Roundup
I’ve been lazy, sort of. This year’s Sydney Running Festival saw me in the 9k, at about 55 minutes, instead of trying for another half marathon, and there’s been lots of other running around, by which I mean trips to Melbourne for work, another round of which starts on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, there’s been the various Nobel Prize winners, and the usual nationalistic spin these receive, such as the headlines here touting the participation in physics by the local boy, one of three to take the prize as a team, whereas the U.S. accounts pretty well ignored him. As they would. Pretty much no coverage of the literature prize, which would have all been different if the Syrian favourite had taken it home. Assuming Syria is home. Or not home, if not.
And Steve Jobs has died, of pancreatic cancer, poor bugger. Sorry for his friends and family. But has the world really lost such a genius as warrants flowers piled up outside the Apple Stores, including Sydney’s location at George & Kent Streets? And Facebook tributes? O.k., I’ve never been one to take up the whole Apple experience, but I don’t have much need for a home PC than the internet and a few basic applications, and work is just work and pretty well limited, for me, to the same set of software. So operating systems or not, Apple and Steve Jobs have little to do with my life, despite owning an iPod Shuffle and a Samsung Android phone (that pretty neatly rips off the iPhone look and feel). Steve Jobs made me buy something. So have lots of other unsung marketers , designers, sales personnel, waiters, waitresses, typographers, whatever. I’m glad he made good on the promise I’m sure everyone saw in him, and admire how he pulled Apple back from the brink more than once (having pushed it there himself at least once, and having made his own dumbass moves in between – remember Next? How’d that work out? Oh, yeah, back to Apple, then). But the endless mourning keening? C’mon. He made you buy things. He didn’t change the world. Facebook and Twitter run on Windows, too, and started there, and mobile phones predate Jobs, as do touch-screens and e-books. We may employ the refinements he added to the tools we had, but the refinements weren’t his and were coming anyway. Getting there first makes him a better salesman, and that’s been enough. Just remember, he made you buy things, even when you already had things, the same things, but that doesn’t make him Gandhi, let alone Jesus.
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Maybe not Gandhi or Jesus, but a bit more than merely a salesman, I think. The mistake is to think of him as a computer guy, because that was (probably) where he had the least influence. If you get past the desktop I think it is fair to say that Jobs' vision transformed three industries in ways that people could never have imagined, even right before he did it. Start with music. Apple didn't just put a digital music player out: it fundamentally changed the way that people interact with music, by making it a more interactive experience. An iPod, even the most basic iPod, isn't a digital Walkman-- it is your entire music collection, organized any way you like; and a way to buy music that takes next to no effort. It has changed the way artists make money, and it has very nearly taken record labels out of the equation all together.
Now consider movies. Pixar didn't just pull Disney's fat out of the fire-- it turned Disney, which had been sort of a niche studio, into probably the biggest player at the table. Digital fx is pretty much standard today, and it is because a Jobs project (which came out of NeXt, by the way) went where nobody thought it would ever go. Avitar doesn't happen without Toy Story.
Then we get to telecom. My iPhone is no mere phone: it is a complete information and communications device unlike anything anyone short of Chester Gould or Victor Appleton ever conceived of.
All of these things were accomplished, by the way, with a sense of style and panache that makes using these technologies seem like a pleasure. And on top of that, he got a bang out of it all himself. Jobs may have been a SOB to work for, and I hope he left his dough to something worthwhile, but is all he ever did was be enthusiastic about producing quality products that would be enough for me.
I am more inclined to our Ex Pat's opinion on all this adulation for Jobs. Big whoop that you all can instant message and instant info. I can do that without his toys. Big NO! to his ipod for music. It is an isolating mechanism for listening for yourself alone or, with yet another gadget needed, to share the music. The big caveats are that he has encouraged us all to buy more things, pretty much all of which we could get on without AND he didn't make any of them in the USA where WE do most of the buying.
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