Passing of an Icon ? Computer Ed Radio
There have been a ton of articles about Steve Jobs hit the web over this last week, not to mention enough TV coverage to think a head of a state rather than the head of a tech company had passed. As I have listened to this coverage I find myself conflicted. Everyone knows that I am not a big fan of Apple yet I would be a fool to not acknowledge that Jobs was a real force in the move to get personal PCs into homes. Yet while I mourn the loss of this icon to the hobby I love so much I am also, almost sick at the misinformation that people are putting out about the man, so I will give my good bye to Steve here and hopefully help people understand a bit more truth.
Steve Jobs was a brilliant man with an amazing gift, he was a true futurist. What I mean by that is he could see forward and have an understanding at how certain trends in technology would play out. This was an amazing gift that he made good use of. Apple was the first
serious computer company to spring up directed at the home market. Oh sure you had Commodore and Atari, you also had Timex and Texas Instruments chime in for a time as well. You see these other companies produced what were essentially tech toys, where Apple made a real computer by comparison.
This was a move that scared other major computer makers that focused on the business world because they did not see the future of computing in homes. I truly feel Steve saw what we now have today even then.
As the computing hobby began to grow the toy makers began to pull off the road and eventually die out, while Apple kept going. However Apple saw it?s first major hurtle come forward, IBM. When IBM realized the future of the home market they enter it in full force and opened the standard for what we now call the PC. This open platform allowed ?kit? PCs as well as market competition that caused Apple to fall from the forefront to an also ran.
However Steve saw a new direction and took it, he realized that a computer in a home needed to be more than a beige blocky box, it needed to have a personality of it?s own, a style that fit the home. This was where we saw the true genius that was Jobs grab hold. Steve would look at technology that existed, stuff that was already working and then he would think outside it?s original design box.
He would take that geeky tech and twist it slightly, skew it a bit and then make it look cool. He could see forward and see how that tech could be used in a way not originally conceived on it?s creation to get consumers excited about it. His talent was seeing how the consumer
would respond to tech and what they would want from it.
You cannot look at a personal computer today and not see a little influence from Jobs on it. Jobs was one of the first to realize a graphical interface would appeal to a broader base than a text based one, he wanted to hip up the PC. He was one of the first that realized that people would respond well to smaller form factors in PC design as well as shapes other than the simple box.
When I think of Steve I realize we have been taught two lessons, one good and one bad. The good lesson he has left us with is that function does not mean there has to be a lack of style. We can take these geeky items we use and give them an artistic bend, make them something we like looking at. Sadly though this leads us to lesson two, as a society we will buy style and not care about substance. This is a harder lesson for us to take but is none the less true, as a society we have gotten to the point that if it looks good we will buy it regardless of weather it performs as well as others
The industry will miss Steve. His drive to look at things in a way we did not and see an opportunity that others had not noticed. This drove the industry forward and opened up new areas that would have taken years longer if Steve had not led the way. So in closing I wish to say thank you Steve Jobs, thank you for helping us look outside the box and see other possibilities in technologies, other ways they could go outside their design envelope. You will be missed.
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Source: http://computered.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/passing-of-an-icon/
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