Hear, hear.

>You may have seen the news stories about Apple’s latest splashy product launch. This time there weren’t any new products, just incremental upgrades to existing ones like the iPod and iTouch. Most of the attention went to Apple’s now long-tenured founder and CEO, Steve Jobs. You may have heard the rumors that he is dying, including at least one prematurely published obituary by Bloomberg News that was rescinded.
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>And so it was that Jobs stepped onto the stage on Monday in his trademark blue jeans and black turtleneck for another launch event. The photo op, clearly staged as such, was a giant headline illuminated on the screen behind him as he walked on: “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” The news reports I have read said he looked thin – “gaunt” in one telling, “not a lot over 100 pounds” in another – but energetic. Talk about tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. (Wall Street, those gimlet eyed parasites, has already acted; Apple stock has been hammered this year on the prospect of a future without a CEO who is about as irreplaceable as any, and with no designated successor).
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>If the shoe is about to drop, as I hope it is not, maybe now is the time to praise him. Death brings with it customs and politely fuzzy memories that are social lubricants at the time, but poison to accurate remembrances of the person who lived.
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>He is not a man without flaws by any means. His temper is legendary. He had an illegitimate daughter. OTOH he has since reunited with her, and even back then he named one of the seminal early Apple machines after her: the Lisa. Personally I think it’s so cool that he named his company’s moonshot machine after an illegitimate child. (The Lisa, burdened with a $15,000 price in the early 1980s, not to mention a less than sprightly GUI based on the work at PARC labs, was a slow seller. Its faster, friendlier, and cheaper offspring, the Macintosh, was another story).
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>The other thing I think is impossibly cool is the most basic fact, and the opening phrase of any reputable obituary of Steve Jobs when the time comes: “Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer….” Apple was the quintessential Silicon Valley computer startup. They, along with Hewlett-Packard, defined the genre. “They” being the two Steves – Steve Jobs, the visionary and marketeer extraordinaire, and Steve Wozniak, the engineer who built the first Apple computer. They did this literally in a garage. For a corporate logo they chose a multicolored apple. The leftover sense of love-peace-and-granola from the Bay Area hippie days, not so long before, endowed the company with an anti-establishment elan it has never completely lost. The Macintosh development team – a shockingly small group, a dozen or so key players – worked in a satellite office with a pirate’s flag flying outside the entrance. The Macintosh announced itself to the world in a legendary TV commercial that was broadcast only once.
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>In his spare time Jobs started Pixar, which has transformed and rejuvenated the animated movie business.
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>He is truly an original, a man who has left footprints in the sand. I hope I am reading the tea leaves wrong and he is around for many more years.