Steve Jobs Leaves Us

[Brad]

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

Surprised by how sad this made me.

RIP.

[Ouenben]

It is crazy how influential the man has been in the last ten years. Apple simply would not be the same company without him.
I find it somewhat coincidental that he passed away the day after the iphone 4S was announced but maybe that's just life.

[Dogg Thang]

Wow, that was fast. He must have been working pretty much right until the end. Yes, an incredibly influencial man, and often very entertaining.

[Neon Ignition]

The full span of his career is fascinating, especially in light of his death coming at such an early age. I'm personally of the view that Apple's popularity is plateauing right now and the only way is down, something that will prove interesting to follow in light of this considering how instrumental into its success he was.

[SuperDanX]

An innovator, RIP.

[Flabio]

All of the obituraies I've read so far skim straight over his time at Atari, which is a shame as he was one of the people in on the ground at the start of the games industry too, not just home computing.

[egparadigm]

Don't like Apple, don't like Jobs, but I was sad to hear of his death this morning – far too young.

Incidentally I saw one of his older videos on CNN a minute ago and it suggests he must have lost a lot of weight to the disease – he was positively chubby by comparison.

[Neon Ignition]

Sad as the death is, some people are being silly with this. A guy on Radio 2 just compared Jobs to Jesus *rolls eyes*

[Brad]

^^^ That's ridiculous! Comparing Jobs with a fictional character!

[Guts]

Sad as the death is, some people are being silly with this. A guy on Radio 2 just compared Jobs to Jesus *rolls eyes*

Yeah, that's ridiculous. He certainly knew how to build a cult of personality.

He wasn't Mother Theresa or anything, he was a brilliant but also ruthless businessman who often treated his employess like sh*t, lead a mega-corporation which didn't care about the environment and used slave-labour in third-world countries through their sub-contractors.

[Dogg Thang]

ruthless businessman who often treated his employess like sh*t, lead a mega-corporation which didn't care about the environment and used slave-labour in third-world countries through their sub-contractors.

This is pretty standard stuff. What makes Jobs remarkable is not what he did the same as most people in business, but what he did differently. And he seemed to put art and a soul into his products. He sold things. Just things. But with what he did with those things, those things didn't just have buyers, users - they had fans. Real true fans. That wasn't marketing. That was art.

[Guts]

I'm not saying he didn't have merit and he certainly was an important and influencial visionary. I'm just saying that idolizing him, like he was Jesus is ridiculous.

Oh, and btw. he fathered a daughter whom he didn't acknowledge as his own even when a paternity-test said he was and the mother of his daughter lived on wellfare for years after Jobs finally admitted he was the father.

[Neon Ignition]

He was the king of repurposing. Almost everything they've had success with already existed but in a clunkier form. It's pretty similar to what Nintendo regularly did with the NDS. Incremental meaningless revisions which are massively overpriced but sell in huge volume regardless.

It's got to be slightly demeaning for Apples employees as well, given Jobs is being pushed as having single handedly done everything good Apple has ever done today.

[Lebowski]

A Clunkier, harder to use, poorly designed, undesirable, unsuccessful form yes. I rember mp3 players pre Ipods, I also rember Nokias idea of what a smart phone should be, they were not pretty.

[dataDave]

Hey, MP3 players are still where it's at for me. I just want a mass storage device with a 3.5m jack and play/skip buttons. iPods/itunes screw my perfectly named, configured, and arranged files around. Arsecake Bumthumps.