Well, shit.
I’m not going to even try to come up with anything important or poignant to say…
- It probably goes without saying, but I think we lost more than the head of a corporation today. I’m not sure who takes his place. Not at Apple, but in the world. I’m not aware of another person who thinks about technology and humanity the way he could. We’re all a little worse off tonight.
- One of the things I’ve thought about a lot since I started Fight is the course of Jobs’ own career. I tend not to look at all the stuff he’s done so right since 1997, but instead all the things that happened before that. He created the Lisa, which was a mess. He was forced out of his own company and spent years in the wilderness. In that time he created Next, which to the best of my knowledge never really sold much of anything. When he came back to Apple, Michel Dell’s advice to him was to close it. But instead he took everything he was doing at Next and turned it into OS X. He ignored - right up until the end - the parade people telling him he was doing it wrong. And he completely reconceptualized what a computer could be and how they would exist in our lives. I wonder if there were times though, after the first round at Apple, during Next, when he wondered if he had it all wrong. I think about this a lot because it turns out that when you leave a good paying job at a good company to start something on your own because you think you can change things, you spend (or at least I spend) very distinctly aware that you are in the wilderness. You hear a lot that you’re doing it totally wrong. And you hear this from people who are way more successful than you. So I think about Steve Jobs in these times and I press on.
