Why Steve Jobs died

[turtledude23]

The first personal computer and mouse was designed by a team of researchers at Stanford Research Institute led by Doug Englebart in 1969. Researchers at Xerox PARC built upon that research and created a personal computer with a GUI (not text-based) in 1973 that could have been mass produced (that's also where ethernet cables and early internet protocols were developed later on). Steve Wozniak built a simple text-based personal computer using widely available parts in his spare time (Apple I) in 1976 and Steve Jobs marketed an improved version of it (Apple II) in 1977. IBM created a cheaper personal computer (also text based) intended for business use in 1981, and closed off their hardware in the style unity was referring to. Compaq hired hackers to reverse engineer the IBM PC in 1982 and as a result we got even cheaper PCs which didn't have to be restricted to the whims of IBM. This is the point when PCs really started taking off, because they were cheap and because programmers who have nothing to do with Apple, IBM or Microsoft developed "killer apps" for these platforms.

Right now there are amazing technologies and potential technologies available and working in the labs of research departments at universities, technologies which may not enter the mass market for many years, or perhaps may never enter the market at all. Why do people buy certain products? Sometimes because they need it (food, soap, clothes, etc.), sometimes because it makes their life easier or more enjoyable (cell phones, movies, etc.), sometimes to look cool or fit in (luxury products). Marketing is also a factor, if someone tells their employees to take a bunch of technologies other people invented and package them in a cool way, runs a large marketing campaign, and alot of people buy that product then that person has succeeded as an entrepreneur, but to have a cult of personality developed around them makes me suspicious.

Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs was a very controlling person, he may have talked the talk about spiritual things, but so did/does every leader of a cult (see Jim Jones), and in some sense most politicians and business leaders do the same thing: say one thing in public that sounds nice, and do something else in private. Its tempting to think that there was some visionary, spiritual business leader who's personal innovations changed the world, we like blaming one person for everything that's good or bad in the world, and our mass media likes keeping that idea going, but life is far from the simple. Technologies which have far larger impacts on our lives every single moment of every day go unnoticed, their inventors die poor and no one knows their names outside a small circle of nerds. If the general public knows someones name it's very rarely because they did anything to deserve that publicity, the majority of the time its because they seek that publicity. The nature of mass media and consumer trends does not reward good deeds.

Here's what Steve Jobs actually did: he marketed someone else's creation which, of which there had already been at least 2 far higher quality equivalents many years earlier; he told his employees to add a GUI which he saw on someone else's invention (which also wasn't the first to have it) to his companies products as his sales were going downhill; he got fired then came back in 1997; he told his employees to make an obscure operating system (already existed) look nicer, but still barely anyone was buying it; he told his employees to make an mp3 player (already existed) which looked cool and forced it to have to connect to his music store and marketed it very successfully, in turn the obscure operating system gained some popularity; he told his employees to make a smartphone (already existed) that looked cool and controlled what kind of applications can be developed for that phone because applications can only be distributed through one channel and that channel was completely under his companies control, so for instance porn viewing applications weren't allowed on any iPhones, in turn the obscure operating system and overpriced PCs forcibly attached to it also gained popularity.

He was good at marketing and good at making money for his company and shareholders, good for him. He was also very controlling both in terms of human beings (yelled at his employees, demoralized them, forced them to compete against each other) and other peoples creations (restricting which apps can be distributed on iPhones and now Macs after the Lion update). He made money by monopolizing markets and charging way more than his competitors. I was not upset when he died, and the fact that so many people will passionately defend someone (who they've never met) who's greatest accomplishment was making phones prettier as the century's greatest innovator while not knowing the names of the people who invented: the first personal computer, ARPAnet or the microprocessor - all of which had exponentially more impact on each of our lives, and the whole world, than the sum total of every Apple product ever created, shows how much our opinions are shaped by the media, how easy it is to lose sight of the big picture, and that the average person doesn't really care how a product reaches them but just that its there and, perhaps, that they deserve it.

The media is interested in "cool" things, fads, trends, it has an inherent bias to short term outlooks and has no desire to give a big picture or long term point of view. Our opinions and outlook on life are all influenced by mainstream media without us realizing it. And I'm not saying there's any conscious or deliberate conspiracy behind this phenomenon, its a totally natural outcome when the spreading of information is in the hands of organizations interested primarily in making profit.