Belated thoughts on the death of Steve Jobs

I was in North Carolina last week when I pulled up the New York Times home page and saw that Steve Jobs had died. I don't know why I was so shocked. I'd seen the photos of the man from his last appearance in June, and I'd written about his resignation from Apple in August, and you didn't have to be a genius to do the math.

For some reason, I just can't seem to shake this death off as being just that of another famous person I'd never met. I'm quite sure much of it is that Steve Jobs was only four months older than I am, and when you start seeing your own birth year as the first of the two dates in obituaries and tombstones, it drives home your own mortality in a way nothing else really does. But there's something heartbreaking about seeing a guy who from all indications did everything right with his health, was a vegan, a Zen Buddhist, had access to the best medical care, and died of one of the more horrific cancers anyway.

Yesterday I was reading Newsweek's coverage online, because I think someone at the postal service took my print copy (something that happens every time there's a particularly interesting cover story.) I happened upon this photograph of Steve Jobs with his wife Laurene:



...and just completely lost it.

Again, not sure why, except that it's easy to pore over the many photographs of the smartypants college dropout, the young executive with his Macintosh, and the many, many photos of the cool guy inveiling his latest cool gadget, even as the trajectory of those images is to watch the man fade away. But I think what this photograph drove home is that there was a Steve Jobs we never considered. We knew about the pregnant ex-girlfriend he'd abandoned and his role as deadbeat dad. But what we never, ever saw that this wasn't just the guru of techniks everywhere, but also a man who grew, matured, and became a devoted husband and father. It depicts a side of this man that the world never saw, because he guarded it so ferociously.

That he WAS so private, even as he was so public, makes it doubly appalling that some on the right have decided that since Steve Jobs was adopted, it makes him the perfect poster child for a movement which assumes that all women who have abortions decide to do so as blithely as they would decide to have a pedicure and go out for a nice lunch. They're dragging out the "What if Steve Jobs' mother had aborted him?" canard. We've seen this before, in the context of President Obama; the assumption being that every woman who decides that for good reason she just can't have a child right now, is carrying the next Steve Jobs or Barack Obama; never conceding that a woman could instead be carrying Jeffrey Dahmer or Adolf Hitler. It's something they never had the gall to do when Jobs was alive, but now that he's gone and can't rebut them, he's fair game.

This morning as I drove to work, I passed by a Verizon Wireless store that had about fifty people waiting outside. At first I thought it was another strike, until I realized that these people were waiting outside at seven AM on a Friday morning to buy the new iPhone; to have in their possession the last phone blessed in person by Steen Paul Jobs. AAPL closed today at $422 a share, up $13.57.

Life goes on.

It isn't just about the hit to my retirement planning

Back in 1995, I took the money out of my then-employer's 401(k) and put it into an IRA that contained mutual funds and some individual stocks. One of those stocks was Apple, and my new account had 40 shares of Apple purchased at $38/share. A 2-1/2 for one split later, and a small investment in Apple stock started to play a sizable role in my retirement planning, for all that the Apple products in my house consist of an iPad that was gifted to me and a PowerMac G5 that had outlived its usefulness at its former corporate home and had been relegated to the computer recycling dumpster.



Still, for all that Casa la Brilliant is not an Apple home, (unlike that of my father, which ought to be used in Apple commercials), the company in many ways led me towards my IT career. Yes, as an administrative assistant at Standard & Poor's I used first a Wang word processing terminal and then an IBM AT-class computer, which boasted a 286 processor, 512K of memory, and a 40mb hard drive; but it wasn't until I moved to the IT group and fell in love with the little white elongated cube that smiled at me when I started it up that I started along the path towards a world that led me to believe that I could write programs and make pretty pictures for presentations.







When the history of my generation is written, it'll be about the ones who crashed and burned, or the ones who we thought Changed Everything but ultimately changed very little. But if in the future, the gadgets that people use to enrich their lives and obtain information continue to evolve, it won't be Bill Gates that they'll remember as the great historic figure, it'll be Steve Jobs.



