The temptation for an Apple fanboi like me is to write a paean devoted to the wonders that Jobs brought to the masses.
He did, from the first usable personal computers...if you used the IBM-PC in the early 80s, you ended up kludged in terminal coding, DOS (then MS-DOS), and function calls out the ass...to the iPad and now into the next generation of Jobs-inspired products.
All this with a side-trip to create an animation studio that revolutionized what you see in the movies and on TV, but I digress.
He is a visionary's visionary, a man who truly lived up to the RFK bromide (via Shaw) "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?' I dream things that never were and ask 'why not?' "
Or to write an obituary, putting his life into perspective and writing off Apple stock (which dropped twenty points last night in off-market trading on the news) as worthless now.
The truth is, what else could the man accomplish? He walked away from the single most valuable business in the history of the world (he will remain chairman of Apple's Board of Directors, and I suspect will still pop up at product announcements for new products he's shepherded.) A micromanager, by all accounts caustic and driven to inspect the smallest detail of projects that he would risk the company on, winning more often than losing, Jobs really has done it all.
He's transformed, twice now, how we compute, turning the PC market on it's side and letting the juices run out while creating single-handedly the smart phone market, the tablet market, and remaking the entire laptop market with the Macbook Air.
With all he's accomplished, and his continuing battle with pancreatic cancer (which he claims is "cured"), Jobs has every right and every reason to walk away from his baby. Apple has grown up now, from cranky toddler to mopey adolescent to unruly and rebelious teenager to a young adult poised to take on the world and carve out its place in history.
So I just wanted to go on record as saying "Thank you, Mr. Jobs."
Thank you for making the world a little more productive and a lot more fun. Thank you for showing us the possibilities of achievement, how naysayers may stand in front of us and shout "FAILURE!" at us, but if we perservere and believe in what we have, we can make it, sometimes beyond our wildest dreams.
Um, anyone want to buy three black mock turtlenecks, slightly worn?
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