“Before reading this, you should know the following: I do not own an iPad, an iPhone, an iPod or a Mac. I abandoned my typewriter only recently,” Robert J. Samuelson writes for The Washington Post. “In short, I have not enlisted in the digital revolution and have kept my involvement to a desktop computer, e-mail and the Internet.”
“Given all this, it’s not surprising that much commentary on Steve Jobs struck me as over the top. In death, he has been lionized as the era’s greatest business leader. Walt Mossberg, the able and influential personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, declared Jobs to be a ‘historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or Henry Ford,'” Samuelson writes. “Longtime financial columnist James Stewart, writing in The New York Times, approvingly quoted the head of a design studio: ‘Jobs is a revolutionary character. He shifted the industry and changed our lives through this amalgamation of culture and technology… That is truly revolutionary.'”
Samuelson writes, “By history’s measure, Jobs’s achievements are tiny. Transforming the music industry is not the same as transforming society. There are many technological advances that had a far larger impact on society: antibiotics, air travel, air conditioning and television. By contrast, many of Apple’s products are gadgets, as commentators have noted. Their ultimate social impact may be less than Facebook’s… [Jobs’] more modest legacy will fade with time. A century from now, historians and ordinary Americans will still remember Edison and Ford. Jobs will be a footnote, if that.”
Full article – Think Before You Click™ – here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, what’s The Washington Post going to waste their readers’ time with next, having Stevie Wonder critique the National Gallery’s Picasso exhibition?
We’ve iCal’ed this for our decendents to deploy on October 11, 2111.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
One word: Luddite.
Before you read this you should know I don’t drive a car and I use only candlelight around my house…
Mark my words, Edison and Ford will be forgotten in just another couple of years.
Exactly man I’m with you…
Edison, Ford, Tesla ??? Who the hell were these people?
* I can churn butter by hand without an AC electric motor.
* My horse is great to ride and sometimes I use a covered wagon with 3 of em’ to haul my family… the ORIGINAL SUV baaby…
* Who needs lights? Without electricity I have no reason to even stay awake after dark… besides I gotta be up at day break to milk the cow and tend to the hogs
These guys just made “Gadgets”… agreed.. they’ll easily be footnotes in history.. if they are even mentioned at all!
Click bait. I did not need the reminder. No clicking from me.
I didn’t click, but what’s quoted above is funny. I like how the guy says he only uses a desktop computer, email and the internet. Well, jeez, the internet’s pretty big, but maybe he doesn’t know that.
I’m sure the IT dept. at the Post loves him.
I bet the IT dept has never heard of him either.
they have no clue how to install windows on a typewriter..
I realize it’s the lowest form of debate, name-calling… But what a douchebag!
How can so much BS come out of one person?
This is the guy Steve mentioned in one of his famous quotes. If I had asked people they wanted, they would say a faster horse. now, this is the faster horse guy in the age of the automobile. Likely had this guy been writing when Henry Ford started the production line. The article would say in a hundred years that Ford would be little known and little more than a footnote at best.
Here To the ignorant dullards!
Y’know… Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile. He perfected its production and popularized it.
Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He perfected it and popularized it.
Jobs didn’t invent the computer. He perfected and popularized it.
100 years from now, I wonder if anyone will look up Robert J. Samuelson’s name?
Who?
Well… people remember Tesla but not George Westinghouse, who’s promotion made possible the choice of using AC power over Edison’s scheme to have DC power plants on every other street corner.
Tesla = Wozniak
Westinghouse/Oppenheimer = Jobs
Well, according to Mr. Samuelson’s bio, his “alleged” area of expertise is in economics and business.
Irrespective of Steve Job’s accomplishments with regards to computers, digital music, Pixar, etc., the fact that he took a struggling company (Apple) that was on the verge of financial collapse and within 14 years took it to be one of the most valuable companies in the world is something that seems to escape Mr. Samuelson’s breadth of financial analysis or attention. I think that omission in and of itself speaks volumes about Mr. Samuelson.
And that’s not counting how Steve Jobs also turned his $10 million or so investment in Pixar and sold it to Disney for $7.4 BILLION within 10 years or so.
To say Mr. Samuelson is an elitist, “blowhard” is putting it mildly.
Your comparison with the talented financial wrangling puts Jobs more in the league of JP Morgan.
As Jonathan Swift said:
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift also said ‘A nice man is a man of nasty ideas’.
And he also wrote a charming little tome called
‘A Modest Proposal’
where did the post dig up that old fossil?
