[LINK] charity

Frank O'Connor francisoconnor3 at bigpond.com
Wed Oct 26 21:40:02 AEDT 2011


Mmmm,

Like Julian Assange, I really doubt that Steve Jobs was someone I could like. He was a driven, myopic and in many ways immature individual ... a supreme egoist, someone who cared little who he offended and ran over on the way. He was narcissistic, but probably not vain. He was convinced he had a mission and he really didn't care what he had to do to achieve that mission.

He left a trail of ruined people on his way (even his own daughter), exploded spectacularly when opposed or faced with competition, and had little or no tolerance for those who practiced other ways of achieving relevance in his chosen field (e.g. Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and a host of others over the years.)

That said, he had a fine eye for detail, and obsession with design and ease-of-use, and an eye for future markets and technology that few if any could compete with. He wasn't a technologist per se, he was the uber IT consumer ... he knew what he wanted to make his life better, he knew what he wanted to make other people's lives better (at a humungous mark-up for Apple), and he had the resources to go about making it happen.

Again ... Just my 2 cents worth ...
---
On 26/10/2011, at 6:49 PM, Ivan Trundle wrote:

> 
> On 26/10/2011, at 3:19 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> 
>> Yeah, I know this is going to change no-one's mind but in the interests of setting the record straight.
> 
> A well-reasoned, rather rational and yet also passionate approach to understanding Steve Jobs (via his biography) came from Chris Rawson, of TUAW.
> 
> http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/25/review-walter-isaacsons-steve-jobs/
> 
> A selected quote follows, but I recommend that curmudgeons and fans alike read the entire article:
> 
> "Walter Isaacson's 656-page profile of Steve Jobs ... is quite possibly the truest biography I've ever read. In the process of telling the unvarnished truth about Steve Jobs, it dispels much of the myth and magic surrounding the man and his legacy. It does not depict Steve Jobs as the information age's equivalent of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with an iPad in each hand. ...
> 
> What Isaacson gives us instead is a portrait of a man with keen insight, brilliant powers of observation, and a stubborn determination to 'put a dent in the universe'. However, the biography also depicts a man with deep flaws, some of which arguably contributed to his early death. It humanizes a man who's spent much of the past decade as a living legend in multiple arenas, and it gives valuable insight into the person Steve Jobs was, not just the icon he became."
> 
> iT
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link





More information about the Link mailing list