Steve Jobs, Our Prometheus
The death of Steve Jobs has unleashed a torrent of comparisons. Is he more like Edison, Ford or Carnegie? Is his crowning achievement the Mac, iPod ir iPad? Or something much more meta, like "Think Different."
I'd suggest that the former comparisons are too, well, human. (Over on US News, Rick Newman makes a thoughtful case that Jobs doesn't really rank with those greats.) And the latter are focused too narrowly on the tech specifics or too broadly on a vision of general achievement.
I think Jobs was a one-off of a particular kind of creativity. A century from now, I think Jobs will be seen as a Promethean figure. If your contact with Greek myths has receded in your memory, Prometheus was the brother of Atlas, the guy who carries the world on his shoulder. The goddess Athena taught Prometheus architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, and metallurgy, and he in turn taught them to people. He's also the god credited with bringing fire to humanity.
How does that jibe with Jobs? As much as any other person, Jobs was the person in the digital age who made the most sophisticated technology accessible to the largest number of people. And his successes inspired many others to do likewise.
Before the Mac, computers were largely the province of geeks who were fluent in <backslash> commands and handy with a soldering iron. Jobs didn't invent the mouse or the GUI (graphic user interface). But his machines were the first to take those ideas to the marketplace. After the first Mac, nobody could say that it was impossible to give people an intuitive, physical way to communicate with the innards of the magic box.
Before the iPod, downloading music was a tech-heavy hit-or-miss process reserved to the skillful and unscrupulous. After the iPod (and the iTunes store) nobody could say that using the Internet to distribute music to the masses was too challenging a task.
The iPhone put the Internet, the whole Internet, into anybody's pocket. And the App store turned a phone and web browsing tool into, well, pretty much anything. There's an app for that in iTunes. And in other operating systems that were created to compete with Apple.
The ultimate promise of the iPad is harder to see. Too soon. But it's surely a step in the long line of increasingly easy ways that regular folks have access to top tech.
How universal is Jobs's gift of technology? Last week, my 86-year-old mom used my six-year-old iMac to check on the availability of theater tickets for a local show. A less tech-savvy person than my mom is hard to imagine.
Might other moms use Dells and Windows to accomplish similar tasks? Of course. But without someone like Jobs to demonstrate the possibilities, how long would it have taken others to find this road? Because of Jobs, nobody could say that making these technical miracles work for the average person was impossible.
Bill Gates is also an accomplished fellow, but much of Microsoft's best work has always been a step behind and inspired by Job's best. Jobs was hardly alone in his creativity, of course. Lots of Apple engineers did heavy lifting. The wizards who created Netscape and Google and even Facebook have contributed to the broad access of information to anybody who can find a smartphone or keyboard. But I bet the history texts of 2111 will remember Steve Jobs as a prime mover in bringing the fire of highest tech to an eager humanity.
And one more thing: There's an irony in comparing the myth of Prometheus to the reality of Jobs. After Prometheus brought fire to humanity, he was punished by being chained to a rock. Every day, a bird ate his liver. And every night it grew back. Sad to say, Jobs was able to pull that trick off only once.
