0
0
By Stephanie Holland / Senior Staff Assistant
( Apple)
By Stephanie Holland / Senior Staff Assistant
When people die it’s easy to overstate their importance or rewrite their legacy. However, when people say Steve Jobs was a visionary, that may be understating things.
The co-founder/CEO of Apple died Oct. 6 at the age of 56 from pancreatic cancer.
Jobs literally helped invent the modern world. The Macintosh was the first personal computer, the iPod changed the way we listened to music, when he said the iPhone would reinvent the phone he didn’t lie and the iPad will no doubt lead even more advance inventions that will shape the future.
“Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips,” said Steven Spielberg in a statement.
It wasn’t just the products that came out of his tenure at Apple, it’s the devices that other companies were inspired to invent. Without the iPhone there would be no Android, the iPod made mp3 players the normal way to listen to music and would there be a Kindle without the iPad?
“Steve was among the greatest of American innovators-brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world and talented enough to do it,” said President Barack Obama in a statement.
In 1986 when no one knew what the company was capable of Jobs purchased Pixar from Lucasfilm for $10 million. Obviously that investment paid off and he once again pioneered a new technology and helped bring countless hours of entertainment to children of all ages. Though the studio had become successful and he didn’t need to be a part of daily decisions, he still showed up for story and animation meetings, offering his opinion and expertise when it was needed.
Earlier this summer at the D23 expo Pixar storyboard artist Ronnie Del Carmen told a story about pitching the ending to “Ratatouille” to Jobs and John Lasseter. When he concluded his pitch, both men hugged him and Jobs told him the sequence was perfect. He described it as the greatest moment of his professional career. There no doubt hundreds of tech professionals who have similar stories.
“His legacy will extend far beyond the products he created or the businesses he built,” said Walt Disney President/CEO Bob Iger in a statement. “It will be the millions of people he inspired, the lives he changed and the culture he defined.”
The one thing that all these statements have in common is that they refer to Jobs as a visionary, creative genius and rare original.
No one has had the impact on the modern world that Jobs had and short of his competitor/colleague Bill Gates, perhaps no one ever will again.
“The world has lost a visionary and there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented,” Obama said.
