastic they wrap their products in.

Yeah, that's right. They make the ugliest, silliest, most embarrassing-looking cheap plastic products in the industry, charge half again as much as you'd pay for a cleanly designed, functional looking product, and they are given credit for design!

I know what will happen, of course. A lot of smug Apple owners will write me taunting letters about how Windows crashes all the time. Old news, kiddies. My XP doesn't crash at all. And I have about a hundred times as much software to choose from, and can customize my own machine (despite the best efforts of Microsoft) a thousand times more than you can, and I'm paying less for it, and it looks like I actually intend to do serious work with it.

As for your iPod, I just have to shake my head and laugh. There are much better -- and better-looking -- products out there, and I already own some of them. But you go on believing that yours is the best in the world. That's what Apple depends on. You'll get into the harness, they'll put the blinders on you, and you'll think you're pulling the queen's carriage instead of the old farm wagon you're dragging along.

Also, I'm not a programmer. Don't claim the high-horse when you're trying to strawman me.

[Bobboau]

The man wasn't a war criminal or a terrorist.

so, I see you don't work in the IT industry.

[karajorma]

But treating him like he's a modern day Tesla or Edison is just rediculous, which is what's happening right now.

 

The fact that he's a modern day Edison seems to be exactly the problem you have with him.

Yes, he was. That doesn't lessen the impact of his innovations. Also, what is it about the internet that brings out the nitpickers?

There's a difference between a nitpick and a joke.

[deathfun]

I applied to Apple not too long ago but they said there were no Jobs left
And yes, I actually did apply

[Mr. Vega]

But treating him like he's a modern day Tesla or Edison is just rediculous, which is what's happening right now.

 

The fact that he's a modern day Edison seems to be exactly the problem you have with him.

Yes, he was. That doesn't lessen the impact of his innovations. Also, what is it about the internet that brings out the nitpickers?

There's a difference between a nitpick and a joke.

Damn, I at least thought he invented the light bulb.

Well, at least Tesla was awesome.

[Ghostavo]

Stallman, also known for being attacked by ninjas and wielding katanas, writes:

06 October 2011 (Steve Jobs)

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

[Nuke]

But treating him like he's a modern day Tesla or Edison is just rediculous, which is what's happening right now.

 

The fact that he's a modern day Edison seems to be exactly the problem you have with him.

edison was a douchebag. patenting the inventions of others (like tesla) in his name. its sad that they give the guy so much credit

[Polpolion]

I applied to Apple not too long ago but they said there were no Jobs left
And yes, I actually did apply

[Luis Dias]

Steve Job was a brilliant marketer for a company that builds products that are often inferior and no more innovative to their competition but sold much better because of such marketing, and has its share of borrowings and other unethical buisness practices just as Microsoft does. Much of the worship he recieved, both before and now after his death, is based upon the image of him as an inventor of genius. I'm within my rights to burst that bubble. He had a hand in many wonderful developments, such as the creation of Pixar- of that I have no doubt. But treating him like he's the modern day Edison Tesla is just rediculous, which is what's happening right now.

Here's a fun little article by Orson Scott Card from 2005, deconstructing Apple's image through the years

Orson's article is ridiculous in hindsight. The ipod is ugly now? Where is the competition to the ipod touch? So ****ing ugly innit?

You have the faith to believe that apple's great advantage towards all the other companies was "marketing", that people are generally stupid and that's the only reason why this company has so many buyers - coz they're stupid.

This failure of "punditry" for all these years is impressive and it's even more impressive that so many people ate it for so long, despite the obvious evidences all around us. I've known these "pundits" for too long, always crying foul at apple and telling us how their doom was just around the corner, once the "public" got some senses. Well, they never did, did they? All the public is stupid and that's why they love Apple.

The alternative is just too obvious to be true, innit?

[Bobboau]

ok, would you kindly tell us what exactly you think were a few of apples better 'innovations' ?

[Pred the Penguin]

The mouse?

[Bobboau]

oh, you mean the thing that they got from Xerox?

[Ghostavo]

Just for hilarious reference.