Steve Jobs just died

Bob Blaylock said:

Here is a picture of the very first computer to ever act as a WWW server.

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It seems worth mentioning this, and making reference to which individual was most responsible for bringing this computer into the world.

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I had an email exchange with Sir Tim Berners-Lee once.

American said:

Let's see, Denmark invented the ....er uh Internet? No, how about the World Wide Web, uh NOT!! Well how about the PC? Nope......

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Well......While Denmark is a small country, its impact on the "net" is considerable to its size.

Ever heard of Bjarne Stroustrup? Well he invented C++... and you cant say that is not important to not only the web but the computer.
How about Rasmus Lerdorf? Heard of PHP?

As for the "internet"... yes the US built it. But not only did the computer come from Europe (Germany and the UK), but the guy that made the Internet user friendly, aka WWW is a Brit.

All of these people have had far bigger impact on computers, the net and phones than Steve Jobs ever had..

JohnWOlin said:

Pixar started out as a side project at Lucasfilms. When bought by Steve Jobs he wanted them to make computers to help with animation, later he helped bring Pixar films and brokerage deals to get them out there and not go Disney's route of making crappy straight to video. Thanks to his company Pixar, Disney and animation as a whole went through a reniassance in the past 15 years.

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Again there were others.. it was not "his company".

Quoting the inventor of the WWW Tim Berners-Lee:

"I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)"

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Yes, and yet where is it today? What runs the WWW... NeXT or Linux/Unix/Microsoft? Point is, he might have used a NeXT computer to lay down the ground works of WWW, but it was no soon after they started porting the whole thing over to Unix and later Linux.

At the time, no other computer (other than those in research labs and horribly pieced together) featured a GUI. At the time of Apple Lisa and later Mac was created very few developers had access to develop programs. One of those developers was Microsoft which was developing there first graphical Excel program. While being one of the few developers with direct access to Mac, Microsoft quickly developed and began selling an early version of Windows in Japan--the same year as Mac came out and the rest is history...

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And as I said.. Macs did NOT SELL. I dont care how revolutionary the Mac was at the time, but it simply did not sell. Apple and Steve Jobs were their own worst enemy by not allowing 3rd parties to use the OS and not allowing other manufactures of Macs. It doomed the project long before it started simply because Apple was not as popular as Steve Jobs thought it was. Microsoft was the one that not only made an UI based system but also sold it and spread it to 90+% of the worlds PCs. That is an achievement, not being "first".

Apple retail stores are now what the blue print many other companies use for their stores, or redesigned stores--many use the same planners previously hired by Apple (Microsoft, Sony, Disney, Best Buy, Old Navy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn, Abercrombie & Fitch, Macy's)

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Talk about being delusional. Do you really expect us to believe the Apple myth that Jobs invented the idea of a company store? Funny.. I remember going into stores of companies back long before Apple even existed.

Recent years, with the all-in-one PC, and has formed what PC companies will and wont put into computers. Apple was the first to get rid of the 3.5 diskette, one of the first to adapt USB, put cameras in monitors, backlit keyboards, most recently with Intel have designed the Thunderbolt I/O and have made the modern ultra-thin notebook something Intel is pushing along with several PC vendors. Not to mention, Apple has formed the modern smartphone and tablet market which someday the majority of people will likely use one or the other over a PC anyways. You misunderstand what Im saying about tablets and phones. RIM is a shell of what it once was. They will never catch up. They are going the way of Palm in 5 years tops. Apple is the reason why. Apple is the reason why Android looks the way it does (originally planned to look similiar to Blackberry), tablets same thing. Bill Gates had a lot of things right; he has even predicted as recently as 2007 that tablets will be the future and guess what? Jobs and Gates ran/run companies that you directly or indirectly depend on so you will come around eventually, as the tech gets better and does neater things it will be more apparent how there are more advantages to them than disadvantages over a pC.

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Seriously.. The disc drive was doomed for a long time but was kept in place because of external factors. Most drivers for printers and so on until relatively recently came on... floppy discs. That was one of the main reasons that the floppy disc drive was kept in service for a long time.

