How do you fly your flag at half-mast metaphorically in
cyberspace?
2012/charles-moore-picks-up-a-new-low-end-truck/ class="left/2012/charles-moore-picks-up-a-new-low-end-truck/" src="../../art/crying-mac.gif" alt=
"crying Mac" align="bottom" height="90" width="70" />I was profoundly
saddened to hear of Steve Jobs' death last night. Ironically, the news
came to me on my old-technology television set rather than on my iPad
or one of my Macs, but I'm sure vast numbers will be made aware of his
passing via one of the devices that would not exist, at least in the
form we know them, had it not been for Jobs' vision.
Not all of that rarest of rare sorts of visionaries that Jobs was
see the concepts they envision become reality in their lifetimes, and
fewer still live to realize their dream of genuinely changing the world
in a meaningful and paradigm-altering way.
Steve Jobs
did both.
I don't expect to see the like of him again in what's left of my own
lifetime - the course of which has been affected and altered by the
products of Jobs's vision, my personal favorite of which is the Mac and
its operating system.
I didn't always agree with Jobs, but where I didn't, I am obliged to
concede that he was more often proved right, or at least reading market
prospects and trends more accurately than I. I also didn't always
admire his personal style, especially his tendencies toward arrogance
and his penchant for casting aside technologies and products that had
evidently begun to bore him without a backward glance.
But one simply couldn't help but admire, indeed be in awe of in the truest
sense of the word, his mind-bending list of achievements, which would
be impressive even cumulatively the product of several different minds
and lifetimes rather than one man's vision.
To say I will miss him isn't nearly adequate.