This asshole needs a faster horse.
So this person who knows nothing about technology blurts out this non-sense and expects people to believe him when he is the only one with this idiotic opinion.
And what historian is he talking about who has this opinion?
His opinion is worthless that’s for sure.
This man does not know what he is talking about, does he still have a job? I mean does he get paid to write this crap. I agree the disclaimer says it all.
To quote Mr Jobs: “Was he inebriated?”
What an blind ignorant ass…
I can see where Samuelson is coming from and agree with him somewhat. Read me out before flaming…
Samuelson was born in 1945. Grew up as a teen early 60’s. What two things happened. First, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 gave us the highways all over the USA that we enjoy today. Second, got his license, most likely, in early 60’s in the era of the Ford Mustang, etc., but probably had a used car from the 50’s no less to enjoy using on all those new highways.
Bottom line, Samuelson has a more intimate relationship with something Henry Ford gave us, and even by his own admission, then Steve Jobs. So he is biased with regards to elevating Ford over Jobs and saying Jobs will be just a footnote a hundred years from now.
Me, cars are superfluous. There is nothing ‘magical or revolutionary’ about cars. The only thing that gets me excited regarding cars is when I pass a gas station with low prices! Now that’s magical! But Henry Ford, to me, is a footnote.
I entered the computer age during a decade after the Macintosh miracle of ’84. I got to witness Jobs coming back to Apple, which wasn’t in the best of shape. I got to witness Jobs business savvy that after a little more than a decade had Apple becoming the most profitable company in America next to Exxon. I, we, got to experience the ‘revolutionary and magical’, time and time again with OS X, the iMac, the iPod, ITMS, iPhone, iPad and more… that left us devotees asking “What’s next?”. But not with cars. That industry is too well established that we take it for granted. But not with computers, because we are still in it’s infancy. But 100 years from now, when people just expect from their computers in whatever form they may be, the same as we with cars and expect the same. In a hundred years, Jobs a footnote? Sure, just as Ford is a footnote to us now.
But my oh my, how lucky were we to be here during the time of Steve Jobs! I for one am thankful! Thanks Steve.
I agree that Henry Ford made the more substantial contribution.
Not many people can grasp nowadays what it was like before cars..or paved roads even.
I always saw Jobs as being closest in comparison to J Robert Oppenheimer. The way the Mac and the atomic bomb were developed have some remarkable similarities: a strong charismatic leader pushing talented people to do their best work, and being able to cause different separate teams to work to complete a single final product.
I wonder if he cranks his car to start it.
Samuelson? Samuelson? Who’s that?
Samuelson’s lack of intellectual curiosity, which accounts for his ignorance about Steve Jobs’ many contributions to society & humanity, is one big reason to retire the guy. He’s hopelessly irrelevant. Or maybe he thought he could increase his readership by being an ass?
Jobs changed my life, I met my girlfriend through an iPhone app!!
that may be one of those things you don’t tell everyone..
I have come across some dribble in my time but seriously how does someone quite this out of touch with reality seriously get a job expressing his shear lunacy. What Steve Jobs has done for society is beyond compare to Henry Ford who simply mechanised the process of building cars before the next person and who’s company is rapidly becoming irrelevant to the process. as for Edison he was an overated inventor of the serial patent process who didn’t even invent the thing that everyone identifies him with and who told Bell his telephone wouldn’t work, probably as he hadn’t been able to steal the idea. Tv was ridiculed for almost as long as the Mac has existed and it was probably Samuelson’s dad who was doing it and it is the very technology that Jobs has pioneered that will continue to make it and indeed much business air travel for that matter less relevant. Somehow someone who has only just given up their typewriter is hardly the first person I would listen to to determine the future course of his country and its position in the World. The fact is in an age when competition for ideas and technology far outstrips those others he mentions concepts Jobs has evolved will establish him as one of the supreme originators of what makes our World what it is while Samuelson’s musings will if they are quoted at all go down in history as examples of the dumbness of commentators who look backwards rather than forwards.
Henry Ford did a lot more than mechanize the process – he made the car affordable for anyone. (Thus also leading to a good reason to have paved roads)
Without Henry Ford (or paved roads) 23 year old Steve may have not been able to escape rapidly enough from his pregnant girlfriend.
This guy is just an ‘Attention Whore’ …
I always thought Wozniak made the greater contribution with his low-cost scaled down design, and homemade operating system.
That he was able to see it in his head and then make it is remarkable.