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Steve Jobs and Alan Greenspan
On the tragic passing of Steve Jobs, while still a relatively young man, it is interesting to juxtapose him to Alan Greenspan, one of the other iconic figures of our time. One made us rich, with a vast array of new products and new possibilities. The other made us poor with a long lasting downturn that could persist for more than a decade.
The two of them can be taken as symbols for the best and worst of modern capitalism. Jobs is the symbol of capitalism when it works. Again and again he broke through barriers, creating new products that qualitatively altered the market by making vast improvements over the competition.
Apple made personal computers a standard household product by developing a simple user friendly idiot-proof system that anyone could use. Jobs was a decade ahead of the Microsoft based systems, using menu driven computers in the mid-80s that were not matched by Microsoft until Windows was developed in the mid-90s. His later generation of computers continues to include features that make it far superior to the competition.
As we know, computers were only the beginning. The iPod changed the way people listened to music. The recently developed CD quickly followed the record on the dust heap of antiquated technologies. Vast amounts of music could be stored in a small handheld device instead of requiring massive bookshelves of records, as had been the case just twenty years earlier.
Then we had the iPhone that made smart phones a standard appliance featuring everything from video cameras to translation systems. And, of course there is the iPad, which, along with its competitors, is revolutionizing the way we read books and is largely replacing the laptop computer.
Jobs didn't do any of this by himself. He put together teams of great innovators. But the point is that he was able to recognize talented people and give them the means to make great innovations and bring them to the market. This is what a market economy is supposed to do.
By contrast, Alan Greenspan's vision was about getting rich. And plenty of people got very rich under the rein of Alan Greenspan, a disproportionate number of them on Wall Street. When we think of successful people in connection with Alan Greenspan we have to think of people like Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide in its heyday as one of the leading pushers of subprime mortgages. Mr. Mozilo walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars while many of his customers faced foreclosure and his shareholders lost their shirts.
Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers is another hero of the age of Greenspan. Under Fuld' s rein, Lehman Brothers took the lead in packaging into mortgage backed securities (MBS) the loans hawked by Mozilo and his competitors in the subprime market. It apparently did not concern him that many of these loans were fraudulent and would inevitably blow up on both the homeowners and the purchasers of the MBS. Lehman also walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars as his company went down in flames.
And then there is Robert Rubin, another Wall Street multi-millionaire. After leading the charge for deregulation at Greenspan's side as Treasury Secretary, he took a top position at Citigroup. He pocketed over $100 million as Citigroup fell to near bankruptcy -- saved only by government bailouts - also done in by the subprime trash it marketed around the world.
The computer guru of Greenspan's world is Bill Gates, a man who got far richer than Steve Jobs. Gates' secret was not making great products -- the only ones praising his creativity at his funeral will be people on his payroll -- but rather in gaining control of markets. In other decades, the anti-competitive practices he pursued to win Microsoft a near monopoly in the computer market might have landed him behind bars. But in the age of Greenspan they made him the richest person in the world.
Unfortunately, we continue to live in the world of Alan Greenspan rather than the world of Steve Jobs. In spite of the remarkable innovations in technology over the last three decades, much of the country is poorer than it was 30 years ago. We have 26 million people who have the skills and desire to work, who can't find jobs or full-time jobs because of the mismanagement of the economy. We have people losing their homes and going homeless even though we have more than 14 million housing units sitting vacant.
This is economic stupidity of a high order. It is a world of unnecessary scarcity, where we have the ability to meet individual and social needs but are governed by people too timid or incompetent to take the steps needed to get the economy functioning right.
It is great to see people rising up in response to this absurdity in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its imitators around the country. Where this will end is anybody's guess, but at the moment it is our best hope for escaping the world of Alan Greenspan and moving toward a world that fosters the sort of creativity that Steve Jobs demonstrated in his too short life.
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97 Comments so far
Show All"Third, he engaged in rapacious business practices (remember NETSCAPE?), resulting in him becoming a billionaire. I would not call that clever, just "business savy."
That (ie, IE vs Netscape) wasn't what made Gates / MS rich.
