Steve Jobs passed away

[midilance]

I just went to Macrumors and read that Steve Jobs has died.

[williemyers]

sadly...*VERY* sadly...it's true
http://www.apple.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Killahurts]

Tears at my household. My partner and I literally owe our careers to his genious, at least partially.

[James Steele]

MOTUNATION site banner appropriately updated.

[Armageddon]

PCs may be as numerous as SUVs, but Jobs created Maseratis. I owe about 99 percent of my career and livelihood to his great works, and I'm sure many of you do, too. The world's gonna be a darker place without him.

[zandurian]

I remember a couple of weeks ago hearing that he was "resigning". I should have known what that meant.

Here's some interesting background info:

"Her name is Joanne Schiebel. In 1954, she was a young unmarried college student who discovered that she was pregnant. In the 1950s, her options were limited. She could have had an abortion – but the procedure was both dangerous and illegal. She could have gotten married, but she wasn’t ready and didn’t want to interrupt her education. Joanne opted, instead, to give birth to the baby and put it up for adoption.

And so it was that in 1955, a California couple named Paul and Clara Jobs adopted a baby boy, born out of wedlock, that they named Steven.

We know him today…as Steve Jobs.

It would not be overstating things to say that Steve Jobs is my generation’s Thomas Edison. As one observer put it, he knew what the world wanted before the world knew that it wanted it.

If you have an iPhone or an iPad or an iPod, or anything remotely resembling them, you can thank Steve Jobs.

If your world has been transformed by the ability to hear a symphony, send a letter, pay a bill, deposit a check, read a book and then buy theater tickets on something smaller than a cigarette case…you can thank Steve Jobs.

And: you can thank Joanne Schiebel."

[zandurian]

Here's the official apple page: http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[James Steele]

I recommend watching this if you haven't seen it and have 15 minutes. I learned some things I didn't know about him.

[tntgraham]

OHMMMMMMMMMMMMM

[bolla]

"Make a dint in the universe" - Steve Jobs
Brilliant.

Bolla.

[cowtothesky]

Very sad news. Steve was as significant as Walt Disney was in his day.

[cbergm7210]

Inspiring article:

Steve Jobs: America’s Greatest Failure
Glory is sometimes born of catastrophe.

Steve Jobs’s announcement that he is stepping down as CEO of Apple is not surprising. He’s a very sick man; and running the world’s largest market-cap technology firm can’t be easy for someone with pancreatic cancer and who-knows-what other ailments.

Lots of digital ink will be spilled about Jobs in the coming days, most of it focusing on his truly marvelous successes.

It’s better to focus on his failures.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.

Everyone today thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on. Yes, he transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else Jobs did.

Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product.

Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.

Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more.

Jobs is a great entrepreneur for another reason. Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.

I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.

All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.

There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

— Nick Schulz is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of its journal, The American.

[James Steele]

Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.

Just as a point of accuracy, isn't this incorrect. Jobs did not get ousted by Scully until after Macintosh was released. Perhaps it wasn't a commercial success then, but it sounds like this is saying he was out prior to Macintosh introduction?

Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more.

One thing perhaps worth mention though is that NeXT included NeXT Step OS, right? And wasn't a good deal of this OS ahead of its time and inspired Mac OSX???

[James Steele]

There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

Okay... I almost deleted this paragraph. This is political and I do not want posting of political points of view that become an open invitation for political debate.

[cbergm7210]

Apologies, JS. For the record I copied and pasted an email I received from my mother, of all people, and did not read all the copy word for word. Delete as see fit, of course. I know nothing of Nick Schulz, personally. I just found the failure part of the article most inspiring for me personally, as I have been self employed my entire life.