The original Silicon Valley pirate

I'm no expert on technology innovation, or on the politics or science of management, but it's difficult to be a consumer of i/e products and not be swayed by the Apple effect. So when the news breaks that Steve Jobs is finally calling it a day (never mind staying on as an "Apple employee") I can't not react. As someone whose digital life has been dominated by Apple products, from being an early user of the Apple IIe and the radical Macintosh (who can ever forget that it was the feisty little Macintosh that made us sit up and note that "1984 would not be 1984"), Steve Jobs has been a larger than life figure. He belongs right up there with other heroes like John Lennon and Bob Dylan and J D Salinger. He made success beautiful and edgy. And his products rode the divide between popular culture and technology in a way that made them inseparable, even before digitality brought culture into cyber-space. The unique design of the original Macintosh made it an object of desire for many who would have otherwise wanted nothing to do with a computer. Suddenly, to own one was to be part of the electronic counter culture. When Jobs was shunted out of the company he created by John Scully, many young people felt outraged, despite the obvious problems the company was facing because of some of his approaches to business. And it's not that he went on to one success after another. There were failures as well (remember Next?) and there were lemons in the apple pie, from time to time. But then there were also some brilliant ideas--I remember the duo dock, which allowed me to pull out the laptop-like hard disk from the powerful desktop and take it home to continue my work on, in an age before laptops were widely available. I remember the first desktop computer I bought--the Performa--which served me very well for a full five years before I had to give in and buy a Windows based machine only because there were no Apple dealers in my city in India. I very quickly went back to the Mac stable and have for the past ten years stuck with Apple products. Design may not be everything. But Jobs knew how to make design that turned productivity tools into objects of desire. No wonder there's all this outpouring of emotion on the web and in print. Jobs, the original silicon valley pirate, the maker of dreams, and the creator of windows into many new worlds, will be missed.

Lots of excellent coverage in the New Yorker here and The New York Times, as expected.