It was the domination of the pc os market, and more importantly the "productivity" market, ie Office (of course with rapacious behaviour). And to be fair to Gates, Office IS good, principally Excel. Their are other "productivity" programs, including open source ones such as Open Office, but none of them can match Excel.
Except Excel was a bad copy of Lotus 1-2-3 for a very long time, until they managed to replicate its quality through spending lots and lots of money. Same with Word/WordPerfect. Almost the same with Xbox. Same with MS SQL and most of there server software. This is basically Microsoft's (and monopoly capital's) general strategy against competition.
"Except Excel was a bad copy of Lotus 1-2-3 for a very long time, until they managed to replicate its quality through spending lots and lots of money."
Yes, they spent a lot of money, and time. But is is no longer simply replicating 123's quality. It IS the best spreadsheet program now.
"ame with Word/WordPerfect. Almost the same with Xbox. Same with MS SQL and most of there server software. This is basically Microsoft's (and monopoly capital's) general strategy against competition."
No, monopoly capital's strategy is to crush / kill off the competition, then, since they have a captive market / audience, deliver crap.
MS's strength is that while they might start out with making crap, over time, they do get better and better, and over time improve on the crap, so that it is no longer crap.. That is pretty much true of all their main money making stuff, whether Windows, Office, xbox etc.
"Yes, they spent a lot of money, and time. But is is no longer simply replicating 123's quality. It IS the best spreadsheet program now. "
Errr Lotus 1-2-3 has been dead for almost a decade now. Of course Excel is better. What is your point?
"No, monopoly capital's strategy is to crush / kill off the competition, then, since they have a captive market / audience, deliver crap."
Not in all (or even most) cases, in fact they usually deliver quite acceptable service but highly overpriced, exactly as MS has done and is doing.
"MS's strength is that while they might start out with making crap, over time, they do get better and better, and over time improve on the crap, so that it is no longer crap.. That is pretty much true of all their main money making stuff, whether Windows, Office, xbox etc."
This is not "MS' strength", this is how things work with all other companies especially in software, but in other areas also. MS is an extremely generic corporation with a lot of monopoly, there's absolutely nothing special about them. Seriously, wtf.
Excel is the only spreadsheet program, aside from some not-so-user friendly open source spreadsheet for linux. It is called a monopoly.
I used to like Supercalc myself. Quattro Pro was also good - both much better for sceintific/engineering use than 123.
Come to think of it, I never used any MS applicaitions until I was forced to by the Windows 95 and onward juggernaut made MS apps the only thing avaiable at work.
"Excel is the only spreadsheet program, aside from some not-so-user friendly open source spreadsheet for linux. It is called a monopoly."
Right, so there is competition, but the competition is not as good, ergo it is a monopoly.
There is no meaningful competition because MS managed to eliminate competitors through leveraging its power and wealth obtained from a different market and managed to keep this up historically through keeping up high barriers of entry. This is standard corporate strategy to achieve monopoly.
I had this discussion about a dozen times already, and btw I started from your side, about 15 or so years ago when I started working. And yes I worked with MS - not for them though, although we were briefly seeking investment from them during the late 90's, so no need to get personal - it's not my hate, it's more like a slow development and gathering of information, working with them, discussing (and very often predicting) their strategies that changed my opinion.
My point is Excel is the best. It took a lot of time and money on MS' part to get there. but it is there. People want programs that are good, that work, that are easy to use. That;s it. They do not care about the rest of the stuff. They do not care that Excel was crap, that it took a long time to become good. All they care is that it is the best
"This is not "MS' strength", this is how things work with all other companies especially in software, but in other areas also. MS is an extremely generic corporation with a lot of monopoly, there's absolutely nothing special about them. Seriously, wtf. "
No it is MS' strength. To say that this is how things work with all other software companies is ridiculous. Apple for one counterexample. Apple tried and failed for years with their OS, and had to go outside for help, for OS X. And many companies fail to improve their software, and as a result are supplanted by another company.
Seriously WTF, you are allowing your hatred of MS to blind you.
Greenspan's policies have made it virtually impossible for regular working people to buy Jobs' products. I have a full-time job, but must save up for an iPod. How likely is it, now that Steve Jobs is gone, that Apple will repatriate some jobs and lower their prices? Or will they just sit on the billions they have stashed?
