“Until the last sinew, the last synapse gives up, Steve will continue to influence the company he co-founded and later recreated,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for The Guardian.
“Seeing he could no longer ‘meet [his] duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO,’ Jobs kicks himself upstairs and becomes chairman, director, and ‘mere’ Apple employee,” Gassée writes. “In a distant future, I see him haunting the circular hallways of Apple’s Cupertino spaceship, the Commendatore hunting the clock punchers and damning the linear thinkers straight to hell.”
“For a long time, I’ve seen him as having an animal inside him, the one with the desires, the instinct, the drive. In 1985, that animal threw Steve to the ground. He picked himself up at Pixar – you’d be a captain of industry for doing no more – and NeXT. Then, in 1997, armed with Pixar’s success and Next’s technical prowess, he came back to run Apple and make it really his,” Gassée writes. “He had learned to ride the animal.”
Gassée writes, “Spanning an amazing arc of 30 years, the company with the anti-establishment image has become the most disciplined, best-managed high-tech giant – and arbiter of taste.”
Read more in the full article here.