Reacting to the death of Steve Jobs
I’ve been amazed at the scope and depth of the reaction to the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs. It goes beyond the fact that he was relatively young and very prominent and influential. We’re seeing what looks like deep grief and personal loss on the part of people who didn’t even know him.
I was sad to hear he’d died, as I’d be sad to hear of the death of almost anyone relatively young, with four children and a wife and a lot of life in him, and more innovative work he could have done. But I’m not a Mac aficionado nor am I a techie, and I hadn’t followed the career or life of Jobs in anything except the most cursory way.
So I don’t share that intensely personal reaction of others, and at first I didn’t understand their grief. But on reflection I think I get it. Jobs was one of those people who really did “follow his bliss.” He seems to have been a unique and powerful mind almost from the start, with strengths in various areas: technical innovation combined with an esthetic sense, knowing what people would want even before they did, and organizing and managing things and people to produce the products that would profitably fulfill those wants and create more.
In doing this he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Those who worked for him often found him abrasive and difficult. But most of us didn’t work for him; we only got to look in from the outside, and to use his products for work or play. And that’s part of the secret to the strong emotional reaction to his death: we may not have known Jobs personally, but Jobs as innovator affected us in extremely personal ways—by changing the methods and technology by which we learn, work, and entertain ourselves.
The other thing about Jobs’s death that I believe struck people is the more conventional one: the relatively early death of a guy who seemed to have it all but who couldn’t stave off fate. The memento mori proves the truth of the poet’s words, that death is also a universal and an equalizer:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
I’ve been trying to think of someone who else whose life and death has affected people similarly. I can’t. The closest I can come is a combination of Thomas Edison (can’t find much about the reaction to his death, but I doubt it was anything like the grief over Jobs) and Walt Disney.
It’s the latter, strangely enough, whom I think Job resembles more than the former. Disney was an innovator who affected people in terms of entertainment, creating a huge empire that began with cartoons but expanded into amusement parks of unprecedented scope.
It seems I’m hardly the first person to make the Jobs/Disney comparison, although it occurred to me independently; I hadn’t read articles like this one when it came to me. But even Jobs’s associate Steve Wozniak seems to think it’s Disney whom Jobs most resembled, not Edison (the relevant passage begins at minute 4:15—and my guess is that Wozniak thinks that Wozniak resembles Edison more than Jobs did):
The comparison is even more clear than that, because one of Jobs’s lesser-known business interests was acquiring Pixar and developing the film “Toy Story,” an extension of the computer into the cartoon world. The connection between Jobs and Disney later became even more direct, as you may be surprised to discover:
The bulk of [Jobs’s] wealth came from his 7.4 percent stake in The Walt Disney Co. — 138 million shares — worth $4.4 billion. Jobs acquired Pixar in 1986 and Disney bought the computer animation studio in 2006, placing Jobs on Disney’s board of directors. According to Bloomberg, Jobs’ Disney stock paid him at least $242 million in dividends before taxes since 2006. Jobs was the single largest shareholder in Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
Jobs was a very rich man, and he probably enjoyed that wealth. But he seems to have been driven by something else:
In 1993, Jobs told the Wall Street Journal: “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me”¦Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful”¦that’s what matters to me.”
Much of the world seems to agree that Steve Jobs did something wonderful.
[ADDENDUM: And here, right on schedule, is a comparison of the grief at the death of Edison to the death of Jobs.]
No question that Jobs accomplished a lot.
I do question outpourings of public grief for the deaths of celebrities. Why does a celeb you never met and only heard of when he brought out a new product cause more grief in a non-celeb individual than the guy down the street you used to wave to when passing?
Don’t get it.
If I did, I might not like it.
Three points, speaking as a programmer and graphical user interface designer and implementer, who has owned only two Apple products in 30 years (Apple II, original iPod):
1. The Mac UI was no big creative deal; they did a very solid job of knocking off the Xerox PARC GUI, and Jobs had the vision to see it was necessary (but so did Gates, who IIRC was with Jobs on that same tour of PARC). Very high marks (Xerox management saw no value at all in the same exact stuff!), but not “genius”.
2. Jobs was the dominant force behind the development of the iPod and iPhone, which really were revolutionary. The iPod is a work of user interface genius, and the iPhone is close. Those products deserve the hype.
