Great Ode to SJ, Numerian!

I pretty much agree, except on one or two points. I don't think the PC "owes it existence" to SJ. He didn't invent the PC. He wasn't - by a long shot - the first to market the personal computer, or even to successfully market it. IBM, Altair, and even the (in)famous Tandy corporation (remember them - sold at Radio Shack?) had brisk sales among the home-computer hobbyists before Mac came along.

Bell Labs, the US DARPA, IBM, and of course Xerox PARC (actually PARC was a huge inspiration for Jobs) - they are the ones that actually invented stuff like the mouse, the word document, and so on that seem so integral to our computing experience today. And they are the ones that actually brought the computer from room-size to desktop size.

But, as you point out, he was visionary because of his genius in finding answers to questions like "what will the computer DO besides be a glorified calculator?" Or " What do people want from computers anyway?"

Plus of course, his flair for designing so that his products looked really cool. "Coolness" is a very powerful factor in the tech marketplace, and he understood that thoroughly.

His marketing was brilliant and always captured the "be the first on your block" crowd, which is crucial to getting a leading edge in the marketplace.

So yeah, he was a genius in the truest sense of the word, with personality quirks and all the rest of it. But it's a little over the top to say we have personal computers and cell phones because of him.
Those are products whose time had come, and many people were working on it.

But SJ's genius is that he really caught the crest of that wave and rode it till the very end, when many other companies spun out, flopped, rode for awhile and fell off, or missed the wave entirely.

Steve Jobs was a man that was deeply in touch with "the flow", and that's a quality that isn't taught to someone. That's a natural type of genius.

Steve Jobs was instrumental in offshoring jobs to China, where people work for despicable wages in poor conditions (Suicide at Foxconn who manufacture the Apple products), and held $30 Billion in "Offshore" account to evade US taxes, whose commons supported Apple's Business.

It seems regretful that Jobs did not hold the US, its people and its commons to whom he owed a great debt, in the same reverence in which he held his products.

Steve may be a friend to you, he was no Friend to many others.

But, let's face it, Apple has become like Microsoft. Too big, too secretive, too proprietary... Right now, their products are cool-looking, but overpriced and suboptimal in many ways.

breakthroughs. Apple copied from heavily from Xerox who pioneered the GUI (graphical user interface) as well as invented the mouse. And, before then, everyone copied IBM who copied from Data General. Which by the way reminds me of the excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book: Soul of The New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the prototype web server - probably the most important thing a Job's device has ever undertaken.

YET: Wolfenstein and Doom were also written on the NeXT cube. :D

Undeniably the components of the personal computer were mostly there before Steve Jobs came on the scene. In my own experience I worked on a Commodore and a Wang. I always thought of these, or at least the Wang, as a new sort of typewriter with marvelous time-saving capabilities. I didn't think I worked on a computer. It was Jobs who created a package of PC features, dressed it up very attractively, and sold it as something entirely new. In a very real way it was. The potential that the product had, redefined the idea of the personal computer for the public. One other aspect of his inventiveness was to take the personal computer out of the office and into the home. Previous to Apple most people were familiar with the machines because you used them at work, where they were affordable. Unless of course you were a hobbyist, willing to buy a Tandy.

Certainly he did not invent the mouse or the CPU or many of these other features, including going back to the silicon chip. This is why I don't think his reputation is going to be burnished over time. His brilliance at product design and marketing makes him look like a genius now, but in the lore of the technology revolution, he will have a unique and seminal place that puts him a few steps behind the inventors.

Also, he went the route of all American manufacturing by sending jobs to China. But I don't think he sold out completely to China. Part of his obsession with secrecy was to prevent the manufacturers from copying and then competing with his products. Second, he did not adopt the planned obsolescence so common in Chinese products. You gave up on your Apple product not because it broke down, but because the next generation version was just coming out. Third, his employees in Silicon Valley were well-treated and he nurtured creative forces back in the US rather than let all this wither away.

Definitely the guy was not a saint, and I am naturally suspicious of the corporate cult of the CEO, having working for some of these people in the past. I did, however, want to give Steve Jobs his due as an influential product designer, a field generally overlooked in technology and manufacturing.

nt

With great respect to all, paeans to Steve Jobs that leave out Steve Wozniak from the early years just drive me crazy...And Steve Jobs would let it happen. [Yes, Jobs is wonderful, but he didn't start it all alone.]
From Wikipedia:

By 1975, Wozniak withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley and developed the computer that eventually made him famous. By himself he designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the Apple I.[3]
{3} a b Swaine, Michael (2000). Fire in the Valley. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0071358927.

Woz also wrote Applesoft, which was a form of BASIC, and was the high-level language that communicated with the 6502 processor.
When we bought our Apple IIplus in 1978, I bought it to use with VisiCalc, and not as much for gaming. At the time, the Apple II was best for gaming, and the Apple IIplus was best for stuff such as spreadsheets and accounting.
What made both the Apple II's popular among hobbyists is that they came with full manuals including an Applesoft tutorial, hardware schematics, much technical information, and one could basically explore the entire machine. Also the 6502 processor's machine code & architecture was fairly open and taught at local community colleges.
At our house, the Apple was set on a table in the middle of the room with all manuals out, and a "have at it and have fun" attitude.