Ülkemizde birisi vefat edip, camide cenaze naması kılınırken, hoca sorar “rahmetliyi nasıl bilirdiniz” diye. Hep birlikte “iyi bilirdik” cevabı adet olmuştur. Steve Jobs arkasından ise, bırakın “iyi bilirdik” sözlerini, çok daha büyük bir yas ilan edildi. Hatta kendisini “yeni nesil peygamberdi” sözleriyle anan batılı yazarlar oldu. Belki bu nedenle şöyle bir fıkra da üretildi : “Steve Jobs öbür dünyaya gittiğinde, melekler kendisini Yahudilik dininin peygamberi Musa ile tanıştırmışlar “tabletlerini upgrade etmeye geldi”.
“the washington times” yazarı “wesley pruden”, “steve jobs” hakkında bir
yazı yazmış. oldukça farklı.
best, abisel
The sincerity of hype and hope
By Wesley Pruden
Steve Jobs was a genius. No one could doubt that. His genius lay not in
technology, as most of the obituaries and eulogies reckoned, but as
master of hype, hope and marketing.
He was the secular prophet for the secular age, preaching the gospel of
the technology that offers salvation, but only a salvation of better and
more beautiful machines. The only higher power he believed in lies
hidden somewhere in the power of more RAM, more powerful chips and in
the perfectibility of an earthly operating system.
Atheist he may have been (though no one knows what he thought in the
moments just before he slipped quietly into the awful and infinite
mystery of death), but the mystique of Apple, which he never quit trying
to perfect and extend, had all the trappings of religious faith for a
secular age. He thought about faith a lot.
Shortly after he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in
2003, he was invited to give the commencement address at Stanford.
Mortality was much on his mind, as such thoughts naturally are for an
ailing serious man. “No one wants to die,” he told the students
assembled on the lawn at Palo Alto. “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’s
life’s change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.”
This was not new stuff, not even from the oracle of the iPod, the iPhone
and the iPad. Socrates and Buddha said it better. But when he died at
56, the full force and appeal of an organized religion spread across the
land. Thousands of iPod and iPad owners descended on Apple stores to
turn them into sidewalk shrines and temples. Many dropped to their
knees, some folding their hands in the universal pose of supplication to
the heavens, to offer prayers to . . . well, it wasn’t quite clear to
whom. Perhaps to an unseen motherboard.
Wondrous as Mr. Jobs’ machines are, there’s an arrogance about Apple
that turns infidels—the unfortunate skeptics armed only with a PC from
Dell or Sony—into puzzled seekers, like curious Christians trying to
plumb the violent contradictions of the Koran. A customer puts down his
$500 for an iPad and the only instructions he gets is the assurance that
“it’s intuitive, you’ll understand how to use it.” Nobody gets an
owner’s manual, and unless the customer has been using one of the
wondrous machines that preceded his iPad—someone who already knows the
rituals of the tribe, the secret handshakes, the words to the strange
hymns, the baptismal rites—he’ll want to throw his new toy into the
street to be punished under the wheels of traffic. Only slowly, like a
Mason suffering through 33 degrees, does Mr. Jobs’ wondrous machine
reveal its riches.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to argue with success, and Steve Jobs won
his success the hard way, by giving his vision its working clothes and
protecting it from the hewers of wood and chippers of stone who couldn’t
understand what Mr. Jobs was talking about when he described the
destination of his machines as “the place where technology meets art.”
He recognized the Internet for what it is, an “amazingly efficient
distribution system for stolen property,” and figured out how to exploit
it all with the personal computer and the machines that flowed afterward
from his amazing imagination.
He was the ultimate capitalist, driven to get all the profits that his
imagination, vision and business smarts entitled him to, but his legacy
to the corporate world is limited. Without the vision, the value even of
hard work is limited. He was contemptuous of the toys of the mind so
precious to the graduate of the business school. He regarded consultants
and focus groups as well-meaning wastes of time and money. Or worse. “We
figure out what we want,” he told Rolling Stone in 2003. “And I think
we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through
whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we
get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people what’s the next big
thing.” He was fond of recalling Henry Ford’s story of inventing the
automobile: “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would
have told me ‘a faster horse.'”
He understood the moral of the story.
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