The tech revolution created many millionaires and billionaires, and billions in economic activity. I had a conversation with a professor at UT (Austin) who studies the economic impact of high tech. He explained that as a country the PC, Cell phone, gadget, reality we have created has cost us trillions of dollars, most of it borrowed, and will take decades for the economy to assimilate.
The quality of the products aside, there's just way too much praise for Jobs. In fact, the last few years of his life serve as an interesting paradox that sheds light on the complete inequality within the United States. His cancer would've rendered him dead within perhaps months of its inception if it weren't for his excess financial advantage. If to compare that to the limitations that approximately fifty million Americans face who are without any sort of health care coverage, and then couple that with those that are under-insured or can't pay the financial demands of their care, then Jobs is the perfect example of severe class distinction and the overt and enormous advantages that exist within a corrupt capitalistic state.
Many pretty ignorant comments here, and I've never said that at CD.
People seem to forget the history of the desktop computer and just how cutthroat the competition was. How many recall the Amiga, for example? Many back in the day thought it was way ahead of the competition (one example is multitasking), but they couldn't put together a successful business model.
Probably the pivotal years were 1992-93 when Apple came out with System 7.1 for the Mac, the graphical user interface (GUI) of which was so demonstrably superior to anything Microsoft had that Bill Gates, even with 90 per cent of the business market, panicked. He hastily came out with Windows ("Windows just copied the Mac," said Jobs), lied about how "good" it was, promised that all those old business computers would not be made obsolete (not true), thus retaining its near-monopoly. This resulted in years of federal anti-trust litigation here and in Europe.
Around that same period, Apple came out with the LaserWriter, which offered high quality printing and many different typefaces. It revolutionized the printing/typesetting trades. True, the technology originated with Xerox and PARC, and every LaserWriter paid a bounty to Adobe for its Postscript typefaces until Apple developed TrueType, but Jobs combined their technologies with the personal computer, empowering people in a revolutionary way.
People learn in different ways. I hated computers until I discovered the Mac. Coming from a printing/publishing background, I waded into learning everything Mac, and every job I've had since the mid-90s I owe to Steve Jobs (and also Steve Wozniak, who pushed GUI through the Apple II GS, another story).
Nobody's perfect, but now is not a time to speak ill of the dead. Steve Jobs was a creative genius and visionary who revolutionized world communications and lived an aspirational life and died far too young.
As for Greenspan (to stick to Dean Baker's theme), PHOOEY. Occupy Wall Street!
-30-
Relax! I think the comments are mainly in response to the over-the-top lionization of the guy by the media. After all, he was Walt Disney, not Louis Pasteur. And sure, he was creative, but more in the area of marketing than technology. Apple products are no better and often not as good as the competition, but people like glitzy, uncomplicated toys and gadgets and he successfully sold status first and technology second. That was his real vision. Apple software is often more bloated and less functional than Microsoft's and Jobs had no problem grossly overpricing for brand name appeal. Also, there is no doubt that Apple business practices, presumably supported by Jobs, are disturbing. If you are looking for a creative genius who touched millions of people's lives in a meaningful way, look at someone like John Lennon, not Steve Jobs.
"After all, he was Walt Disney, not Louis Pasteur."
Another great analogy.
I read an article recently (can't remember where) while researching the IPad that pointed out that Apple's policy is often to bring out products like IPhone, etc. before they have been given a really robust quality control assessment. They count on tech geeks and early adopters to glom on to them and discover for themselves the glitches that turn up, in effect making consumers their quality control investigators. In a short while Apple then brings out a new version that incorporates fixes. Many commenters on the article agreed with this description. While clever, that strikes me as fundamentally unethical.
Ha. This resonates with an old Andy Rooney-type rant of mine about what I call "beta creep".
It's one of those things that can't be precisely pinpointed. And I'm aware of the perceptual trap attributed to guitar manufacturer Leo Fended, who supposedly quipped, "We don't make them like we used to-- and we never did."
Those disclaimers made, I believe that there was a time when computer software and applications were fairly rigorously tested and debugged before they were released for production and sale.
