Steve Jobs--the devil is in the details!

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank [at the time ... this has grown massively since], to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

And I suspect he would have, considering the size of Steve Jobs' ego.  The notion of Steve Jobs accusing anyone else of stealing is amusing--at best.  He got his start by selling Blue Boxes in the early 70s, gadgets designed to make free long-distance phone calls by producing the beeps that the telephone system used for switching, which by the way was designed by the other Steve.  Jobs was the marketing guy. And then there was the Macintosh graphical user interface, based on Xerox's "STARS" system, which was designed to allow easy merging of text and graphics in an editing system.  And let's not forget Unix, the basis of Apple's operating systems, or the C programming language, both from Dennis Richie, and others, of Bell Labs.


Steve Jobs was a petty, jealous man, who wanted the whole pie (Apple) for himself. Unlike the original designers of the internet who wanted to share their ideas freely, Jobs was willing to accept and use the ideas of others but reluctant to see anyone else use his ideas or, to be more exact, the ideas generated by the engineers at Apple. He was a designer, not an engineer, and without those who came before and after, doing the hard work and the late nights in their labs, there would be no Steve Jobs.  


I'm not denigrating design.  When I worked in the early 80's at Bell Labs for the group developing the Unix PC, one of my jobs was to evaluate, by both price and design, our competition, including the Apple Lisa and the IBM PC.  I was the only woman on our team, and the only one who preferred the Lisa, mainly for its color--as I remember a soft lavender.  And I loved the documentation, also in matching color.   I also preferred Calvin Klein jeans to those of "little Gloria."   I own a MacBook, and I prefer it to my Windows-based Think Pad, again for its design.   It's white and has a great key pad (the most important feature to me when buying a note book).  The touch is like typing in soft butter--smooth and noiseless.  I don't own an iPod (I'm tone deaf), an iPad (prefer paper when I read), or an iPhone (too expensive), but I'm sure they're wonderful products and wonderfully designed, but hardly the stuff to confer sainthood.  I can only be grateful that Jobs was not Catholic, or there'd be suggestions of canonization.


And then, of course, there were his political positions (and politics is what this blog is about).  Jobs tried to influence Obama to loosen American regulations, which he insisted make it more difficult for Apple to build its products cheaply in the United States.  He preferred to manufacture his products in China, where Chinese health and safety standards are more lax than in the U.S., permitting 13 year olds to work 13 hour days.  So enjoy your "i" products, as I enjoy my MacBook, but remember where it was made, and by whom, and ask yourself whether a few extra apps or a really great key pad are the stuff of heroes.


Let's celebrate instead Elizabeth Warren, still a coming attraction.