Yes, my name is Alpha.

Since the news of Steve Jobs’ death, there been many great pieces and stories about the man. I’m going to capture my favourites here. (Hat tip to Techmeme, Jason Kottke, John Gruber for most of these links.)

In Memoriam

At Billboard.biz, they interviewed a bunch of music executives. It’s a little interesting just for the history of it:

“We did our deal, closed it in October 2002, they then pitched it to each of the other, who signed on and they launched it on April 28, 2003. Within a month they sold a million downloads, which startled everybody.

Vic Gundotra, back in August with a personal story:

After services, as I was walking to my car with my family, I checked my cell phone messages. The message left was from Steve Jobs. “Vic, can you call me at home? I have something urgent to discuss” it said.
[…]
“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

Errol Morris:

IN MEMORY OF STEVE JOBS: The only CEO to call me at midnight to discuss an advertising campaign. An extraordinary and fascinating man.

Stephen Colbert, delivers a hilarious yet beautiful segment about his own dealings with Steve and Apple. The last moments of this clip is masterful. (Hulu link. In Canada, watch the clip on CTV)

Walt Mossberg, in a rather self-asserting but otherwise finely written post:

But I can honestly say that, in my many conversations with him, the dominant tone he struck was optimism and certainty, both for Apple and for the digital revolution as a whole. Even when he was telling me about his struggles to get the music industry to let him sell digital songs, or griping about competitors, at least in my presence, his tone was always marked by patience and a long-term view. This may have been for my benefit, knowing that I was a journalist, but it was striking nonetheless.
At times in our conversations, when I would criticize the decisions of record labels or phone carriers, he’d surprise me by forcefully disagreeing, explaining how the world looked from their point of view, how hard their jobs were in a time of digital disruption, and how they would come around.
This quality was on display when Apple opened its first retail store. It happened to be in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, near my home. He conducted a press tour for journalists, as proud of the store as a father is of his first child. I commented that, surely, there’d only be a few stores, and asked what Apple knew about retailing.
He looked at me like I was crazy, said there’d be many, many stores, and that the company had spent a year tweaking the layout of the stores, using a mockup at a secret location. I teased him by asking if he, personally, despite his hard duties as CEO, had approved tiny details like the translucency of the glass and the color of the wood.
He said he had, of course.

Larry Brilliant:

The defining character of Steve Jobs isn’t his genius, it isn’t his talent, it isn’t his success. It’s his love. That’s why crowds came to see him. You could feel that. It sounds ridiculous to talk about love when you are making a gadget. But Steve loved his work, he loved the products he produced, and it was palpable. He communicated that love through bits of steel and plastic.

Matt Drance:

The vast majority of Apple’s unprecedented resurgence took place while Steve Jobs stared death in the face. How many of us could have lasted this long at all, let alone accomplish all that he did along the way?

Jason Snell:

Steve Jobs could have left Apple at any point after his cancer diagnosis. He had enough money to buy one of those private islands that only rock stars and James Bond villains can afford. That he didn’t, even after living (briefly) with a death sentence before it was transmuted into a future of struggling with cancer, tells you something about his passion.
Apple was his passion. Not just the company that he founded and then rescued, but what Apple represented. Apple as an engine that took the highest technology the human race had yet invented and turned it into products that people would buy, use, and love. It’s telling that at numerous Apple events, Jobs would cart out his street-sign slide, the one that indicated that although Apple’s address was 1 Infinite Loop, the company’s heart was firmly planted at the intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts.

John Gruber, back in August:

Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like.
[…]
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.

Horace Deidu, in a brilliant post simply titled “Steve Jobs Didn’t”:

Steve Jobs was not a magician. He practiced, a lot.

While Mike Daisey opined against nostalgia and offered sharp, but fair, criticism even at Jobs’ death.

Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to.

Likewise with John Lilly:

As a people manager and leader, I really struggled with how to think about him. The stories of how brutal he could be on the people around him — employees, competitors, and everyone else — are legion, and they’re not apocryphal. He could be deeply dehumanizing and belittling to the people around him. Like a lot of people of great vision, which he surely was, he did it all in the name of greatness, of perfection — but I have enough close friends who have been in the line of Jobs’ fire to know how personally destructive it could be, and as a manager I have a hard time with it.
[…]
On Twitter yesterday Naval nailed it, as he often does: “I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But, his message was the opposite. Be yourself, with passionate intensity.”
That’s it, I think — that’s the biggest message from Jobs’ life. Don’t try to be like Steve. Don’t try to be like anyone.

Quotes

And here are some remarkable Steve Jobs quotes that have surfaced.

This quote can sound rather cold, but it can also makes Steve sound like a reinvention artist, like a Beatles or Radiohead — always looking forward, and not revisiting the old sounds.

“When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

From Steven Levy, Steve Jobs on boredom.
The quote shows a Steve’s humanist and perceptive side. He was the atypical technologist. He marketed technology with a clear love and optimism, but that technology doesn’t replace the magic of being alive:

“I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.

This quote from a 1996 Gary Wolf interview shows the same sentiment. (Although I do wonder if he re-estimated the impact in latter years?)

The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t. I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much — if at all.

From another old Gary Wolf interview, Steve Jobs buys an appliance:

We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

… and Finally

And finally, here is a hilarious post from The Onion that’s been quoted and retweeted everywhere. I totally lost it when I read it.

“We haven’t just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we’ve literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on,” a statement from President Barack Obama read in part.

Yes, the article is funny because it’s cynical — it ribs on American leaders and corporations, perhaps in the context of the recent economy.

But isn’t it also funny on a secondary level, where it defuses our hyperbole?

Sure, there’s some truth in it. Most of us have a little voice that says “there goes a man who really knew what’s going on”. But we’re also laughing at this Onion article because it’s ridiculous. It’s not true. There are many Americans who “have their shit together”.

Perhaps there will be no one with the same acumen, or the same batting average — but we all know that great men are out there, and there will be more.

As Steve said in that famous Stanford speech,

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Life goes on.

Let’s go out there and work hard on the things that you love.