Products that were not quite ready for prime time, i.e. in their "beta" phase, were offered for free or on a limited basis to the public in order to detect flaws and glitches that weren't obvious on the drawing board.
But broadly speaking, the designers and manufacturers bore the cost of all of this preliminary R & D work. From the bean-counter's perspective, leaving things in the "beta" stage until the quality kinks were ironed out by testing and robust assessments is counter-productive "down time".
So eventually, the producers began to push the "beta" threshold forward; they found that they could get away with unloading minimally developed, buggy product onto the marketplace, and simply do the necessary refinements after the fact based on feedback from paying customers.
They also cleverly turned patches and fixes resulting from their half-baked releases into seeming "bonuses" for the end-users-- lucky consumers could subscribe to no end of "free" updates and fixes.
They made it seem like they were doing distressed customers a favor, rather like a defective automobile manufacturer sending over Mister Goodwrench once a month to swap out defective parts on the death-trap you'd paid for handsomely.
It's truly insidious, because non-technical and non-professional users are in no position to confront software manufacturers-- especially titans like Microsoft and Apple-- and complain about the lemons they are sold.
I mean, it's not like a car or appliance, where physical defects are apparent and can be detected and identified as such. By definition, software is a dark and bloody mystery; when it doesn't seem to be working right, there are a million reasons why it might be malfunctioning.
There's no software "consumer advocate" who can stand up and insist that a given product is substandard and unfit for release. Instead, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
Hell no, it ain't "ethical"-- unless you count "virtually ethical".
Yes, beta creep exists, OS, but the pressure on publicly traded software companies to release software in this manner likely comes not just from market competition and the profits to be made in externalizing some production costs onto customers. Investors and computer trading have no respect for engineering cycles. I expect those pressures may be at work since the software business is a big part of tech financial portfolios. Software engineers probably don't like releasing beta software as finished product, I'm guessing. Software complexity is likely another factor leading to buggy releases, no doubt, but my guess is capitalism is also a degrading factor.
Software engineers probably don't like releasing beta software as finished product, I'm guessing. Software complexity is likely another factor leading to buggy releases, no doubt, but my guess is capitalism is also a degrading factor."
As someone who spent over ten years as a software engineer/developer, I can say from experience that that is right on the money.
I can't even begin to count the number of times I and co-workers were essentially forced by sales and marketing people to release stuff that we knew -- and told the sales people and management -- was not ready for prime time.
And the software I worked on was instrument control software with potentially critical ramifications.
The response was always the same: "Release it now. I just sold 10 instruments and the customer can't wait."
I eventually quit software engineering altogether as a result.
Most software engineers (except the game programmers) that i have known are perfectionsists and like to do stuff well. Acutally take pride in it, if you can imagine that.
But our system really forces people into producing crap. Pride ain't got nothin' to do with it anymore.
In response to you and TIA, I hope it was clear that I indeed believe that the insidious capitalist system, with its overmastering imperative for the quickest and dirtiest profits that the market will bear, relentlessly erodes and leaches away standards of quality and excellence.
In general, management universally pays pious lip service to Quality. But in practice it's always trumped by their venal, self-serving masters' demand for the quickest and most profitable return on their investment.
Software engineers probably don't like releasing beta software as finished product, I'm guessing. Software complexity is likely another factor leading to buggy releases, no doubt, but my guess is capitalism is also a degrading factor."
As someone who spent over ten years as a software engineer/developer, I can say from experience that that is right on the money.
I can't even begin to count the number of times I and co-workers were essentially forced by sales and marketing people to release stuff that we knew -- and told the sales people and management -- was not ready for prime time.
And the software I worked on was instrument control software with potentially critical ramifications.
The response was always the same: "Release it now. I just sold 10 instruments and the customer can't wait."
I eventually quit software engineering altogether as a result.
Most software engineers (except the game programmers) that i have known are perfectionsists and like to do stuff well. Acutally take pride in it, if you can imagine that.
But our system really forces people into producing crap. Pride ain't got nothin' to do with it anymore.
You would probably be disturbed to know that the same problem exists in civil engineering. I review high-hazard potential mine tailings dams - that can kill a lot of popele if they fail - for a federal agency. The licensed engineer-stamped designs are rushed out and full of flaws. It is only the after at least 2 or 3 cycles of regulation-required reviewing/returning the plans by our group of government engineers - who don't work under the pressure of the profit motive, that we haven't had any more Buffalo Creek, WV disasters.
