FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: nec13 on October 05, 2011, 08:35:39 PM
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It's hard to imagine anyone in the past 50 to 75 years who has had as much of an impact on the way we communicate, and the way we consume. Arguably the greatest innovator of our time.
RIP
http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/ (http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/)
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(http://typophile.com/files/sad-mac_6738.jpg)
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I don't usually care that much about this kind of thing, but he was too young, and he certainly affected my life positively, so yeah. A sad passing
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I love sweatshop operators.
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I liked him.
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(http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/8003/29811110150339823832114.jpg)
a true genius. very sad news.
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I wonder what the mood over at Foxconn is like right now.
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I love sweatshop operators.
The computer you're typing on, I imagine, is made of artisanal, locally-grown components.
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Though I have only ever owned one Apple product in my life so far (Ipod first gen),
he certainly is a pioneer of personal computing and making computing easy and accessible.
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Steve Woz has always been my Apple idol and I used to be one of those guys who thought it was unforgivable that Jobs screwed Woz out of $700 back when Jobs worked for Atari. I eventually figured out the home computer revolution was never going to happen on pure geek power alone and that Jobs' business savvy was as much a part of Apple's success as Woz' extreme engineering skills. It is irksome to hear 'thanks, Steve Jobs, for inventing the iPod', but he helped make computer revolution of the last few decades happen.
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Steve Jobs hired good people and then made them do their best, through a combination of paying attention to details, having good taste, and weird psychological terror tactics. People like Jonny Ive, Tim Cook, and Avie Tevanian were just as important in later years as Woz.
People do keep bringing up the "outsourcing to Asia" point, and it's fair, and it's a shame. But I'd hope for people to do more about global economic conditions besides take the opportunity to be a contrarian or online wiseass when others are marking someone's death, which frankly is all I've seen. This (http://hbr.org/hbr-main/resources/pdfs/comm/fmglobal/restoring-american-competitiveness.pdf), incidentally, is the best piece I've read on the economics of outsourcing, which touches on "Why Amazon's Kindle can't be made in the US" and the differing fortunes of Dell (which outsourced *everything* including design and engineering work and thus is being destroyed by its former contractors) and Apple (which keeps engineering and design in-house). One of the reasons why NeXT wasn't a marketplace success, was that Jobs insisted on building a whole bunch of high-tech factories in the US, hoping to bring down costs via automation, instead of via outsourcing, which by the late 80s was already the conventional wisdom. Jobs used to have a vision of Apple (or NeXT) being a company that was almost 100% vertically integrated, turning raw materials into finished products. But unfortunately he couldn't pull this off and part of Apple's financial success in the 2000s owes to the fact that he just gave up paying attention to supply chain issues, letting his less-idealistic lieutenants handle those sordid details.
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The computer you're typing on, I imagine, is made of artisanal, locally-grown components.
I don't know if emptyquotes are allowed on this forum, but I wanna do it here. Perfect comment.
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Actually thanks to the global hackerspace movement, it's possible artisan computers will be a thing. Will have to wait for homebrew chips, though.