I fully understand that we all use C on a daily basis in a real technical sense, in the exact same way that everyone who drives a car uses an internal combustion engine on a daily basis. And if we lived in a more intellectual society, perhaps dmr would be better known than Jobs and Carnot would be better known than Ford. But we live in a consumer society, so the people who can interface with the consumer market are more famous. The question of who anyone would like to hear about is one that is totally separate from the question of determining who in actual fact accomplished important things. Jobs accomplished important things, even if you don’t think they’re interesting or worth the time to talk about. But you can say that instead of saying that he didn’t actually do anything that merits credit.

you: a major influence on the development of personal electronics OK. I didn’t say no. I did say: There are Jobsian marketing strategies, and Jobsian employee management techniques.

So fine, what about the technologies then?

Well, there are Jobsian technologies (VD’s phrase) depending on when and how they become his. Are they his because he promoted them as a powerful CEO? That’s one definition, but that’s not how I would assign “ownership”. Even still, I’ll go with that definition for sake of argument.

Which technologies are his then? Here’s my list, please add what you think I have forgotten: GUI, tablet gestures, the Apple Store, a closed shop for development, and the iTunes store.*

Some of these are great, truly, but I don’t see these as fundamental for purposes of communication. For example, cell phone technology, or the technology that underlies the internet is far more fundamental. I especially don’t see Jobs’s work as fundamental to the things that VD is mentioning. And I do think it fits with the spirit if not the intention of the post.

And why mention Dennis Ritchie? The death of the two of them so close in time, with one death discussed non-stop and the other non, seems like such a perfect illustration of “less famous men”.

It may not seem to you that users interact with C (and Unix), ever, and don’t come into contact with dmr’s work. But in fact they do, every day, because C and Unix underlie pretty much everything OS related that we do. It’s the combustion engine we are using, and the assembly line, right now.

I see Jobs’s contributions as business decisions. I’m sure that’s great in context but it’s just not interesting to me. I don’t want to denigrate, just contextualize. For me, in the really long run, business decisions are not as important as tech decisions. For me, Jobs didn’t invent the combustion engine or even the assembly line.

I’d rather hear about the more hard core tech stuff (and I’d rather hear about the civil rights stuff). This post is about priorities, those are mine.

I see Steven Jobs as the prototype of the famous man that obscures others. And not just famous but famous in a really specific US-American way. Because he’s so good at what we truly value here, more than anything else, ever, at all. And that’s business success.

The business of America is business, right? Well, I want to say publicly, that I wish it weren’t. I wish it were tech, or science, or civil rights.

* and some more boring blablabla from me that maybe you know already

Graphical user interfaces is work that came from Xerox Parc, which Jobs brought to market in the 80′s. So you don’t need to read stuff, you can just look at icons. The gestures thing, such as two finger pinches and drags and what not mean that a user can interact with a screen more directly, (and maybe not have to read words or even look too much at the icons). All this work done elsewhere, by other companies. Jobs was smart enough to spot it. Once spotted, especially in the case of the gestures, he had a big enough engine behind him to bring the ideas to market. The tech part is not his work, but rather the work he promoted. That progression, text to icon to gestures: great idea. Bring these things to market: great idea. Give credit to Jobs? sorta, for business decisions.

I would argue that the iTunes/Apple store is one of his most useful ideas, but I would also classify it as a business idea, not really a tech idea.

Here’s my story about this: Am I, jane doe rodriguez, addicted to sharing music? Yes. Do I want musicians to benefit from their labor? Yes. Great, make it cheap and easy for me to buy lots of music. Let my conscience be easy, and let the artist get exposure to a far larger customer bases than ever before.

The closed shop thing meant that Apple could practice very strict quality control over what appears on Apple machines. In doing so, some of the wilder problems and glitches of using Windows machines are smoothed over. But some development gets cut off too. It’s a trade off. Windows went one way, with predictable results. It makes sense for Apple to go the other way, if they were (once) competing with Windows. Even still, this seems more like a business decision to me, and not really a tech idea.

You could say I have now defined away the arguments by redefining what is tech and what is not. So be it.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/father-of-c-and-unix-dennis-ritchie-passes-away-at-age-70/

The kind of influence that we think Steve Jobs had, Dennis Ritchie truly did have. But he is unknown outside of tech circles. Hmmmm. Showmanship much, Steve?

…

I’d love to have a thread one time where we talk about expanding modes of communication and the good and bad they represent. I say bad because of course communication is a tool, to be used in all kinds of ways. Like maybe a FFT on whether or not the internet is a vector of freedom.

(And I can hear you asking “That’s what you think is a fun thread?”)

The ‘products’ of Mr. Jobs allow for the dissemination of ideas.
Ideas change the world through the agency of social justice activists.
Music is a powerful conduit for these ideas.

The way I see it, the technologies that aid communication are not the ones that Jobs made his mark in. He was working a couple layers up from there.