This is an absolute gold-mine if you are an Apple aficionado and the entire collection is free to download. The amount of great content on iTunes U never ceases to amaze me.
(via @SteveStreza)
This is a great way to spend some your of free time.
Steve Jobs died a year ago today and it genuinely was one of the saddest days of my life. I’ve no shame in admitting the fact that i cried for a man i had no personal connection with that day.
I had neither seen him in person nor did i ever work for him. Heck, i tried and failed to get one of his famous one-liner email responses and yet it feels like i’ve lost someone close to me.
That is the power of great people and Steve Jobs was one of them. If i had the power to immortalise a single human being on this planet then i would have immortalised him with no second thought. But there is a reason why we human beings are mortals and nobody put it better than the great man himself:
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.
Steve jobs was a man who inspired and will continue to inspire people to do great things for many years to come. Would Apple be better off with Steve Jobs at the helm? Hell, Yes. But the time has come for us Apple fans to move on and be excited about whats ahead for the company that Steve Jobs created and resurrected.
Apple has changed a lot in the past one year but in many ways it hasn’t. Apple is still the most valuable company on the planet and the company is bringing in billions of dollars in profit every quarter. The company still values design-focused engineering.
One of the things that has changed is company’s corporate culture (Some would say for the better) and that is the way it should be. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs and to his credit he hasn’t tried to be one. Tim Cook is now the captain of the ship who was hand-picked by Jobs himself. When i look at Tim Cook i see a man who understands his strengths and weaknesses. He looks very Steely and at the same time he has done things like paying attention to company’s far-east supply chain issues and things are certainly getting better on that front. He even kick-started the Company’s Charity matching program. He even apologised publicly for a less than stellar launch of the Apple Maps application. In many ways, Tim Cook is humanizing Apple.
Humanizing Apple is one thing but keeping Apple at the top of the heap is a different ball game altogether. We don’t know what the future holds for the Company but this is an exciting time to be an Apple fan. We will really know the true mettle of Tim Cook and Co in the coming years. The future is uncertain and that is why it is exciting.
John Gruber once said:
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
Now it is up-to Tim Cook and Co to prove Gruber right in the long run.
“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” and take a look at Apple’s Brilliant tribute to Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs’ Biographer Walter Issacson has penned an exclusive and fascinating piece for the Smithsonian Magazine in which he reflects on the Genius of one of Greatest CEOs the world has ever seen. It is long and i absolutely love it.
Related Video:
Michael Lopp, a former Apple employee commenting on significance of Steve Jobs’ Trademark ‘One More Thing’ Announcements at Apple Keynotes and Why Secrecy is so entwined in Apple’s Cultural DNA:
The best stories, the ones we love, have a surprise ending. Since Steve returned to Apple, an essential part of the keynote was the anticipation of the unexpected, and that means aggressive and invasive secrecy. Not because they don’t want you to know, but because they want to tell you a great story.
It takes a showman to tell a great story. No one really believed Steve forgot to announce The Thing, but he made an amazing show of it.
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
This research paper explains why Apple fans like yours truly mourned the Death of Steve Jobs.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
- Steve Jobs
From 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
P.S. I just saw this on stevetold.us. I visit this site everyday.
Source: news.stanford.edu
Henry Blodget:
Like most people who work at Google, Steve Jobs was brilliant, but he likely never would have been able to get hired at Google. The Google hiring algorithm would have taken one look at his flaky educational background and concluded that he would never have amounted to anything.
Steve Jobs’s genius, in other words, was a sort of genius that Google places little or no value on.
But if Google is to become a beloved mass-market brand, it’s also the sort of genius that Google needs a lot more of. And the place to find that genius is probably not the country’s most prestigious computer engineering programs.
Steve Jobs would have been 57 today but like all great people his legacy will live on for a long, long time. Here’s is an excerpt from the best Steve Jobs eulogy i read back in the 1st week of October, 2011. The post was written by Gary Morgenthaler.
Steve Jobs did not achieve any of this alone. But he was the visionary, instigator, leader, motivator, marketer, pitchman and showman for all of them. He was the most prolific technology and business innovator of our time. His restless intellect uniquely combined the humanities with technology and science, and brought a Zen sense of spare aesthetics to our everyday lives.
His brilliance, passion, commitment and energy changed, and continues to change, the lives of hundreds of millions of people for the better.
Steve’s legacy is hard to judge as a whole, as it lives on in the company he created, the technologies he unleashed, the many acolytes he trained and the aesthetic sensibility he imbued in all of us.
My family, many friends and I mourn for someone we never met.
See Also:
A Sister’s Eulogy For Steve Jobs by Mona Simpson / N.Y. Times
Video: A Celebration of Steve’s Life (Requires Apple Quicktime)
On January 9, 2007 Steve Jobs Introduced the iPhone to the world at Macword 2007 ( iPhone went on Sale in the United States on June 29, 2007). Apple redefined the way the smart-phones should work on that historic day. The keynote was Steve Jobs’ greatest presentation and he had that self-satisfied smirk of a man who knew that the product he was introducing to the world was way ahead of the competition. Great men help create great products that that outlives them and Steve Jobs created not one but many during his life-time.
Macworld 2007 Keynote (iPhone Introduction):
P.S. Apple and Google were partners at the time and this keynote bought back some painful reminders of how Trojan Horse Eric Schmidt (Then an Apple Board Member) and Google backstabbed Apple by introducing Android in 2008. Early Android Prototypes looked like Blackberry phones but Google later decided to shamelessly copy the core concepts of iPhone because it was way ahead of what RIM was doing at the time. I’ll never forgive Google for betraying Apple.
See Also:
Five Year of iPhone - Apple Insider
What Googles Android Looked Like Before And After The Launch Of The iPhone
