On Steve Jobs' Death

[KMD]

         So I'm sure everyone has heard already that Steve Jobs died not long ago. I respect the guy, I think he was a good director, probably an innovator, and seemed to want to improve (some) peoples lives. But if you didnt know, the internet is fucking exploding with people mourning the loss, saying that he was some kind of digital Jesus. The greatest innovator ever and all this other bullshit.

It pisses me off that everyone whos ever used an ipod thinks that one man is responsible for all of Apple's success. Especially when i read stuff like this....

http://mashable.com/2011/10/15/steve-jobs-day-california-october-16-stanford/

 He was a face of the company. I didn't know the guy personally, and i'm not going to treat him like an icon. Because I really dont think that ""Lets improve people lives with technology">Selling expensive gadgets>making tons of profit" is an ideal worth idolizing. Maybe in this Country.

   But I guess that the thousands of programmers and employees who did the coding and designing weren't responsible. After all, Jobs hardly knew anything about programming. He had no problem using taiwanese plants with shitty working conditions, and a number of suicides.

    And then Dennis Ritchie, the creator of probably the most famous programming language and UNIX (which MacOS is largely based on) dies a few days later and people have no idea who he is.  I guess thats not really his fault, he was a little heavy for black turtlenecks anyway. Plus, if you ask most kids who own an ipod who steve wozniak is, they will probably either have no idea or say "isn't he that one guy, you know, from the movie?"

       Seriously. That people will heroize the public face of a gadget maker like this upsets me. Especially when I read comments like "the world will never have another thinker like Steve Jobs". Seriously? Fuck you too world, for lack of confidence in the rest of us.

    What do you think, Village?

[Dourak]

I think you're right.
And that's not the last guy who will have all the greetings for others works, saddly.

[Solwyn]

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?

[BlueCross]

Ritchie died??

[Hoopy Frood]

Ritchie died??

Yep. About a week ago, actually.

[Chucara]

I pretty much agree. I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but some of the statements he have made (the one that springs the most to mind is the one about Bill Gates stealing ideas) have been extremely arrogant, and quite frankly, I think most of the "inventions" that have come out of Apple in the latest years have been more marketing and packaging that actual new technologies.