Originally posted by whodeyIt doesn't even take political leanings.
From what I hear, he was a little left leaning, so my guess is that the left is mourning his loss. However, had he been right leaning you would hear everyone come out saying he was an evil capitalist exploiting the thousands he hired.
If you go back pre-iPod, Jobs was painted a lot differently in the media as a slave-driving bastard and a bit of a failure with NeXT being pointed to as an example that he wasn't the inspiration behind apple, just the whip.
Clearly, a much different view emerged, but people's opinions can be fickle.
Gates is another example. We wanted to tar and feather him with justice investigations not so long ago, and now he's the savior of the poor in Africa.
Nothing much wrong with Social Capitalism in my book. Better than a lot of alternatives.
Those marching against Wall Street are against greed and the impunity of those whose actions have cause misery. Most are aware that it is a system that built and still maintains the West.
Of course, we could go back to living in caves. The most famous cave dweller of recent times; earned his terrorist money from his family exploiting the capitalist system.
Money makes the World go round and has done for many hundreds, if not thousands of years. Those demonstrating their hatred of the system while enjoying its comforts and benefits cannot be taken too seriously. IMHO
Originally posted by sh76Nope. He exploited his workers while becoming the 110th richest person in the world. He then halped create devices that those who he exploited felt compelled to buy, thus further exploiting their bottom line.
I understand you're being tongue-in-cheek, but even the most ardent socialist could not possibly argue that Steve Jobs did not create wealth and happiness to an extent far, far greater than any that he may have exploited.
Right?
He is no better than a drug dealer on the corner as the masses feel compelled to go buy his expensive products. In fact, I think Obama should come out and say that the state should have a certain percentage of his estate before he passes it on to his children.
Originally posted by HopsterIts not the pawns who are protesting Wall Street that we should worry about, rather, its those who exploit such sentiments who offer a Stalinistic utopia we should fear.
Money makes the World go round and has done for many hundreds, if not thousands of years. Those demonstrating their hatred of the system while enjoying its comforts and benefits cannot be taken too seriously. IMHO[/b]
Originally posted by KazetNagorraHe died. The pentagon does keep him in zombie form just in case zombie stalin is released so we can fight the zombie communist threat.
Don't we have Senator McCarthy to protect us against that threat?
We'll then have a zombie cold war which could lead to the real zombie apocalypse though.
I don't think I wrote zombie enough in this post.
Originally posted by AgergThe cost of getting into the Apple ecosystem was always too much for me. And there were aspects of Applethink in terms of what was better for me, that rankled from my user defined PC perspective. But I was always impressed that their systems seemed better designed, made more efficient use of hardware resources generally, like changing your OS is not an all day affair in a mac for instance, you know the little things. There were issues with what iphones didnt like (flash) or what you as user couldn't get to (batteries), but at the end of the day if you couldn't see Jobs for who he was, as a catalyst, a practical visionary(as in he made it happen), a guy that pretty much knew when the time was right for the market to adopt a major paradigm shift, then you've been blind to his genius.
I never knew the guy, he never knew me, my mp3 player is a Creative Zen, my e-book readers are my laptop and Kindle (as opposed to i-pad), and I have never liked macs..........
Much has been said about his lack of geekdom, that he never wrote a line of code or that the look of his shiny apples were the design genius of Jonathan Ive. Steve Jobs' genius was to combine all the elements together, select the best, and create a buzz that changed the world. He has been the best news for competition in the IT space for the past three decades and as tablets start rolling out of India (at $30 a pop), we are in the middle of witnessing a world transformed, in much the same way that the bic ballpoint pen transformed the way most people wrote and communicated things from the 50's (one hundred billion Bic's sold as of 2004), but I digress.
iPads's/tablets are becoming a part of the educational landscape. The dream of a paper-less society is much closer than we think.(kids these days are not as inclined as us elders to see it on a printed page)
But regardless of what his genius was or who he should be compared to, at the end of the day, he was a quick witted, funny bastard who could also laugh at himself. You don't take a garage idea and turn it into corporation, that has a market cap that can duel with the likes of EXXON without being driven. For a garage start up to scale those heights takes something. And that something was Steve Jobs. Whether we like to give him credit or not, he was at the forefront of the wave that is transforming how we live. The detractors and Luddites will find reasons to hate him, but the rest of us will always smile when we hear his name.
RIP. Steve Jobs.