[LINK] Jobs not all bad

[Richard Chirgwin]

2c worth.

1c: Apple's wish for the walled garden is far, far older than the iPad 
or iPhone. I have, or had, a T-shirt from the first half of the 1990s 
promoting an Apple-branded Internet service - I forget the name. The 
idea was, back then, that the Internet was big, dangerous and 
uncontrolled, so here's a "safe" place for children. Anyone surprised at 
later developments forgot their history.

1c: In this as in other parts of the Internet, many people were a little 
smug; the aphorism that "the Internet treats censorship as damage and 
routes around it" was our excuse for assuming that walled gardens would 
never succeed. Didn't turn out that way.

RC

On 13/10/11 12:27 PM, grove at zeta.org.au wrote:
> My opinion of Steve Jobs is that like all of us, he was just
> a human being.   He was gifted with some extraordinary opportunities and
> knew how to take them into his control.   Maybe his wandering years in
> India and visiting ashrams and dropping acid did teach him how to create a
> "reality distortion field"?   But I am just kidding of course.
>
> There are people who come along and create vicariously through others,
> thereby amplifying their own capabilities - Frank Zappa comes to mind here.
> He was a brilliant composer for sure, but he had to drive his musicians
> to make coherent sense of his conceptual ideas.    Likewise, Jobs knew
> intuitively what worked in both a technical and aesthetic sense and could see
> conceptually what would follow.  The fact he knew what would sell
> and how to sell it does not make him inherently evil.
>
>
> rachel
>