Only one selling all in one PCs.. is Apple. Will that change.. maybe, but at the moment they are not popular mostly because of price.

Camera's in monitors.. hmm few monitors have camera's in them.. just saying.

RIM is still huge outside the US. In fact RIM is outselling Apple in India. Like it or not, a lot of people like a physical keyboard on their phone. Can RIM recover to the glory days of owning the smartphone market... no, but they are hardly dead yet.

Wrong again. Apple is the first company to offer USB only for peripheral connections when it was first introduced. Besides the iMac being very popular, first computer anyone offered without a diskette drive, it is what drove Apple out of the brink and also brought on the trend of (love or hate it) companies using translucent colored plastics in their products.

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USB 1.0 introduced late 1998... Apple introduce the iMac 1999... so.. DUH! the iMac was probably one of the first new PCs since the introduction.. so big wupti. It does not change the fact that USB did not become popular before it hit the windows PC. And the iMac was not popular HAHAH.. sorry but having so little of the market share means you are unpopular. Apple also tried to kill off USB by promoting Firewire... and how did that exactly go?

Thunderbolt came out this year how can you say it failed already?

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Lack of adoption by motherboard manufactures. Cost of the cable (50 bucks for a ****ing meter of cable.. what the hell?). Lack of things that can use Thunderbolt... where are the printers, disc drives and other things... not made by Apple that is..

Thunderbolt was DOA and intel knows it. That is why they are now implementing USB 3.0 in their chipsets.. Even Apple is being forced by user outrage to add USB 3.0 to its products starting next year. USB 3.0 is backward compatible and can be used instantly by people with their old gear and .... big drum roll..... motherboard manufactures and others are actually adapting the standard hand over fist.

Since I can tell you didn't actually know this and just googled something and didn't actually read it I will leave it at that. Also yes, once Jobs came back to Apple several from Apple left to form the Palm division at US Robotics including Palms eventual CEO.

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But that is not what you said... you said it was a spin-off from Apple. People leaving Apple to form a new company is not a freaking spin off. You were in error.

dontworrybehappy said:

Forcing children to work in unsanitary conditions for minimal pay so Jobs could become more wealthy isn't the sign of a very decent person, if you ask me.

Whenever I found out about the child labor in China I vowed not to buy another apple product. And that was years before Jobs died. I am sorry now that I even bought the ipod touch 2G. I didn't know about it back then.

The man was brilliant and way ahead of his time, but he was also an asshole.

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Fiddytree said:

I hope you turn off your computer. Odds are, the companies that manufacture the parts inside of that thing, were connected to the same factories.

You support exploitation of poorer countries. Now, visit your priest to confess your sins.

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Foxcon is most likely a horrible place to work with long long hours and living in dorms for the workers, but they do not employe child labour in their factories.

Last but not least the value of the Chinese contribution to Apple products is rather small, most componets are not made in China and generally the most valuable value that China has to add to the manufacture is the final assembly of the components.

Lord Tammerlain said:

Foxcon is most likely a horrible place to work with long long hours and living in dorms for the workers, but they do not employe child labour in their factories.

Last but not least the value of the Chinese contribution to Apple products is rather small, most componets are not made in China and generally the most valuable value that China has to add to the manufacture is the final assembly of the components.

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Sorry but that is incorrect... Fist off it is Foxconn.

Secondly Foxconn is the world leading supplier in "bits" that every single computer manufacture uses. Hence the actual contribution by Foxconn is underestimated. Take LG IPS screens in Apple products... made by LG right? Yes, but Foxconn most likely delivers many of the bits and bobs on various boards and chips in the screen that make it work. Another example.. ASUS motherboards, or Gigabyte.. yes Foxconn delivers a huge portion of what makes them what they are.

The difference is that in Apple's case, it is Foxconn that puts the damn things together, where as in most other cases it is the company (LG, Samsung and so on) themselves that put their products together with lots of Foxconn components in them.

PeteEU said:

Well......While Denmark is a small country, its impact on the "net" is considerable to its size.

