“He was there at the birth of the personal computer. He has had his second coming. He has healed one very sick company. And along the way he has changed the way we think about music and movies, telephones and computers,” Brian Caulfield reports for Forbes.
“To call what Apple co-founder Steven Paul Jobs hath wrought a religion, of course, is easy. There are the adoring masses. There are the rituals of new product introductions. There are the signs and symbols: The famous Wired cover bearing an Apple logo enmeshed in thorns above the exhortation ‘Pray’ comes to mind,” Caulfield reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs designed that cover for Wired, who knew?
Caulfield continues, “And there is Jobs himself: the billionaire in a black mock turtleneck, the miracle worker in New Balance running shoes.”
MacDailyNews Take: Amen, brother! Tell it like it is!
Caulfield continues, “Jobs launched the personal computer industry as we know it with the Macintosh. He returned to Apple to lead a thunderous revival. He remade movies at Pixar. He led the creation of the iPod and the iPhone. ‘He’ll certainly be in the history books, and I would not be surprised if he is featured more prominently than Bill Gates,’ says Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company who, like McNamee, has followed Jobs’ career from the start.”
“After all, it was Jobs, not Gates, who made the computer personal–first with the original Apple he built with Steve Wozniak, and later with the Macintosh, which popularized the graphical user interface Gates would later rebuild Microsoft around,” Caulfield reports. “And unlike Gates, Jobs has remade not just computers, but movies, music and the telephone.”
“Jobs has simply hustled his way into the middle of more of the most important technological moments of the past 25 years than anyone else,” Caulfield reports. “‘He’ll be for beginning of the 21st century what Thomas Edison was to the beginning of the 20th,’ says veteran technology investor Roger McNamee. ‘Edison was an inventor in an era of inventors, and Jobs is a product person in an era of products.'”
“It’s a comparison that fits Jobs as snugly as his signature shoes, putting his accomplishments in a very American context. After all, Jobs didn’t invent the things that define the digital age any more than Edison invented electric light,” Caulfield reports. “What the two men did was (rather lucratively) weave new technologies into systems that made them useful to the rest of us. Apple’s iTunes software is to digital music what Edison’s Pearl Street electric station was to the light bulb: the infrastructure that turned a technological artifact into a business.”
Caulfield reports, “We can’t know when the Jobs tale will end. Edison’s story, however, tells us something. In the final few months of his life, Edison oversaw the construction of the electric train system between Hoboken and Dover, N.J. When the first train left the station, in 1931, Edison was at the throttle. He stayed there all the way to the end.”
Full article, plus a link to “In Pictures: 10 Great Steve Jobs Moments,” here.
MacDailyNews Take: Only Steve Jobs would figure out a way to get to see how the world will react to his passing while relaxing in front of his Mac in Palo Alto.