As an interface designer, I regard Jobs with real awe: Both his fanatical attention to detail and commitment to seamless, simple excellence in usability, and the genuinely new things that were done under his leadership late in his life. It doesn’t matter if they were his ideas, or those of other team members. I suspect there were both. Great editors are more rare than great writers, and they leverage their greatness in a way that writers can’t.
They did get a few things wrong, of course: In MacOS, dragging the floppy disk icon into the trash can to eject the disk, when by rights, that should probably mean “reformat it”, if anything. Not a very intuitive metaphor. But the great ideas counted for very much more, in the end.
3. Jobs’ perfectionism and control-freak-ism are not all good for Apple, nor for Apple’s users. Jobs originally hated having third-party software on the Mac at all. He has never been very friendly to third-party developers. Microsoft, by contrast, has been incredibly good with developer tools, documentation, backwards compatibility (which is more important than a non-developer can imagine), etc. Anybody who tells you different probably has not done much professional software development for Microsoft platforms. MS has recently lost their way a bit in that area, but for many years they were absolutely unbeatable in their support for developers. For the user, that adds incalculable value to the platform. There’s a special sort of beauty in an open platform that everybody can add to, and I don’t think Jobs ever recognized it. It’s not Jobs’ kind of beauty. He was never a programmer; that was an angle he couldn’t see things from. Which is OK; nobody can be everything, and he achieved truly great things exactly as he was.
So, the good, the great, and the could-use-some-work.
It’s funny, but I don’t feel the sadness of Jobs dying young. To be able to achieve what he achieved, but die at 56? I’d take that deal in a minute.
There must have been times when he felt sorry for himself, but he kept it to himself.
He died well, as far as we can see from where we sit. How many people these days who must die in public, have the character to choose to die well, and the strength to do it?
Steve Jobs was not a vulgar man. He had good taste, even when it wasn’t easy, in technology and in how to live and how to die.
A lot of people were in love with Apple’s products. Ever been in an Apple store? Not my cup of tea, but it is almost like a cult. Steve Jobs was the face of those products. Thus, many people saw Jobs as the object of their affections.
He had completed a string of big product successes. Seemed to be at the top of his game. Seemed to have the magic touch. Apple has become the second biggest U.S. company under his leadership. That’s a big deal. Many people in the investment world believe that Apple cannot continue to be the big success it has been without his brilliance. Well, that remains to be seen.
There are two things about his story that many don’t know or overlook. The first is that Jobs was fired from Apple and spent some years in the hinterlands of the tech world. Pixar revived his fortunes and then he was recalled to duty by Apple. The rest is the stuff of legends. But he was looked at by many as a loser for a number of years. His is a great comeback story.
The second thing is that he was an adopted child. His birth mother opted to have him and give him up for adoption. Ask any abortion supporter if it would have been a good thing had his mother opted for an abortion. Kinda puts a human face on the issue.
As someone else remarked elsewhere, Steve Jobs is the last capitalist that young moonbats will be allowed to admire.
1. Perhaps part of the grief mourns the society whose structure allowed Jobs & Wozniak to do what they did.
2. It is appropriate and timely to eulogize Jobs. A measured assessment can wait until a decent interval has passed.
A couple of reasons for the public reaction to Jobs’ death: First, certainly, he was young, good-looking, charismatic, and famous. Second, and much more important, was the degree of his contribution to both modern technology and, much more importantly, to modern culture.
BrotherCadfael.
I agree that we will, or may, miss Jobs’ potential to improve various things in our world.
That doesn’t, in my mind, generate personal grief.
Jobs’ money didn’t stave off his fate … partly because he wouldn’t let it. When he was first diagnosed with cancer, instead of having the immediate surgery that was available to him, he opted for “alternative” (totally quack) therapies for nine whole months. Score one for Buddhism.
On reflection, I recall that I felt a bit of grief/sorrow when I learned of the deaths of people like Dave Thomas (founder of Wendy’s) and even Harlan Sanders (Kentucky Fried Chicken) when I was a kid. The thing that people like these did was humanized their companies; they gave their companies a face, a name and even a personality.
KRB
Apple’s always struck me as cult-like, and I find especially galling the way they can get away with things Microsoft would be roasted for.
For example, Apple recently sued Google for copying the iPhone Operating System’s look and feel in Android, Google’s own smartphone operating system. That’s Apple going back to its old nastiness, back to the days of suing Microsoft and Digital Research for copying the interface of the original Macintosh Operating System in their Windows (1.0) and GEM, respectively. An interface that, as Matthew Walker has mentioned, was originally a Xerox invention. “We are here to bring innovation to the world,” with the caveat, “but you’re going to get it only from us.” One could say maximizing your profits is the essence of capitalism; OK, but what I like far better about Microsoft is that they’re honest about it, while Apple hides behind a mask of altruism.
