It’s not fair when the work you’ve dedicated so much of your life towards is being recognized, lauded, cherished like never before but you can’t enjoy it to the fullest due to poor health.
It’s messed up. Here’s a person whose beliefs and vision have led to a company’s incredible run in years of late and have shaped in many ways how humanity uses its current tools, and as his legacy grows around him, his own health deteriorates. Here’s someone who presided over his own “post-Steve keynote” (macabre). It was the shoulder bones pointing corners in the traditional black mock turtleneck that were unsettling to me, and while he strode upon his stage with his smile, he was gaunt, sparse, reserved. He’s not well. And that is sad.
Working in technology, I believe that we’re privileged to live in a time when we can see and hear business visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos express their thoughts to the world and lead companies driven to improve, improve, improve the experience of their customers. And with Jobs, he pretty much created the notion of a technology keynote that people would actually stop what they’re doing to tune in to. It’s his gig. And I know that Phil Schiller (who seemed like an 8th dwarf waddling around the stage) and Scott Forstall (who seemed like he’d lost a battle with a blow-dryer) have presided on the stage before, but they’re just not Steve Jobs. But they’re running the show now. And that is sad.
I’m not an Apple enthusiast. The Apple ‘reality distortion field’ and the hyperbole that gets spun up around these events bothers me. Much of the WWDC presentation was derivative of others’ existing work. Every detail Jobs extolled for iBooks, as an example, was old news for Kindle and its Whispersync service <chuckles at ‘Whispersync’>, yet there’s this sheen of novelty cast over the proceedings.
All that said, I’m a Steve Jobs enthusiast. He is someone who understands the full depth of customer experience - the details matter. It’s not just devil in the details, it’s angels. It all needs to mean something, it all needs to just work. It needs to make us better.
I’m sure others have written on this topic more effectively, but it seems so wrong to me that this person who is only 56, seeing so much success, having given so much, has this dark shadow so close to him. But we can only be grateful. To me, software (the reason you’re reading this) and hardware are important, they are the tools we humans are using to advance. And this person has helped us do that - advance. It is a good time to be alive.
