“Two week’s ago I attacked Steve Jobs and made myself the most popular columnist in the Mac universe — even my own wife called me ‘an idiot.’ So this week I figured I’d balance things out by talking about someone I admire greatly: Steve Wozniak,” Leander Kahney writes in his article “Forget Jobs, Let’s Worship Woz” for Wired News.
“There’s a lot to admire about Woz, but let’s start with four things: his dedication to kids; his support for his community and its public institutions, especially schools; his casual relationship to money; and his egoless appraisal of his own place in history — a realization, absolutely true, that he was a good engineer but has been disproportionately rewarded for simply being in the right place at the right time,” Kahney writes.
“Woz embodies the most admirable qualities of the hacker. He’s a great engineer, who designed beautiful machines and made a fortune from them. Good for him. But he wasn’t greedy, he didn’t screw anyone over and he took care of his friends… Woz has been generous with his fortune, financing scores of educational initiatives and sponsoring dozens of public institutions, including San Jose’s Children’s Discovery Museum, which sits on Woz Way… Woz lost an estimated $20 million of his own money hosting a pair of giant Unuson (‘unite us in song’) rock concerts, but considered them a tremendous success because they were great fun and he got to hang out with ‘a few thousand of my closest friends,'” Kahney writes.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews reader “Too Hot!” for the link.]
Is it just us or does Kahney lately seem overly concerned about how much people make, how much people spend, what people decide to spend their money on, how people treat their money, etc.? Money, money, money! Did Kahney get a massive pay cut recently? Did his publisher screw him over in a book deal? Did Kahney lose a bundle on the ponies? Is he just trying to jump back over the shark and hope nobody remembers his previous leap? Did he become a monk and shun all of his worldly possessions to work tirelessly with the world’s poor? Kahney, did you move to eastern Massachusetts?
Really, what the heck going on with Leander? He should try to get a handle on his fixation with other people’s money and how they spend it. He should stop judging people, not by how much money they spend or how much money they have or what they spend it on or how they feel about their money, but by how they treat themselves and others. Here’s a suggestion, if we’re going to worship some entity, let’s just worship God, if that’s what we believe in, and leave humans – any human – out of it, okay?
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Wired News wrtier: What’s up with Mac users’ ‘blind hero worship’ of Steve Jobs? – February 02, 2006
Kahney jumps shark: praises Gates, crassly criticizes Steve Jobs over charitable donations – January 25, 2006