"After all, he was Walt Disney, not Louis Pasteur. And sure, he was creative, but more in the area of marketing than technology. Apple products are no better and often not as good as the competition, but people like glitzy, uncomplicated toys and gadgets and he successfully sold status first and technology second. "
That is what makes them "better". Look different things have different strengths. Some things are better than others at certain things, but worse at other things.To use an example of operating systems, a computer programmer / scientist / geek, would be comfortable with, would prefer something like Linux / FreeBSD / Solaris. S/he would be fine with, would love vi / emacs. Pine would be great for email. The command line, shell scripting in tcsh / bash would be something routine. But not everyone is a computer programmer / scientist / geek. Just as it is unrealistic to expect everyone to be good at playing a musical instrument, or writing poetry, or painting, it is equally unrealistic to expect everyone to be comfortable using all aspects of computers. Or being comfortable with, knowledgeable about all aspects of a car, or even a bicycle.
"Apple software is often more bloated and less functional than Microsoft's and Jobs had no problem grossly overpricing for brand name appeal. "
Beauty, like function, is in the eye of the beholder. And the recent Apple OS are very powerful, since Apple based them on some of the *nixes, for those who start out with something easy to use, but then might want to go further.
You are of course correct about Jobs' neoliberalism.
BRAVO!
All the Occupiers should be educated on the fact that it was Bill Slick Willie Clinton who destroyed the Glass Steagle act with Phil Gramm, the act that led to the destruction of our Banking system. It was the same Slick Willlie who signed of on Nafta, the deal that outsourced our industrial base to China. This is the same Slick Willie who is advising Obama.
Not sure why you're making that comment here on a thread about Jobs, but it is absolutely correct, nevertheless.
Lol..Cathy,
So true....A liitle misplaced but most would agree.....I personally try not to think of President Clinton. Our current President seems to suffer the same fate here at cd...
I writing this fun comment on an ipad2 making it difficult for me to forget the above article is not about President Clinton.
Thomas Gilbert-
Sorry to rain on your parade Dean, but as far as Steve Jobs is concerned, most of the jobs he created were overseas. Apple imports all of it's products from overseas. Yes, brilliant at making very expensive gadgets. Not so great at making jobs at home! But what the hell, everybody buys them anyway. Why not just put a gun to our collective heads and pull the trigger!
"Jobs was a decade ahead of the Microsoft based systems"
They were not even in the same dimension. A few at Micro$oft genuinely want to compete on a level playing field with Apple, et al. And this fact is trumpeted by liberals as 'justification' for the rotten status quo of kapitalist extremism that has driven Micro$oft's kingpins, and their peers, for decades. But after sloughing off the liberal indoctrination, we see that the few engineers at Micro$oft with the good intentions simply do not make up for the rot at the top. Gatez/Ballmur,et al, have been driven not to compete on a level playing field, but to suck blood like parasites from their competition and conquer/dominate markets. People don't understand this, and this misunderstanding has allowed krazy kapitalists to attack all markets with intent to conquer/dominate. Think about it. For markets to be functional, they cannot be dominated/owned/controlled by a single entity. It's common sense, and yet it is rabidly resisted by the elite thug squads in Washing-town who are supposed to enforce the antitrust laws against any kapitalist who tries to hijack, monopolize, conquer/control any market. One of their secret agenda items is global technological imperialism (imperialism of any/all kinds is thrilling to them). But the long slow-motion train wreck of Merkan imperial kapitalism is coming to a screeching halt as the world looks beyond the thuggish curricula of Harvvard Business School, Chicaggo School, et al. Nobody listens to Merka any more. It's a bright new day.
Job was a visionary. Apple survived the juggernaut of Bill Gates and his billions with innovation and pure genius. Apple survived with a sliver of the personal computer market for years. Microsoft usurped mouse-based computing (Apple), word processing (WordPerfect), spread sheets (Lotus), database (D-Base), browsers (Netscape), etc..., with huge monopoly money bombs. Only Apple and the MAC survived.
