"What it means to serve humanity."...? I would have chosen other words to remember him by. He did little to serve humanity. Building products and a business isn't serving humanity and the greater good...
Are you kidding right? Apple would never turned into a greedy fashionable brand under his leadership.
The average person in developed countries has comforts that kings of old dreamed of.
What should have done then? How do you serve humanity?
Steve looked at things very differently from the typical person. He saw details that no one else did. He was able to drive the creation of devices and software that allowed people to communicate, create, and collaborate like very few others have before. Apple's design philosophies - driven by Steve Jobs and his eye for detail - have trickled into products from other companies, into print media, into home product design, and countless other things.
Hundreds of thousands of careers and companies were launched on the basis of what Steve did, whether it was Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or whatever. He was poised to take over Disney prior to his death. That company controls an enormous swath of the cultural landscape and was perfectly suited for a person with his mind and his eye. What do you think he would have done there?
I very rarely do this in debate, but in this instance I have to simply state: you're wrong. Its not an insult, and its not intended as an ad hominem. Please consider what those "products and a business" have provided: billions of dollars in wealth for common people as well as corporate, products that help us define ourselves and push our lives forward, and tools that augment creativity while boosting productivity.
As a side note: the Watch is actually a Steve Jobs product, but it was for a completely different purpose
Indeed. Jobs was likely a sociopath with narcissistic tendencies who pointed fingers at his associates and insulted their work and themselves personally but whose Reality Distortion Field never allowed him to accept the blame when things went South.
The story of how he cheated the Woz out the bonus for a game Woz designed for Atari - which Wozniak wouldn't learn about until the story was told in print years later - speaks volumes about the sort of man Jobs really was.
The way he and Bill Gates tried to take credit for inventing the Desktop Paradigm is another indication.
Jobs had seen the Xerox Alto in 1979 and the direction of the Lisa's early design was absolutely based on the Alto. We can dismiss Gates' claim altogether: In 1979, Gates and Microsoft were unknowns with only a Basic for the MITS Altair and a version of Unix called Xenix under their belts and would never have gotten an invitation to Xerox, nor does anyone who worked at the Parc facility remember ever seeing Gates anywhere near their offices. Gates' claim was an indication of his own narcissism.
The part of the story Steve always neglected to mention was visiting the El Segundo facility in 1980 and seeing what would become the Xerox 8010: The Xerox "Star" Office System. Every aspect of what would come to be known as the Desktop Paradigm was developed for the 8010 at El Segundo and the direction of the Lisa changed to follow suit. Yet, Jobs and Apple always insisted the Desktop Paradigm was innovated by Apple. True, Xerox deserves part of the blame for never properly honoring and recognizing the work and ideas that the men and women of the Xerox Parc and El Segundo facilities produced but Jobs (and Gates) took credit for technical innovation neither men deserved.
Jobs should be remembered for inspiring others to produce great products and insisting on a tasteful and artistic approach even if part of that inspiration process was via threats and intimidation. He brought Apple back to life - give him credit where credit is due but leave the syrupy praise out of it.
SameTime flies... 7 years already!
I remember reading the news on the very device he introduced to the market.
I miss him especially during Apple keynotes, they were way more interesting to follow when he was on stage.
Apple products very rarely allow people to do those things which they couldn't otherwise do. What Apple products do is allow people to do those things with a bit less frustration from the user interface. Which is good for me (I spend a fortune on Apple products because I like that less frustrating user interface), but I don't think it's really serving humanity in a meaningful way is it. How does a £1,000 iPhone server humanity? By being nicer to use than a £100 Android phone? Hmm.
Are you kidding right? Apple would never turned into a greedy fashionable brand under his leadership.
he would rather be shocked by $ rat race and sh*tty company Apple become towards customers. Not everyone judge company success purely by its value for the shareholders.I'm sure he would be proud to see the Apple of 2018.
