“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.]