And so aside from the financial hit that I'm going to take tomorrow, as Chicken Little investors start dumping Apple stock (making it a good day to buy, as far as I'm concerned), I find Steve Jobs' resignation from the CEO position at Apple to be some of the most melancholy news I've heard today:

Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave for an undisclosed condition since Jan. 17, resigned as chief executive of Apple Wednesday, saying he could "no longer meet" the duties and expectations of the job.



Interim CEO Tim Cook was immediately elevated to CEO, while Jobs, 56, will stay on as chairman of the board.



"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know," Jobs said in a letter to "the Apple community" that was released by the company. "Unfortunately, that day has come."

It isn't that Jobs is saint. Unlike his peer and rival Bill Gates, Jobs never decided to parlay the ridiculous amount of money he made out of the company he started in his garage with Steve Wozniak so long ago into a post-midlife career as a big old cuddly philanthropist. And opinions vary as to whether he's this nice, humble, zen guy, or a ruthless asshole. But when you look at where technology is now, with a world of information at our fingertips, and how reports on the Weather channel giving advice on what to do about your phone service don't even MENTION landlines but show clip after clip of people carrying iPhones, or when you walk into an Apple store and whether you feel a lack in your life or not, you immediately think WANT. NOW. SRSLY. -- or when the Apple store itself makes it into a song lyric to a hit Broadway show, you know that what Steve Jobs has done over the years is nothing less than change the world we live in. It isn't so much that he created products out of thin air, but he has always had a sense of the intuitive mind and a great sense of design. Sure, Apple has always built great products which it's been able to sell at a premium price, but Jobs has arguably been the first CEO-as-cult-figure -- something all to rare in our greed-obsessed times.



While there are no accompanying reports about the state of Jobs' health, one has to assume that nothing could tear him away from this company except, as he wrote in his lette, he can no longer meet his duties as CEO, that a deterioration in his health is at least a contributing factor to his decision. I'd love to believe that he's accomplished everything he wanted to and now he feels he can step down, but someone with his drive and his constant yearning to explore the limits of technology and our potential to be enriched by it doesn't reach that point in a normal lifetime.



Steve Jobs is exactly my age, which adds another ominous dimension to his decision. No matter that he's achieved in his career a level of immortality that even the most legendary cultural figures can rarely hope to achieve; 56 is not a particularly old age.



I hope that he has many more years ahead of him to continue to explore and dream for his own enrichment after spending thirty years exploring for ours.

Dear Steve Jobs: It's Not Always About You

Dear Steve,

I know that Apple is your baby, perhaps more than any other company is the direct spawn of its founder. I know that among the community of Apple devotés you're like a TV preacher who's also the deity for whom he shills. I know that you're the vision guy, the face behind the product. I know that people who go to MacWorld look forward to your appearance the way some people used to look forward to a Grateful Dead concert at Madison Square Garden. It must be heady stuff. And to a large degree, the mythology surrounding you is justified.

There's only one problem.

You're not a deity. You're all too human, as your body has been telling you ever since 2005, when you had surgery for pancreatic cancer. And you simply cannot continue this policy you have of being Mr. Apple, Without Whom The Company Cannot Survive.

We all want to feel that we're important, and vital to whatever endeavors to which we're a contributor. Look, I had a job in which I had skills and talents no one else in my department had. And they laid me off anyway. And they're managing to live without those skills and talents. It's not easy to realize that we are all expendable. Even you.

I know you've built Apple into this hybrid of corporation and evangelical cult, with you as its center. I know that when the board of directors booted you out and brought in John Sculley, thinking that a guy who could sell Pepsi could sell computers, he damn near ran the company into an iceberg. I know that once you came back, the company thrived again. I know this because Apple has done a great job, as it always did, promoting its products; products that combine style and substance. And the ads with John Hodgman are hilarious. I also know because Apple's stock price went through the roof, and since 40 shares in my IRA became 100 shares through stock splits, and were at one time going for $190 not that long ago.

