Well the recent news about Steve Jobs passing away is truly surprising. I hardly follow the news but I was reading about Jobs earlier this week. He seemed a very interesting person and while not the first of the first-wave technologists to pass away he was a major figure in that scene.
Will Apple become an even more soulless consumer-vampire without him? Will they continue to innovate or will they simply vacillate without Jobs' leadership? The news is saddening but what's worse is that it draws out the cynic in me: why would someone with Jobs' Buddhist past become a shameless corporatist? Or was it always more than that? I'm sure there are many more balanced and knowledgeable perspectives about it, but I have to wonder.
It's sobering news and it happened so quickly. I remember reading the wikipedia entry maybe four days ago and thinking, "Well that resignation stuff has pretty obvious undertones." Seems I was correct but I was thinking this news would drop in a year or so. The man was a leader, think what you will about Apple (especially the Apple of the last decade), but without Jobs it would've been another IBM or some stolid corporation with little to add to the flood of technologized junk into the global consumer markets but expertise and fabrication. Instead they offered some glimpse of progress.
With the release of the iPhone 5 coming up and announced pretty much right as Jobs was dying, it seems like we have a juggernaut of a company that may just be losing its stride at this time. There are several prominent iProducts but they are all iterative, and if there is no corporate vision these will be the products Apple continues to sell and improve until they cease to exist, as well.
Well I can't find a Steve Jobs twitter account, so my usual celebrity death spiel will not be played. Instead a subdued close and a good idea for a Halloween costume.
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