Its easy to judge that, standing here at the (current) end of history. Take a look at the original iPhone keynote introduction and check out the reactions from the crowd. People went nuts over Visual Voicemail. Today thats nothing, but back then it was cause for people to stand up and cheer.
The overall effect of the phone was that it freed people from their desktops and offices and enabled mobile computing in a way that laptops hadn't achieved, despite being superior devices at the time. Productivity took a leap, and the effects of that are still being felt, still reinforcing other leaps in productivity. It all builds on previous work. You don't understand the dividends that are being paid out here.
I would also like to point you to couple of things in Isaacson's biography. Just two things.
First is the story of Steve bringing the first Macintosh to a party, where he encountered the hosts' young son. He spent the entire party with that child, giving him pointers on using the computer. He was enthralled by how quickly the boy had embraced the machine, and how quickly he had started creating by using the tools there. I am not certain since its been a while since I read the story, but I believe it was Sean Lennon.
The second is just a simple pic. You can see Steve with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, as Steve puts an iPhone through its paces. They're standing next to each other like a couple of besties, this alleged sociopath with narcissistic tendencies, and a powerful leader from the opposite side of the globe. Everything else in Medvedev's life seems to have melted away as he played with this wonderful device. For those few minutes, he was just like everyone else, affected by this brilliant thing that transcended politics and culture. The look on his face was priceless.
Obviously, every device ends up getting corrupted in its use case, and the iPhone was no exception. But people are building on that device, and on other things introduced to the world by Steve Jobs, and those devices are paying dividends for the foreseeable future. Since more and more is being done on these phones, their capabilities have grown, power has increased, and prices have risen. What about the day when everything is on the Watch, for instance, and one of them costs $1500 - but you won't have to have a desktop or even a phone. Will that bother you? Or will you accept the dividend and move on?
Not to sound completely cynical, but Cook celebrates Jobs' high-profile persona that's very valuable for Apple, the guy behind the myth is forgettable at best.Well, Steve was a great thinker and entrepreneur but I don’t think he was the humanitarian that Tim Cook is describing him.
You are certainly optimistic regarding how long Apple will be around, at least as primarily being a computer company. Technically all the iOS gadgets are computers, but Apple is still generically categorized by the namesake of this forum - the Mac. That has begun to change over the last few years, as it has really become mostly a mobile phone (and accessories, dongles, etc.) company. Steve Jobs main contributions were with the Macintosh and the iPhone. Ten years ago no one could have fathomed how much the iPhone lay in Apple's future, and I'm guessing no one right now can really guess what Apple will be ten years from now. In 1976 a company called Eastman Kodak encompassed 85% of the markets in photography. It is still around, but only as a phantom of what it once was, after nearly going bankrupt in 2013. I was surprised, upon Googling it, that it still exists. I suspect Apple will go a similar route, but much more quickly due to the accelerated speed of the tech industry. Most of the folks who still admire Jobs were of the Macintosh era of Apple. My guess is that a lot of the people clamoring for "let's move on regarding SJ" are mostly too young to remember the significance of his rise - fall - and resurrection of the company he founded. Cook, and even Ive, are at least old enough to know they wouldn't be where they are now without Steve Jobs. That is where Tim Cook comes from, and what he can't forget. Eventually, the Mac (at least as we know it) will die, the iPhone will change and mutate to something we can't imagine, and the people like Cook who came to prominence under Steve Jobs, will also retire or die. After that, Jobs will be consigned to a footnote in history which most people won't remember. Just a guess ...I imagine it'll become less common as fewer people personally knew Jobs are still working at Apple.
Maybe after the 10th Apple as a whole won't be talking about it for the 11th-14th, and instead individual executives might tweet about him or something, but Apple will bring him back for the 15th, 20th, 25th, 30th, and every decade after that...
Although IDK. How often does IBM bring up Watson the man? I left the company 4 months before the 60th anniversary of his death.