Ever heard of Bjarne Stroustrup? Well he invented C++... and you cant say that is not important to not only the web but the computer.
How about Rasmus Lerdorf? Heard of PHP?

As for the "internet"... yes the US built it. But not only did the computer come from Europe (Germany and the UK), but the guy that made the Internet user friendly, aka WWW is a Brit.

All of these people have had far bigger impact on computers, the net and phones than Steve Jobs ever had..

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The point was for you to stop your bitching about American ingenuity. We all know how you feel about America, but don't distort the facts. On the topic of invention and ingenuity, the US is the elephant in the room. There is no denying it.

Opteron said:

Well then we should treat it like it is. He was an enterprising capitalist and we were the consumer. We shouldn't make it out to be more than it is. He chose to make products in China and should be treated like other business men and CEO's, I don't know why we are glorifying him and vilifying other CEO's who outsource.

Steve Jobs certainly impacted the world because he made products that millions used, but did he change the world or make it better?, I don't think there's much support for that argument. Did he contribute to charity, did he make the lives of the Chinese workers better? not really. He did make lots of popular innovative products and he should be respected for that, but I don't see how the glorifying of him is warranted.

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I fully agree with you giving our jobs to Chinese is bad however, FOXCONN the company that produces several electronic devices for companies in mass has had some help from Apple recently when a string of suicides occurred, and the workers were treated better. Apple is also in the process of slowly moving much of manufacturing from FOXCONN China to FOXCONN Brazil where workers are treated considerably better. Not to mention most components for Apple's computers come from Japan, South Korea, Texas, Canada, and so on.

American said:

The point was for you to stop your bitching about American ingenuity. We all know how you feel about America, but don't distort the facts. On the topic of invention and ingenuity, the US is the elephant in the room. There is no denying it.

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Yep. Pete's mission in life is to prove that America is irrelevant. That **** sure gets old, doesn't it?

American said:

The point was for you to stop your bitching about American ingenuity. We all know how you feel about America, but don't distort the facts. On the topic of invention and ingenuity, the US is the elephant in the room. There is no denying it.

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Not lately. We do not invent **** anymore. Where is our Hadron Collider? Where is our updated transportation system? Japan has had phones that could stream movies for years (long before the iPhone ever came out). What are we, dead last in renewable energy sources? What are we, dead first in oil consumption per capita? NYSE is no longer american. Budweiser is no longer American.

Well, we may have created the ShamWow and the Slap Chop.

All the stuff consumers all over the world want is invented in America.

Superpowers use oil.

Reg said:

All the stuff consumers all over the world want is invented in America.

Superpowers use oil.

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Wow, great point. Good job using information and facts to back up your argument. What do they use that we invented recently? The only thing I can think of is the Internet - which was mostly thought up by Americans.

There is no demand for alternative energy in the world, except among backward governments. If the Japanese phone that could stream video was any good, Americans would have demanded it, like they demanded Toyotas.

Reg said:

There is no demand for alternative energy in the world, except among backward governments. If the Japanese phone that could stream video was any good, Americans would have demanded it, like they demanded Toyotas.

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So I can assume you are just making stuff up as you go? You cannot just bring a phone over and say, "Oh sweet, check out this phone!". Infrastructure also has to be built to provide the service. Yeah, it's great to have a phone that can stream video, but who cares if you cannot use it? And there is no demand for alternative energy in the world? Have you seen how many nuclear plants have been built throughout Europe and China. China produces far more than we do, and they use far less oil, by the way, so I am not sure how you can justify your statements.

Government didn't build 3g and 4g networks in this country. When the ROI was such that consumers would pay for it, those networks were built privately. Now carriers are at war with each other to aquire their competitors who have them.

That system works.

Reg said:

Government didn't build 3g and 4g networks in this country. When the ROI was such that consumers would pay for it, those networks were built privately. Now carriers are at war with each other to aquire their competitors who have them.

That system works.