Then Jobs' genius came out of the box with the iPod, iPhone, iPad. Jobs put technology to work for the masses and amassed a fortune. Apple's value soared.
Microsoft stuck to the knitting and kept selling Windows over and over. Gouging US year after year for their 'enhanced' platform. Jobs will go down in history with the likes of Edison. Gates relied more on monopoly capitalism than innovation. Can't buy me love, Bill.
Greenspan was a gangster. He never developed a product. He never manufactured anything but money from nothing. All the wealth he conjured up for himself and his beneficiaries was from society at large. Greenspan used supply side economics - corner the market, keep supply below demand to drive price and then milk baby milk. Greenspan was a con man. A modern day alchemist. All the wealth he created came from the pockets and the blood and sweat of the masses. Greenspan was just another criminal. A plutocrat running the same old ponzi scheme.
Jobs will be missed and he died too young. Greenspan will not be missed.
iPod was an MP3 player. iPhone was a smart phone. iPad was a tablet. All were already existing product categories, it's just that technology made them actually worthwhile and usable, and of course Apple added some user friendly design fit for today's attentionless and brainless world.
This worship of completely undeserving people is absolutely, completely idiotic. Seriously. FFS.
"Jobs will go down in history with the likes of Edison. "
Except of course Jobs invented absolutely nothing, unlike Edison, on whose achievements, btw, people are also completely mistaken (eg. that he invented the lightbulb). But he actually WAS a great inventor, unlike Jobs. Seriously, the ignorance and the Jobs cult is just unbearably stupid.
Have you read anything about Edison's politics or ethics? I say this as a sincere recommendation. Do you know what he did to Tesla, along with electrocuting elephants and other animals as a public show of the power of electricity.
This has nothing to do with Jobs, by the way. I don't know that much about him, however i am not one who gets excited over new kinds of telephones and techie gadgets. I also think that telephones have become a fetish and texting hasn't raised consciousness of civilization as far as i can see.
Yeah, of course. But he still was an actual inventor, pretty talented too :-) Being smart and inventive doesn't mean that you're necessarily a good person, sadly.
Jobs has no more credibility than Edison or P.T. Barnum for that matter.
Jobs very successfully exploited a wealthy ,ill informed and status driven market and made a lot of money for stock-market speculators, that is all.
Will be remembered in the future for developing a 'Stockholm syndrome' like mentality amongst his customers.
A great irony of Jobs was that, while on the one hand, was the poster-child for individualistic, go-get-'em entrepreneurship so admired by many on the Right, his life and personal brand of "reach for that dream" success underscored the fact that ANYONE in society can succeed with big ideas, and therefor ALL deserve the opportunity to do so (fair access to education, health, housing, hiring, etc).
It's hard to even imagine how many people he ultimately touched on a creative and expressive level. Among friends and family I know many whose lives would have been quite different, and whose imaginations might have flourished less had some of Job's visions not become the available practical realities they did. Like so many others full of contradictions, nonetheless I feel, ultimately a good person. Heaven knows, we sure need other kinds of leadership at this moment as well, but Steve Jobs will surely be missed.
It's a nicely argued essay and almost thoroughly credible, but Jobs and Gates aren't really that different. Both worked in calculated ways to shore up their markets, which are different - one being consumer, with the other strongly being on the business solutions side. Both use the patent system and lawsuits to attack competitors and wrest dollars when a market takes off. Gates certainly is more ruthless. For instance, he used contract law to steal Apple's user interface advances for Windows. So, Baker kind of has it right.
The thing is, under capitalism, there is nothing wrong with Bill Gates' behavior. The corporate structure and the laws don't require ethical behavior or delivering social benefit. And since our government is essentially subordinate to those corporate interests, you get the Frankenstein monsters like Greenspan and Mozilo.
All companies aspire to monopolies, including Apple and (of course) Microsoft. It's not personal; it's just business.
A better approach to innovation would be to have corporations function like nonprofits - only using profits for R&D and operations. They should be chartered with the assumption of providing a social good. The people should have sovereignty over such judgments, and should dissolve those corporations that have violated their charters. So, for instance, given this structure, people might decide to dissolve Blackwater (Xe) or Goldman Sachs. And, of course, corporations do not have speech rights and should have limited representation under the courts system. For instance, they should not have unlimited funds to withstand lawsuits or prosecute lawsuits since human beings don't have unlimited funds. No corporation should have rights greater than a citizen.
