I won't shed any tears when "Hamilton Nolan" dies.
Generally speaking, Ayn Rand was wrong about everything, but reading something like this makes me think she had a point.
People are mourning someone who was a part of their lives, of their youth, somebody who made the world a better and a more interesting place.
Maybe the tributes can get a tiny bit excessive, but you shouldn't have to lay down your life for some cause to receive some gratitude when you die.
Living, working, achieving something -- even when you get a lot of money for it -- can also be reason for appreciation.
“Generally speaking, Ayn Rand was wrong about everything, but reading something like this makes me think she had a point”
Rand was misguided to try to build up the American businessman, or The Producer, to a hero. Because we know better, and aside from the great role of fortune, there’s the plain fact that worthy economic victors aren’t great men. Very often they’re boring men. Maybe we need less great men, then. Nevertheless, it was too obvious a ploy.
Which is not to say the various other professions that routinely receive the laurels businessmen lack are deserving. Warriors we’ve pretty well debunked. What about artists, those heroes of the anti-bourgeois life? Often downright horrors.
Apple computers directly benefitted more people’s lives, almost certainly, than most latter-half 20th century politicians put together. No matter. We can see through business idolatry too easily, for whatever reason.
Absolutely, “x”. Jobs had a tremendous impact on the world of technology and how we use it to enrich our lives, whether for business or personal pursuits.
And with regards to some of the nonsense being posted here about him:
I lived in downtown Palo Alto from 1989 to 2003. During that time I ran into Steve Jobs dozens of times on the street, at Whole Foods, and professionally, as in the early 90’s I worked at an independent Apple retailer there on University Avenue which was frequented by many leading lights of Silicon Valley...Jobs, Bill Joy from SUN, Bob Metcalfe, those Russian guys that wrote Tetris, to name just a few. Jobs at the time was running NeXT, and our store was chosen as one of the two locations in the country to sell NeXT (whose Unix based graphical OS was the precursor to Mac OSX) on a retail level. So we all got to go to NeXT HQ in Redwood City for training, and Steve spoke to us at a dinner there. At no time did he give any indication of being gay, and every time I saw him in a non-professional setting in downtown Palo Alto, he was with his wife and daughters. So if he really did have HIV as one poster here is claiming, he likely picked it up from a tainted blood transfusion in the late 70’s or early 80’s, before blood banks screened for it.
The man is dead. He brought a lot of joy to many people’s lives through his products. His life is worth celebrating, for as other posters have said, he is an icon of American ingenuity. And for those spreading rumors, leave his family in peace, for crying out loud.
Depends, some value loyalty and honesty above achievement. You can count me among those and after reading years ago how Jobs screwed Wozniak on the Atari gig Jobs fell off the admired list.
I do offer prayers for those he left behind and hope that he corrected that character flaw but the way he treated Gates after Gates saved Apple with cold hard cash, I doubt the correction ever happened.