STEVE JOBS DIED YOU GUYS OMG

[rozn]

Except his inventions were just semi-transparent casings. And he presented every new product like it was cold fusion or something.

I forgot where but I read somewhere that his speeches were part of the success in selling the products. He was a good speaker and people admired that. Lemme try to find that quote.

[Potjeh]

So why wasn't there this much fuss when Billy Mays died?

[rozn]

Who was that again... Oh ya the oxy clean guy... mhmm right ok that pretty much sums him up xD

[Potjeh]

He did the same thing as Steve Jobs - pitched mundane crap like it was a more important invention than fire.

Really, what's wrong with this world when being a snake oil salesman is a respectable profession?

[Jackard]

So why wasn't there this much fuss when Billy Mays died?

but there was some fuss when Billy Mays died

[cobaltjones]

Except his inventions were just semi-transparent casings. And he presented every new product like it was cold fusion or something. The man was really insufferable with his praising of his products and himself, but I guess that's forgotten now that he's dead.

You seriously have absolutely no idea what this man actually did for the personal computing world and you're making yourself sound quite stupid. Either read up on his history with bringing the computer into the home and his work with graphical user interfaces or please stop acting like you have any idea what you're talking about.

I'm not even that big of a fan of the guy but seriously saying "HE JUST PUT IT IN SOME SHINY WHITE PLASTIC!" is so far off base it's laughable.

[Potjeh]

And what exactly did he do? HP and IBM did PCs before Apple, Xerox did GUI first, and you can't beat Microsoft for making computers mainstream.

I mean, seriously, everyone is going on and on about how much he did, but nobody is saying what it is that he actually did.

[rozn]

And what exactly did he do? HP and IBM did PCs before Apple, Xerox did GUI first, and you can't beat Microsoft for making computers mainstream.

I mean, seriously, everyone is going on and on about how much he did, but nobody is saying what it is that he actually did.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daniel-g ... 40746.html

It's difficult to put a tag on what it is precisely that Jobs did. He didn't create a fundamentally new business structure, the way John D. Rockefeller did with the vertical integration of Standard Oil. He didn't democratize a product that had only been available to the very rich, as Henry Ford did with the Model T. And he didn't fundamentally alter the distribution, logistics, and production systems the way that Sam Walton did with Wal-Mart. Under Jobs, Apple simply created a bunch of really cool products that people decided they needed to have.

Edit: Comment by a reader: They forgot to mention Pixar... this little animation company that was going broke and Steve decided to finance them and provided them with everything and they blossomed into the best Animation Studio in History. He recognized talent everywhere. Without him Pixar would cease to exist.

Which is true as well.

[cobaltjones]

And what exactly did he do? HP and IBM did PCs before Apple, Xerox did GUI first, and you can't beat Microsoft for making computers mainstream.

I mean, seriously, everyone is going on and on about how much he did, but nobody is saying what it is that he actually did.

HP and IBM didn't do PCs, they did business/server components. The Apple II is basically the first computer device marketed towards personal/home use. Jobs also championed the use of GUIs in computing (Xerox didn't bring to the masses) years before Microsoft Windows.

Henry Ford is the most often example brought up (Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he simply made automobiles that people wanted to drive). The main thing that made Jobs a "visionary" is that he was able to see and understand what people wanted/needed out of their computing devices and he was able to give it to them. The iPod/iTunes digital store basically revolutionized media consumption and completely changed the way the recording industry approached their sales. Like already mentioned, he saw the potential in a small computer animation division of Lucasfilm and purchased them and personally provided them the tools to become what we now know as Pixar. He left Apple in the mid 80's and created a GUI operating system which become the basis for the current Macintosh OSX operating system, and after rejoining the company in 1996 when it was bleeding money (Microsoft was actually giving them money so they would stay afloat and could avoid monopoly issues), Jobs guided them to become literally the largest publicly traded company on the world market.

A really simple but also really telling example of just what kind of effect one man's vision can have on the course of something...

This is what the Android Moblie Operating System looked like shortly before the first iPhone


And this is what the Android Mobile Operating System looks like after the release of the iPhone

[Tonkyhonk]

gosh, i feel im getting real old now.
windows GUI is just a copy of what Mac had had for long. many of you dont know how they sucked before.
Mac actually made it possible to let "the rest of us" use computers easily without learning all the unecessary bs.

personally, Mac was the only one for so long that i could have multi-lingual typing so easily without experts' help.
(i needed to use 3 different writing systems on the same documents for work and couldnt do it on windows before.)

also, if there were no Mac, there would have been no Excel either...you might have been stuck with Lotus.