Anyway, nice try in this essay, Dean Baker, but all capitalists and all corporations have no restraints in our present milieu and will pursue their self-interests only in the name of profit making, and never for any social benefit. Essentially, the whole system is rotten and must be scrapped.
It should also be noted that Apple doesn't make devices that benefit most people. It builds premium-cost devices for those who can afford them. Microsoft is not too far behind in that respect. Compare both companies to the Indian government's sponsorship of a $50 tablet running Linux.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/10/questions-from-worker-who-reads.html
i think way too much is made of people like Jobs, or Gates, or companies like Apple, or Microsoft.
In terms of bio-cultural evolution, the GUI and the mouse and the iMac and the iPod and iPhone are simply tiny evolutionary steps on the way toward truly networked humanity... continuing along the road started on with the "invention" of the telegraph, camera, telephone, radio, television, computer, transistor, chip, internet, web, etc. These "inventions" are inevitable developments for smart monkeys with our array of senses and capabilities discovering the properties of this cosmos.
Soon enough - provided our technological and industrial interventions in the bio-sphere do not doom us all to die in collapse before these stages are reached - our minds will all be directly connected in an internet that includes our minds.
This will not be due to any "inventor" or "invention" or marketer or ruthless businessman. It is inevitable.
Current research is bearing fruit to connect a chip to the optic nerve - direct connection to the brain. Among much other research and development.
Think of the transformation that occurred when single-celled life forms became electro-chemically networked, followed by the development of sexual reproduction. These transitions led to the riotous explosion of multi-cellular life forms that make up the evolutionary history we are familiar with, we are part of.
Think of the transformation that will occur when "single-bodied" humans (and other life forms and machines!) become networked, followed by who-knows-what further transitions in riotous explosion. The very early stages of the transition have barely begun, with the computer and the internet and the web and "social networking" etc.
It really has nothing to do with any individual human's personality, inventiveness, ruthlessness, etc. And when it is complete, individual humans will have no meaning.
i still find 99%+ of people state unequivocally (as they diddle their android) that they will NEVER allow their implant / network connection to be implanted and attached to their brain. Ha! Of COURSE we will all be implanted, attached, direct-networked. It is simply inevitable. And then we will be swept along and vanish in the evolutionary explosion to follow.
Unless we collapse our own civilization first, through our technological and industrial assaults on the biosphere... smart monkeys!
Many of us certainly deny this narrative. Maybe we could choose our evolutionary path?
Oh give me a break, Baker, you ole corporate shill in disguise. Steve Jobs was an evil greed corporate cocksucker, who didn't care who he trampled to get ahead. His devices of mass destruction were made by slave labor, to increase his overstuffed coffers. There is a special place in Hell for Steve Jobs.
like. :-)
So true. Seriously, there are loads of great inventors and technicians people could admire, why do they have to choose these shitheads? Jobs and the others? What the fuck
"...governed by people too timid or incompetent to take the steps needed to get the economy functioning right."?
Perhaps, but more likely the answer is that we are governed by people who are too corrupt to take the steps needed to get the economy functioning right. Much as I adored Jobs (and will be eternally grateful to him for iTunesU), Apple itself manufactures in China and sells things here like too many others.
I do think this starts in the schools. For far too long we have rewarded conformity and have imposed sanctions on honesty. If this crisis isn't a wake-up call on "go along to get along" I don't know what is.
For more background of Jobs.....
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MJ08Ak01.html
Some further observations given the above thread...
* SJRyan to my mind pretty much has it right.
* To put Jobs in the same neo-liberal context as Gates is absurd. Gates helped create the neo-liberal global system with his virtual monopoly on global computing (name a large corporation that does not use MS Word). By contrast, Jobs was a Buddhist and thus aware of the environment others had created but to which he had to adapt.
