Thursday, October 06, 2011

Whoops I did it again

Ok, Steve Jobs died (publicly inappropriate alarms should be going off). The superficial outpouring on Facebook has been somewhat sickening. First, I'd bet virtually none of those people who said things like
"I wish I could just stay in bed and lay around with all of my apple products." or
"My hats off to you, Mr Jobs, for being the greatest visionary of our time."
have ever met him, know anything about his personal life or what kind of person he was or even heard him speak in person! They just have an image of him and it's not his miserable failure with NEXT computers. I do because I was subjected to a bunch of artsy prima donnas who didn't care that the systems were cost prohibitive and impractical. They also decide to ignore Steve Wozniak's contributions to Apple. Am I happy he died? OF COURSE NOT. Is it sad? Yes, any time a 56 year old dies it's unfortunate and sad. Did he turn around a company years after he had helped run it into the ground, yep. Was he a great visionary? Hardly. He simply was heading up a company poised to take advantage of modern technology and probably had a slightly greater customer focus than his competitors. I applaud him for that.

Been a busy couple of days with work and an economic conference that discussed the impact of our current economic crisis on the "middle market", which turns out to be generally defined as a little bit bigger than our normal client. It was interesting though and the main speaker, Diana Swonk, chief economist from Mesirow Financial, is a pretty dynamic speaker. For the record, she blames our congress in part for the budget mess and believes the economy will edge upward slowly over the next few years, but with jerks both up and down.

3 comments:

Bee said...

yes, the real visionaries are the ones whose spirit and backs are broken in the grist mill of Apple. Steve had charisma and that is a public face that you want to be viewed as successful...If you think about it, anyone who works has run across a charismatic leader who gets you to swallow the purple kool-aid...ok rant over.

el supremo de nm said...

Thanks Joe. I also get soooo tired of the platitudes of people who have not real connection with the deceased icon and no real knowledge of the complexity of their lives.

On the other hand, one should acknowledge that the products and services that Jobs envisioned and brought to market in his last tenure (iPhone, iPod, iPad, iTunes) have truly changed the way people work. That's no small deal.

alexis said...

lol, you said it, not me. :)