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How does that change the fact that it took more years? I do not believe I ever argued that point. And do not say "the demand wasn't there". The infrastructure wasn't there and the wireless companies, being the oligarchy that they are, knew they did not need to upgrade immediately.

When consumers wanted it, entrepreneurs created it.

Reg said:

When consumers wanted it, entrepreneurs created it.

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Are you telling me that consumers did not want a phone that could stream movies 5 years ago? You're funny, guy.

Yeah, otherwise they would have sold them here. Sushi has been around for hundreds of years, but only accepted in America for a few decades.

300,000,000 consumers can't be wrong.

Reg said:

Yeah, otherwise they would have sold them here. Sushi has been around for hundreds of years, but only accepted in America for a few decades.

300,000,000 consumers can't be wrong.

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Quit it, guy. You're killing me. You are comparing sushi (which actually does sell pretty well here) to cell phones that can stream media? I'd say those were accepted, hmm, well about the first day they were sold. Are you or are you not going to admit that America's unwillingness to invest in infrastructure is the reason we fell behind on that market? (I think I know the answer already)

Also, you truly believe that if you asked the average person on the street 5 years ago, "Would you like a cell phone that can stream media and access the internet anywhere?", that they would have said, "No"? I don't think so.

Government's gift to managed telecommunications policy and infrastructure was decades of the rotary phone.

I'll put my money on Steve Jobs, or the next Steve Jobs, if there ever is one again.

Why Japan’s Smartphones Haven’t Gone Global - NYTimes.com

TOKYO — At first glance, Japanese cellphones are a gadget lover’s dream: ready for Internet and e-mail, they double as credit cards, boarding passes and even body-fat calculators.

But it is hard to find anyone in Chicago or London using a Japanese phone like a Panasonic, a Sharp or an NEC. Despite years of dabbling in overseas markets, Japan’s handset makers have little presence beyond the country’s shores.

“Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it,” said Gerhard Fasol, president of the Tokyo-based IT consulting firm, Eurotechnology Japan.

...

Indeed, Japanese makers thought they had positioned themselves to dominate the age of digital data. But Japanese cellphone makers were a little too clever. The industry turned increasingly inward. In the 1990s, they set a standard for the second-generation network that was rejected everywhere else. Carriers created fenced-in Web services, like i-Mode. Those mobile Web universes fostered huge e-commerce and content markets within Japan, but they have also increased the country’s isolation from the global market.

Then Japan quickly adopted a third-generation standard in 2001. The rest of the world dallied, essentially making Japanese phones too advanced for most markets.

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That's right, they were on a 3-g market in 2001. We just reached 4g in 2011. We simply did not have the infrastructure to keep up with their phones. It does go on to talk about things that you discussed, such as not liking the way their phones look or interfacing with PCs, but those are simple tweaks more than anything else. If the infrastructure is not there, what is the point?

Reg said:

Government's gift to managed telecommunications policy and infrastructure was decades of the rotary phone.

I'll put my money on Steve Jobs, or the next Steve Jobs, if there ever is one again.

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The only thing Steve Jobs did was take what was already working in Japan and tailor it towards a western market. He made the phones look more sleek and he made interfacing with Apple hardware easy. Other than that, the idea was not his. A marketing genius? Yes. But it was no invention of his.

And as I said.. Macs did NOT SELL. I dont care how revolutionary the Mac was at the time, but it simply did not sell. Apple and Steve Jobs were their own worst enemy by not allowing 3rd parties to use the OS and not allowing other manufactures of Macs. It doomed the project long before it started simply because Apple was not as popular as Steve Jobs thought it was. Microsoft was the one that not only made an UI based system but also sold it and spread it to 90+% of the worlds PCs. That is an achievement, not being "first".

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So using your logic I don't care that Microsoft made the tablet PC or Palm or RIM made the smartphone they simply DID NOT SELL. Who cares that they were first? They sold a lot so thats all that matters.

Talk about being delusional. Do you really expect us to believe the Apple myth that Jobs invented the idea of a company store? Funny.. I remember going into stores of companies back long before Apple even existed.