And that's why I'm writing you, Steve. Because frankly, you look like hell. And people are scared. We're afraid for you and we're afraid for ourselves. There's a huge community of people who are card-carrying Apple-heads, and they aren't just the geeks at Macworld, either. All over the country there are parents and grandmas making picture books of their family vacations and meticulously documenting their kids' development -- projects they're learning how to do at the Apple store. There are Web developers and graphic artists who rely on Apple for their very livelihood. And then there are people like me, people less than fifteen years away from retirement, who've seen our retirement funds decimated because the markets are not taking kindly to watching you waste away and not create any kind of succession plan.

Let me just kick an idea out there. Isn't it just possible that by not creating a succession plan, you can convince yourself that you're not really sick and that you'll live forever? Isn't it possible that your mind has created a kind of twisted logic which says that if Apple can't survive without you, and you ARE Apple, that you by definition have to be immortal because Apple needs you? Isn't it just possible that not having a succession plan is your way of trying to beat back death?

It would be perfectly understandable for you to feel this way. But one of the consequences of being The Guy for a Big Operation is that it can't be about you anymore. You may have created this company, but there are too many people who are reliant, not just on you, but on the survival of this company. There are the employees and their families. The employees of the ad agencies and other associated companies that help Apple promote its products. There are the many shareholders -- shareholders like me; who have seen the value of their holdings plummet -- and now they continue to plummet simply because you have not been forthcoming about your health. Privacy? Sorry, dude, but you don't get privacy. When you decided that Apple = Steve, you turned yourself into a living, walking 10K. You don't like it? Then do something about it.

Back during the heyday of the Apple vs. Microsoft wars, we always thought you were the good guy and it was Bill Gates who was the dick. You were the good-looking one, the charming one, the guy whose PCs had smiley faces when they opened up, and they had pictures. You had the whiz-bang enthusiasm of a kid who grew up watching Mr. Wizard while Gates seemed like a kid who used to wear a suit to second grade. He was Nixon and you and Woz were Bobby Kennedy. So what happened? How did it turn out that YOU became the egotistical dick, more concerned with your own interest and this little bubble of invulnerability you've built around yourself, while Gates is out there spending his billions on trying to eradicate malaria and HIV in Africa and improving water quality in developing countries?

I'm glad you've decided to take a leave of absence, but it's not enough. Do you really think that taking a leave is going to stop the concern -- and yes, it is concern -- about your health? The answer is simple: Come clean. Release your health records. Yes, it's intrusive, and it shouldn't be necessary. But YOU'RE the one who set yourself up as indispensable, so if this bothers you, well, you should have thought of that.

So go. Take care of your health. But while you're out of the public eye, take care of business -- the business of Apple. Because whether you like it or not, it can't be just about you anymore.

Between an iRack and a Hard Place

Even during the “glory years” with the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, I believed that Saturday Night Live just wasn’t that funny. Oh sure, there were always random moments of savage comedic brilliance, but most of the time I felt as though I needed a few shots and a bong hit for the jokes to work.

I thought shows like SCTV, In Living Color, the Upright Citizens Brigade, The Kids in The Hall, and MADtv were much funnier. Shorter, too.

After seeing Bush and his lying sock puppet of a general in the news the other day, I remembered this classic comedy sketch from MADTV that satirizes both Steve Jobs and the War in Iraq. It’s intelligent, well-crafted, ruthless in its’ logic, and doesn’t overstay its’ welcome. Only the humorless disciples of the Cult of Mac wouldn’t find this textbook example of a perfect comedy routine funny, and even then I’ll bet a treacherous chuckle will sneak out when St. Jobs isn’t looking.

You'll laugh bitterly even as the tears run down your face.

Just Say No

One object I had in placing Bartleby so handy to me behind the screen, was to avail myself of his services on such trivial occasions. It was on the third day, I think, of his being with me, and before any necessity had arisen for having his own writing examined, that, being much hurried to complete a small affair I had in hand, I abruptly called to Bartleby. In my haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance, I sat with my head bent over the original on my desk, and my right hand sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with the copy, so that immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby might snatch it and proceed to business without the least delay.

In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”

“Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here—take it,” and I thrust it towards him.

“I would prefer not to,” said he.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener", by Herman Melville