Steve Jobs is Dead
Steve Jobs, who sparked a revolution in the technology industry and then presided over it as Silicon Valley's radiant Sun King, died Wednesday. The incandescent center of a tech universe around which all the other planets revolved, Jobs had a genius for stylish design and a boyish sense of what was "cool."
He was 56 when he died, ahead of his time to the very end.
According to a spokesman for Apple Inc. — the company Jobs co-founded when he was just 21, and turned into one of the world's great industrial design houses — he suffered from a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he had undergone surgery in 2004.
Jobs had taken his third leave of absence from the company in January of this year, and made the final capitulation to his failing health on Aug. 24, when he resigned as Apple's CEO. After 35 years as the soul of Silicon Valley's new machine, that may have been a fate worse than death.
Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976. Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery — its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall — to a device people considered "personal," and then indispensable.
Jobs was the undisputed "i'' behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lower-case. According to Fortune magazine he was considered "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs," but Jobs also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs — ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits — whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company's stock plunged 22 points after Jobs announced his final medical leave on Jan. 17.
"A hundred years from now, when people talk about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates is going to be remembered for his philanthropy, not technology," said tech forecaster Paul Saffo, "the same way people remember Andrew Carnegie for the money he gave to education, not the fortune he made in steel. But what they're going to say about Steve Jobs is that he led a revolution."
- Source
He was 56 when he died, ahead of his time to the very end.
According to a spokesman for Apple Inc. — the company Jobs co-founded when he was just 21, and turned into one of the world's great industrial design houses — he suffered from a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he had undergone surgery in 2004.
Jobs had taken his third leave of absence from the company in January of this year, and made the final capitulation to his failing health on Aug. 24, when he resigned as Apple's CEO. After 35 years as the soul of Silicon Valley's new machine, that may have been a fate worse than death.
Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976. Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery — its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall — to a device people considered "personal," and then indispensable.
Jobs was the undisputed "i'' behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lower-case. According to Fortune magazine he was considered "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs," but Jobs also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs — ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits — whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company's stock plunged 22 points after Jobs announced his final medical leave on Jan. 17.
"A hundred years from now, when people talk about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates is going to be remembered for his philanthropy, not technology," said tech forecaster Paul Saffo, "the same way people remember Andrew Carnegie for the money he gave to education, not the fortune he made in steel. But what they're going to say about Steve Jobs is that he led a revolution."
- Source