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I didn't say that. I said they did it right, and many followed their blueprint. Well, in Microsoft's case they just shamelessly replaced everything that said "Apple" and put "Microsoft" in front of it: Microsoft retail store opening in AZ copies freely from Apple Stores | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Seriously.. The disc drive was doomed for a long time but was kept in place because of external factors. Most drivers for printers and so on until relatively recently came on... floppy discs. That was one of the main reasons that the floppy disc drive was kept in service for a long time.

Only one selling all in one PCs.. is Apple. Will that change.. maybe, but at the moment they are not popular mostly because of price.

Camera's in monitors.. hmm few monitors have camera's in them.. just saying.

RIM is still huge outside the US. In fact RIM is outselling Apple in India. Like it or not, a lot of people like a physical keyboard on their phone. Can RIM recover to the glory days of owning the smartphone market... no, but they are hardly dead yet.

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Actually many people got pretty upset about them taking out the floppy when they did it. Apple also isn't the only one selling an all-in-one, the best? Of course. HP however has the best selling all-in-one line in the US with the HP TouchSmart. Also seriously haven't seen cameras in any monitors? Every single laptop comes standard with them. Several external monitors now come with them. Every single all-in-one made. Every single Apple, Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba computer.

Also saying RIM, which makes several much cheaper and more free offerings than Apple (apple has only one) does better in a third-world country isn't all that impressive. What is impressive is Apple only has (recently) three phones on the market at the same time and makes up nearly 20% of the worldwide smartphone market, being the most popular single phone in several countries (US, Japan, Canada, England) and while Android has nearly half the market now, that is also with 25x+ more phones released in the same time period Apple does.

A Microsoft store would never work because PC/Microsoft people are not brand-loyal, brain-dead consumers. We do not care about each other, we wouldn't go visit the store to look for new accessories to buy every day (have you ever seen an Apple store? WTF are all those people doing in there all the time?). Also, since Microsoft was forced to split up its hardware and software operations, what would they really sell? Who would buy a Microsoft PC? Nobody that uses Microsoft is that dumb. Here is what Apple has done:

They have built a franchise around which its users are completely dependent on them. In my opinion, it's not a good business model, but for now it is slowly working for them.

whysoserious said:

A Microsoft store would never work because PC/Microsoft people are not brand-loyal, brain-dead consumers. We do not care about each other, we wouldn't go visit the store to look for new accessories to buy every day (have you ever seen an Apple store? WTF are all those people doing in there all the time?). Also, since Microsoft was forced to split up its hardware and software operations, what would they really sell? Who would buy a Microsoft PC? Nobody that uses Microsoft is that dumb. Here is what Apple has done:

They have built a franchise around which its users are completely dependent on them. In my opinion, it's not a good business model, but for now it is slowly working for them.

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"Slowly working" enough that they are the most valuable company in the world. "Slowly working" enough that both Microsoft and Google have bought hardware makers such as Nokia and Motorola. One of computing pioneers, Alan Kay said it best:

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

JohnWOlin said:

"Slowly working" enough that they are the most valuable company in the world. "Slowly working" enough that both Microsoft and Google have bought hardware makers such as Nokia and Motorola. One of computing pioneers, Alan Kay said it best:

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

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Microsoft cannot even tie software with their software, so I can only imagine if they tried forcing an inclusive market like Apple has done. Hell, I do not know if you remember the giant anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft because of IE's large market share? How Apple has avoided these issues is beyond me, since you cannot really use any of their products without using their software and, often, more of their hardware. It's quite the racket Apple has running.

Yes, their job marketing tablets and phones has done them wonders, but they'll always have a few glaring issues:

1) Because of their marketing campaigns, they have ostracized themselves to a large portion of the population
2) Their determination to make users buy and use their hardware and software also limits themselves to a certain portion of the population
3) The pricing schemes set up by Apple are outrageous. Their cheapest desktop computer is $1,200! Are you kidding me?

Of course, they do have brand loyal customers, which is a positive attribute for them. For instance, you can never tell any person with an iPhone that there is a better option out there.