Steve Jobs died on October 5th 2011, at the age of 56. The news of which broke not an hour before we started to record our podcast.
PodCast… As much as disagree with the association between iPods and podcasts, it’s there. And no amount of Portable on Demand broadcasting can change it. People listen on their ipods, or whatever. And the term is forever linked. Without him that word wouldn’t be here.
There are things being written by people smarter than I am, and by people who actually knew the man. This won’t be 7 fun things he created, or 13 things your didn’t know about the man. A father has left his family, and three young children don’t have a dad tonight. A loving wife doesn’t have a husband. There is a very real loss to the community as a whole, but my thoughts go out to the people who didn’t just lose a leader and a visionary but a human being as well.
Steve Job’s passing saddens me because people are focused on the things he created, and that his vision helped shape. iPads, and pods, Macs and Apples. That seems shortsighted. If you look at this legacy he didn’t love these things. They were designed to be replaced in a year or two. They were products of a much larger vision for the world and a devoting to making beautiful design functional and easy to use. Focus on the abstract.
I wouldn’t have half my friends if Steve Jobs hadn’t been the man he was. Friends in Podcasting, Friends in Graphic Design. My son wouldn’t have his favorite movies, all Pixar. And I wouldn’t have the experience of playing my first video game with my son, not only because it was Cars2 the video game. A Pixar Joint. And not only because the Xbox 360 runs on a PowerPC chip, which for years powered the Mac. And not only because in the 1970’s Steve Jobs and Woz worked with Atari to help cut the code down for Pong, to make room for other innovations. That right there is several layers of genius missing from the world tonight.
I’ll do you one hyperbole better. Steve Jobs, was not the Walt Disney of our time, no he goes beyond that. Everything you touch today is influenced by Jobs, and Thomas Edison. That’s it. I can’t think of another analogue to the mans body of work. He quite simple thought differently, and changed the world. We are living in the world as it is because of what he wrought.
Thank you Steve.
