Skip to main content

Steve Jobs

This post may be a little late (two days to be exact). I would not really like to write an obituary, that can be done by people far better than myself. Rather, this is about how Steve Jobs has affected my life, and those of everyone across the world.

I must admit, I'm not an Apple fan. In fact, I'm an Apple hater. More than anything else, I hate the Apple fanboys who keep harping about how cool Apple products are. I have never used any Apple products so far, except maybe tried out some that my friends have. Yet, Steve Jobs and his vision has affected my interactions with the technical world in many ways.

Take for example my phone. I use an Android, and it's awesome. I just love the multi-touch gestures on the phone. But then, that's something Apple came up with on the iPhone. If it were not for the superior touch screen capabilities of the iPhone, we would still be stuck with boring single touch resistive touchscreens which had to be worked with styluses. Not only that, the multi touch trackpad on my computer too has been inspired by it's Macintosh cousin.

The next example is the displays on all computers so far. Steve jobs, in his commencement address, which is attached at the end of this post, mentions that if Apple had not come up with proportionately spaced fonts, probably no computer in the world would have this feature. That is not an overstatement. The fact is that Macintosh has indeed always set benchmarks for competition. Just watch the video where Jobs unveils the Mac in 1984 (again, attached at the end of this post). Since then, till the day he died, that video shows what Steve Jobs was capable of. He let superior products made by the companies he led, speak for themselves. When he joined Apple in 1997, he was facing the challenge of leading a company that was near bankruptcy. He knew, in his heart that there was a huge base of Apple loyalists who would pay much more than the market rate to get products which looked good. He was the one who envisioned newer markets for Apple other than computers, coming into the realm of music players, phones and tablets. In these markets too, he set benchmarks for the entire industry. He never did actually come up with new technology. He found niches in the market for existing technologies where no one found any earlier.

Some while ago, I wrote a post trashing the way Jobs marketed his products. My main argument against this form of marketing was that it promoted a form of consumerism wherein people are convinced that they cannot be happy unless they have the latest and greatest Apple products. That argument is still valid. Nevertheless, I know that I shall miss Jobs on the stage, with his charisma and his enthusiasm. Steve Jobs shall surely go down history as one of the greatest entrepreneurs, next to the likes of Henry Ford.

Do take some time to watch these videos in case you have not seen them already.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Harry Potter and why I dislike the series

There could not be a better time for this post. There could not have been a worse time for this post. Now that the penultimate movie of the series is out, and my facebook wall filled with people who loved the movie. But this is something I really wanted to say, and I shall say it anyway. Harry Potter is pathetic literature. Now, you must be wondering why I say that. There are many reasons. Firstly, the storyline itself is flawed. When a writer sits down to write anything, he/she must set up some essential rules about what is happening. These rules must remain constant irrespective of how many times he/she changes his/her mind. This is so that the readers are allowed to have some sensibility in what they are reading. In the fourth book, Rowling goes ahead and kills Cedric. Then, at the end of the book, the horseless carriages are there again. Nothing special. We all knew that they are horseless. But then comes the fifth book, and BAM, the horses are actually winged beasts that only thos
20 comments
Read more

ERROR_SUCCESS

ERROR_SUCCESS. This macro would be familiar to all those who have done some programming in WIN32. It is the output of the GetLastError() function to check the thread's last error state when no error has occurred. Weird, isn't it? I mean, if it is a success, then why is it marked as an error in the macro? This is one example of a badly made API. APIs are considered bad when programming in them becomes non-intuitive. Software is said to be bad (or said to suck) when it seems counter-intuitive to the user. There is one very simple example of this. Start notepad. Type in any text. Click on close. The message that you see is: This makes no sense to me as a user. Of course, the programmer follows the approach that he creates a temporary file called Untitled , and in that file he allows the user to make all his changes. But how am I, as a user to understand that? A similar disconnect occurs even between two different programmers. That is why it takes a whole lot of effort to make
2 comments
Read more

Elements of a Story: The Whispers

I'm compelled to begin each post with a meta. That way, my blog posts seem less like essays or dissertations, and more like diary entries, or web logs. So here goes... I started this blog a little over a year ago. The main purpose of this blog was to experiment with styles of writing, and find an effective outlet for all the subjects I wish to rant about; saving my classmates the agony of having to listen to them. As I wrote this blog, I've experimented with so many styles, and have received comments claiming that my work is a shameless copy greatly inspired by so-and-so author/work. Fact is that I simply chanced upon that style. I read, so obviously, my work shall reflect the styles of those I admire, but I've worked out so many styles without even knowing that they exist, only to be informed of them later. Recently, I've been struck with the seeming absence of whispers as an element of a story. The more I've thought of the subject, the more I've been convince
10 comments
Read more