It's good to remember flaws as well as good points

What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs

In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.

We mentioned much of the good Jobs did during his career earlier. His accomplishments were far-reaching and impossible to easily summarize. But here's one way of looking at the scope of his achievement: It's the dream of any entrepreneur to effect change in one industry. Jobs transformed half a dozen of them forever, from personal computers to phones to animation to music to publishing to video games. He was a polymath, a skilled motivator, a decisive judge, a farsighted tastemaker, an excellent showman, and a gifted strategist.

One thing he wasn't, though, was perfect.

One final Jobs video

An excellent commencement speech...

Where to begin?

I have never owned an Apple product. That being said, I recognise that Steve Jobs was a visionary who changed my world, and I was very sorry to hear that he had died at the relatively young age of 56. The first computers I learned in school on were Apple IIcs and TRS-80s (the latter came from Radio Shack).

Over the years, as he revolutionised the tech industry with products whose features everyone tried to imitate, he made being a tech geek actually seem cool, a far cry from when I was programming on an Atari in high school.

He did so with a characteristic sense of humour. You can see that in this timeline produced by CNN:



World reacts to the death of Steve Jobs

Then there's the lovely tribute to him using a very simple redesign of the Apple logo.

So thank you, to the man who brought us Pixar movies and portable tech, who put an entire music library in our pockets and made our phones smart. RIP.

PS Just so things don't get too grim, I found this on a tribute to Jobs. It's the first Pixar film, the one that is the reason for the hopping lamp logo. It's deceptively simple in design, like many Apple products (with a lot of work on the back end to make it so).