There are a lot of other examples of Apple’s roughshod treatment of its devoted followers, all under Jobs’ management. Beta version testing is a service to the software developer, yet Apple made people pay for the beta version of Mac OS X. Any company, but especially one dependent on hardware sales, ought to court developers to its platform, yet Apple sees fit to charge $99 for a license to develop for the iPhone. Sincere fan contributions such as Hexley, the platypus mascot for the Darwin operating system kernel, have been cold-shouldered by Apple, with an additional warning to abstain from attaching the Apple logo to that mascot, on pain of lawsuit filing.
Apple has behaved in the corporate scene and treated its loyal base far worse than Microsoft, yet Microsoft gets vitriol for petty things while the worst from Apple is excused as, “Yes, some of your points have merit, but you gotta see things from Apple’s point of view.” Why such a double standard? The answer I came up with long ago and still stick to is what’s termed Underdogma, the excusing of the minority player’s wrongs just for being a minority player, hand in glove with not cutting the big guy the slightest slack–the twin prejudices of “Plight Makes Right” and “Strong Is Wrong.” That’s a hippie thing, and if there’s anything I hate it’s hippie things and ways of thinking. Steve Jobs’ youth was in the 1960s, and it shows throughout his life and his work. His achievements were real, but I could have less of that mixture of smugness and do-gooder attitude that oozes from each and every one of his achievements (and that goes for those outside Apple as well, such as Pixar).
I think the grief comes from an unstoppable death applying a bit of shock to the half of the country that believes reality can be whatever you choose to think it is.
I find it interesting that Apple seem to be forgiven for having its products manufactured overseas. From what I understand, there is a huge profit margin built into the iphone (something like 50%). I wonder why the Occupy Wallstreet types don’t give companies like Apple grief for not manufacturing in the US?
I use a PC, but I’m not a Mac opponent (or advocate). But his death did come as a bit of a shock. Like him or not, he was an icon, a giant in the personal computer world.
Part of people’s reactions to his death was due to its suddenness. We knew he was very ill, but there were no advance warnings during his very last days.
To me it’s a bit like Jim Henson’s death. Very sudden (in his case unfortunately due in part to his reluctance to seek medical attention).
No grief, but sympathy for his family. I’m not that attached to tech and, frankly, having two tech-savvy brothers has made me less interested in upgrading beyond my use. There was an op-ed in the NYT about Jobs’ contributions on one hand and his blindness to the abuses of workers who make the product.
Interesting website: “All About Steve Jobs,” the man, mostly.
http://allaboutstevejobs.com/being/3-work/3-work.html
With anecdotes about him as the “shithead/hero roller coaster” boss.
How many people can found a company; be fired by the board of directors for poor performance; sell most of his stock after being fired; and then somehow be offered the chance to run the company again?
Matthew says:
“It’s funny, but I don’t feel the sadness of Jobs dying young. To be able to achieve what he achieved, but die at 56? I’d take that deal in a minute.”
Make that deal with whom, exactly?
I seriously doubt the thought of dying at 56, wealthy and accomplished, gave Jobs one microiota of comfort. In fact, his public postures were those of denial, OK, untruthfulness, right up to the end.
Only his family and his docs know the story, and they ain’t saying.
I don’t feel sad about Jobs, either. But I appreciated and was deeply moved by Reagan’s farewell speech. We never heard anything like that man’s honesty from Jobs, and he had plenty of time to do that.
One of the things that Jobs did was make Apple products cool. Now this is important as he sidestepped the need to invoke all the social justice bits of technology( have you noticed how many of the CISCO adds for videoconferencing are with aid workers in Africa?) You could just do stupid things with apple products and still be blessed by the liberal PC police.
“A lot of people were in love with Apple’s products. Ever been in an Apple store? Not my cup of tea, but it is almost like a cult. Steve Jobs was the face of those products. Thus, many people saw Jobs as the object of their affections. ”
Not affection, reverence, even deification to a degree.
The cult of Mac is real, a lot of Apple junkies (and that’s the only way to describe many of them) buy Apple products for no other reason than because they’re there, it’s a sort of offering on the altar of Jobs.
So Jobs dies, their God is gone (or at least his prophet, for many of them the company itself is the deity).