What Steve Jobs means to me: absolutely nothing
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Steve Jobs is easily the most extraordinary business leader of our time, by virtually any measure imaginable. He built a computer company that was declared thoroughly marginalized in the late 90s into the world's largest company of any kind. And that's not counting what he did at Pixar.
Some people can't handle that that kind of achievement garners a lot of admiration, so they characterize it as a "cult" and then attack it.
I feel really bad for Steve Jobs because he is good at what he does and he did some amazing things to the industry (and is now dying), but I would not at all feel bad if Apple fell back into irrelevance.
Edit: Wow, with so many votes after only 45 minutes this article should be in the top 3 and not #17+. You flaggers really shouldn't let yourselves get so upset over someone being negative towards a man who might as well be a mythical historical figure from your point of view.
And if you are wondering why Steve Jobs gets so much attention around here, it is probably because this is a forum for entrepreneurs, and he is arguably the best, taking Apple from the brink of collapse to the world's largest public company.
Regarding Linus, he actually gets a lot of hero-worship...and rightly so.
But did Linus (or Richard Stallman) have the overall impact of Jobs? Not by a longshot. So in my mind, the admiration for Jobs is deserved. Some disagree and I respect that, but calling it a "cult" is ludicrous.
The use of "The Cult of Apple" is common enough it's not so much a judgement by an individual as a way to sum up the group, especially when he only references it in passing once. How else could you describe all the people who do admire the company/Jobs with such passion in a succinct and understandable manner?
He even goes so far as to say Jobs is a brilliant man and deserving of praise... But points out since he is just a man, he's not deserving of worship. He's not attacking, he's saying he has trouble relating to the unadulterated adoration/worship of certain (vocal) fans.
Then why did you post that comment ?
BTW I have seen people struggle to get package management working cleanly on OS X and then claim with a straight face that OS X is the greatest OS ever so I am not too hesitant in calling Apple's user-base a cult. There just seems to be an underdog mentality there - a need to defend everything apple does.
The very concept of Linux-style package management is somewhat foreign to OS X, where, to a first approximation, apps are expected to carry their dependencies along with them in the application bundle. It made sense to worry about the overhead of an extra copy of a library 20 years ago, much less so now. In most cases the inconvenience to the end user vastly outweighs the trivial overhead of having multiple copies of a library hanging around. I like being able to "uninstall" an application by simply dragging it to the trash, or "installing" it by just putting it in the Applications folder (or any other folder, for that matter -- want to run your application on another machine? Just drag it to a network-accessible folder and run the sucker).
This is an odd criticism, to say the least -- it's like saying that Linux sucks because getting Windows apps to (sort of) run in WINE is a little dodgy. Yes, it's nice that you can use things like fink and MacPorts to do a cheap port of software that was originally written for Linux, but it's still a nasty hack that's not the way things are normally handled on the platform.
A microwave isn't a very personal device. You don't hold it in your hand or religiously carry it in your bag. You don't rely on it for communicating with people. It doesn't give you access to any new information or ideas. You interact with it for maybe a few minutes a day. You can't create new things with it. The admiration for personal technology is a lot closer to the reverence musicians hold for particular brands/models of instruments which is based on their build quality, their unique sound, their design, and many other intangible details.
The connection people might feel to Jobs is probably based on the simple human experience of relating to people with similar ideas/views or the relationship people have with someone who influences their own way of thinking. I feel a deep personal connection with most of my favorite authors and musicians though I've never met most of them. You could easily marginalize them as people who have accomplished little more than putting words on paper or sound waves on tape but I would not agree with that at all because of the experiences I've had with their words & sounds.
To my young mind, the scientific facts were independent of who discovered them, and this was an unnecessary distraction. "Just the facts, ma'am" would have been my preference.
In my dotage, my view has changed.
First: each of these scientific facts was discovered by a person, or more usually, teams of people, sometimes working together at one place and one time, but often at a remove in both dimensions. It's a social process. It took a long time for me to realize that these weren't simply dry words on a page or facts in a class.
Second: each individual's insights often grew from experiences and thought processes specific to them. Understanding the circumstances helps understand (and sometimes explain) the insights (it also occasionally provides clues as to weaknesses of the conclusions as well).
Third: we're social animals and remember things in a social context. Once the _dramatis personae_ do become established in our minds, it adds another layer of interconnectivity for recall of facts.
Fourth: as I came to interact with the world as an adult and met people I'd read about (or read about people I'd met), I came to appreciate that these weren't some two-dimensional cartoons or gods, but real people, much like myself, and knowing and understanding them could help me not only understand their work but to further it myself. It's the rare week now that I don't see something in my news feed that doesn't have a direct personal connection.
So: while I'm certainly not a fan of all things Steve and Apple (though I make very heavy use of his NeXT interface, in fact, as I type these words), I recognize that he, as a man, with his background and inspirations, created Apple, and drove it through two distinct periods of phenomenal growth and development. If he copied, he copied from the best, and improved in the copying (usually). He has a clarity of vision and a view of the ideal to which any physical and technological instantiation is at best an approximation, but repeatedly he's blown all existing models out of the water, and created whole new paths of development and advancement.
For this I can indeed bow to the man.
"Steve Jobs is not dead. Nor is he Jesus."
They're right, Steve Jobs is absolutely not Jesus, Steve existed and has had a meaningful impact on my life.
How cool is it that we can celebrate a maker like Steve? Would he prefer we idolize celebrities, politicians, criminals, odd balls, imaginary figures?
similarly, apostrophes mean nothing to the author.