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Unwashed Village / Re: On Steve Jobs' Death
« on: October 18, 2011, 03:50:41 PM »
I said something similar in response to someone on a long Facebook rant earlier, but I'll say it again here.
The thing that Jobs really contributed was helping to bring the PC to the common man. He was uncompromising in his idea of quality and design, and the reason was that he absolutely felt that with the correct amount of tweaking anything could be used by anyone. The fact that he's being so fondly remembered by so many consumers is testament to his philosophy.
However: he was an authoritarian, and from everything else I read kind of a dick in person. He denied being the father of a girl until much later in her life when his paternity was proven, but at that point he paid for her to have a full ride in college. You can fill entire notebooks with stories of how difficult he was to work with, and how many times he basically made people feel worse about themselves.
I bet if you walked out on the street and asked the average person who Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Bill Gates were, they'd probably give you 2/4. Is that because a majority of people on the street use products branded by Microsoft and Mac? Maybe. But I think it has more to do with the cult of personality those two have surrounded themselves with.
Go back on the street and ask those same people who Jaakko Iisalo is, they'll probably have no clue: but I'll bet you ten bucks they either have Angry Birds on their phone or they've played it before.
When this kinda stuff happens, just remember that people are often remembered by people who don't know them for things that may not be worth remembering. People give credit to Steve Jobs for the PC. How possible would any of his contributions have been without Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of the C programming language? Especially now that most mac products are written in some version of Objective C? Not likely. But if people didn't know that before he died, wouldn't you be more pissed that they jumped on the bandwagon after he died?
The thing that Jobs really contributed was helping to bring the PC to the common man. He was uncompromising in his idea of quality and design, and the reason was that he absolutely felt that with the correct amount of tweaking anything could be used by anyone. The fact that he's being so fondly remembered by so many consumers is testament to his philosophy.
However: he was an authoritarian, and from everything else I read kind of a dick in person. He denied being the father of a girl until much later in her life when his paternity was proven, but at that point he paid for her to have a full ride in college. You can fill entire notebooks with stories of how difficult he was to work with, and how many times he basically made people feel worse about themselves.
I bet if you walked out on the street and asked the average person who Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Bill Gates were, they'd probably give you 2/4. Is that because a majority of people on the street use products branded by Microsoft and Mac? Maybe. But I think it has more to do with the cult of personality those two have surrounded themselves with.
Go back on the street and ask those same people who Jaakko Iisalo is, they'll probably have no clue: but I'll bet you ten bucks they either have Angry Birds on their phone or they've played it before.
When this kinda stuff happens, just remember that people are often remembered by people who don't know them for things that may not be worth remembering. People give credit to Steve Jobs for the PC. How possible would any of his contributions have been without Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of the C programming language? Especially now that most mac products are written in some version of Objective C? Not likely. But if people didn't know that before he died, wouldn't you be more pissed that they jumped on the bandwagon after he died?
