Thursday, 13 October 2011
Pioneer of the personal computer revolution, .co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. and co-founder and chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios (24 February 1955 – 5 October 2011).
There aren't too many people who get into a position where they can change the world, and most of the ones who arrive at that point manage to stuff things up, usually because they end up listening to the conventional wisdom as the nay-sayers start gathering around, pointing out what's not actually possible and making helpful suggestions about ways things could be done better.
Whatever other character quirks and personal foibles Steve Jobs may have had, paying attention to the conventional wisdom wasn't one of them.
Over the past week there have been enough column inches filled to make another narrative approach unnecessary, and, in any case, this particular Apple fan boy would rather reflect on Mr Jobs' iconoclastic approach than run through another chronology of his achievements.
With the Apple II among the vanguard of the wave of personal computers that appeared on the market in the early eighties you'd have thought the way to go was to conform to emerging industry standards. After all, no one was sure what these things were going to be able to do, so collaboration would have to be better than competition, and you'd want to keep the programmers on side.
Computer programming was, after all, a pretty sophisticated skill back then in the days of the command line interface.