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The world is darker today...
Oct. 5th, 2011 06:52 pm...for the passing of a great man.
Regardless of whether or not you liked his personal style, whether you used the shiny, 'cool' products of his billion dollar company, and whether or not you think Apple's — and by extension his — policies were good ones, you would be foolish to deny that he was a visionary, a genius, a one-of-a-kind person in this world.
I don't know if he was the smartest person in the tech world or even of the top five tech companies, but he was someone who was expelled from his own company and then came back to make it the most valuable one in the world, someone who demanded perfection and cared about the details, and someone who always chased his vision — for desktop computers, for MP3 players, for mobile smartphones, and for tablets — and who can say what would have been next?
But even, even if you think the entire computing world would've been better without the design that he championed and the hardware that he picked apart before approving, he was more than that — he was responsible for Pixar, he was a father and husband, and a creator and inventor. He was a businessman — the greatest CEO of our time — and a techie at the same time, and proved that you didn't have to sacrifice one for the other.
And in 2005, he gave a commencement speech at Stanford, with advice on how to live life — even in the face of death. In his closing, he mentioned that there was a phrase that he had always wished for himself, one now wished for everyone in the audience. I've always thought it was good advice, and I've tried to live by it ever since I heard the speech.
Stay hungry, he said. Stay foolish.
May you rest in peace, Steve.
Regardless of whether or not you liked his personal style, whether you used the shiny, 'cool' products of his billion dollar company, and whether or not you think Apple's — and by extension his — policies were good ones, you would be foolish to deny that he was a visionary, a genius, a one-of-a-kind person in this world.
I don't know if he was the smartest person in the tech world or even of the top five tech companies, but he was someone who was expelled from his own company and then came back to make it the most valuable one in the world, someone who demanded perfection and cared about the details, and someone who always chased his vision — for desktop computers, for MP3 players, for mobile smartphones, and for tablets — and who can say what would have been next?
But even, even if you think the entire computing world would've been better without the design that he championed and the hardware that he picked apart before approving, he was more than that — he was responsible for Pixar, he was a father and husband, and a creator and inventor. He was a businessman — the greatest CEO of our time — and a techie at the same time, and proved that you didn't have to sacrifice one for the other.
And in 2005, he gave a commencement speech at Stanford, with advice on how to live life — even in the face of death. In his closing, he mentioned that there was a phrase that he had always wished for himself, one now wished for everyone in the audience. I've always thought it was good advice, and I've tried to live by it ever since I heard the speech.
Stay hungry, he said. Stay foolish.
May you rest in peace, Steve.
