Here’s To The Crazy One
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This. A thousands times this.
MG touches on many true points as to why most people feel so sad about Steve's passing.
However I feel like there's a deeper reason that hasn't been properly elucidated.
Or perhaps I'm just far too emotionally confused at the moment to understand why I feel the way I do.
Yes Steve died too soon.
Yes his products affected everyone they touched.
And yes it's scary to think of a future that won't have Steve's direct influence.
Ultimately the passing of this powerful man elicits an emotional response equal to the one he had on you. This varies for everyone, but it exists for many.
RIP Steve. :(
Listen, I don't want to be disrespectful to a man who's just died, but you dishonor him when you try to stack him up next to them.
The ideas and intellectual breakthroughs of the ancient Hellenese that have been passed down to the world through their books are infinitely of more importance than the work of Steve Jobs. This is just not a comparable matter.
That said, we do still talk about Edison, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, over a century later. A millennium? Probably not, but the point is valid, even if off by roughly half an order of magnitude.
So you'd expect that someone who rises in the general consciousness now to actually be far more impactful than the 'ancient greats'.
This must be the first entrepreneur/capitalist/CEO that has been mourned on such a global scale, and that in itself is remarkable; there's no one who comes close. Maybe Warren Buffett, but outside of the US he's not that well-known. The only person I can think of from modern times might be Walt Disney, someone who was similarly creative, demanding, and left a cultural and commercial legacy behind.
He has done great things for the industrial world in bringing them luxury devices to solve luxury problems, but this is a really small part of the world. Most people dont have enough money to buy his products, like all his workers at the Foxconn factories for example. Its amazing how Apple was able to keep such a clean vest while still doing many not so nice things big corporations do these days, but as long as everyone has their nice toys noone seems to really care.