* A simultaneous electronics and digital memory revolution has occurred in the relevant period. The first Mac was 128K with no hard drive. Memory was stored on floppy disks. If you had two floppy drives you were in heaven. The progression here has followed something close to Murphy's law. Circa 1992, the Mac Classic has 4 megs of RAM and a few megs of hard drive storage and could run some pretty amazing programs, including QuarkXPress, a high-quality typesetting program that ran rings around MS Word, which was intended as a "word-processing" program. With Quark linked to the new Personal LaserWriter, virtually anyone could become a "publisher." (A long report on NPR points out this revolution: an African man educated in the U.S. takes a Mac system back to his country and is able to publish country-changing political tracts to produce liberal change in his country's governance. His Mac system back then cost $5,000, while to publish by then-conventional methods would have cost 10 times as much. Similar scales of publishing costs existed in the U.S. Most people who are "entertained" by recent Apple products simply have no comprehension as to how the Mac and the LaserWriter (starting at 300 dpi) revolutionized the publishing business. (Among Jobs' earliest interests was Calligraphy, then typefaces, fonts, diacritics, thence to the ability to incorporate mathematical and chemical formulae into his TrueType fonts---at least the most important for academic purposes---consider the costs involved to do that, to write computer code that expresses mathematical symbols in visualized form).
* Tesla vs Edison! Wow! Direct current versus alternating current. (Historically here we have the GE/Westinghouse split...) Edison's first Electric Chair. Tesla was building huge windings that literally created lightning. No doubt, Jobs studied Tesla. And chose to go to miniaturization instead. Electricity ultimately as "information," not some god throwing bolts of lightning from some chosen mountaintop. The early experiments with electricity (Ben Franklin being iconic with his kite and key) were at a macro level. By the mid-90s, Apple was facing a serious design problem on their main printed circuit boards: they were able to push electrons with so much pressure that if an electron hit a right-angle channel it might LEAP the circuit and enter a different copper circuit! Early computing, based on transistors, capacitors, hand-soldered copper wiring, etc., was now confronting submolecular issues.
* The capacity to create both RAM and Memory was growing exponentially. My 8-gig Duracell "thumb drive" is named that for a reason: it is smaller than my thumb but bears a resemblance. It plugs into a tiny port, while to achieve the same information even 15 years ago required a SCSI port the plug-in was near the size of your palm, 64-pins, precisely spaced.
* Many others have been involved in this revolution. Intel, for example, with its background business servers. All these people both collaborated and fought each other and the game ain't over by any means. What they did was to open up an entirely new world of human experience, with both good and bad implications.
Steve Jobs went "retail." His genius was in seeking to democratize the new technology. Some will say he "overpriced" his devices. I would say that this was often true, but he was aware of the bottom line: it costs money to be the most sophisticated in this business; the Mind is a terrible thing to waste. He remained an individual sentient promoting Individuality, while, yeah, as an earlier post noted, eventually we will all be plugged into that great central cyborg computer in the sky, THANK GOD I will not live to see it!
To comprehend the implications, imagine that in the past two decades Apple had failed, and Microsoft obtained not only a virtual but an absolute MONOPOLY on retail computing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we'd still be dependent on the rotary-dial telephone!
This is why anti-trust laws need to be enforced. Dinosaurs die off because they are no longer nimble and cannot adapt to their changing environment. Steve Jobs went a major step forward: he created the environment. Humans can not only "predict" the future, they can create it.
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Jobs never made an Ipad, Chinese kids did. The Iphone factory in China has a phenomenal suicide rate amongst its employees, which may have to do with their society, but........
Jobs was a bright guy but no one, and I mean no one, knows the long term affects of social media and related hardware. Jobs created toys that we then developed uses for (and a zillion laws to oversee), money and novelty became the motivation for inventions and not necessity. There are a lot presumptions surrounding the last 35 years of technology. ie: Everyone and his brother was saying in the late eighties that in twenty years the whole world would be democratic and without any war because of the internet and cellphones. Duh.
Good comparison. Have you seen this video of Occupy Wall Street protestors with a voiceover by Steve Jobs?
http://youtu.be/HRUTvrVOtPw
BTW I didn't know this at the time of the article, but Dennis Ritchie, someone who did actually contribute significantly to computer science and technology, died October 8.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
R.I.P.