Hacker News Reader

Comment by hswolff | Hacker News Reader

I might argue that Jobs is the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology. He’s someone that will be talked about a thousand years from now. And the fact that he was transformative in technology just compounds the reactions to his death right now.

This. A thousands times this.

MG touches on many true points as to why most people feel so sad about Steve's passing.

However I feel like there's a deeper reason that hasn't been properly elucidated.

Or perhaps I'm just far too emotionally confused at the moment to understand why I feel the way I do.

Yes Steve died too soon.

Yes his products affected everyone they touched.

And yes it's scary to think of a future that won't have Steve's direct influence.

Ultimately the passing of this powerful man elicits an emotional response equal to the one he had on you. This varies for everyone, but it exists for many.

RIP Steve. :(

View on HN

Steve Jobs is a brilliant man, but please he won't be talked about a thousand years from now.

Do we not still talk about Aristotle or Plato? Euclid, Archimedes or Pythagoras? Hippocates or Eratosthenes?

Are you seriously comparing Steve Jobs to those giants?

Listen, I don't want to be disrespectful to a man who's just died, but you dishonor him when you try to stack him up next to them.

The ideas and intellectual breakthroughs of the ancient Hellenese that have been passed down to the world through their books are infinitely of more importance than the work of Steve Jobs. This is just not a comparable matter.

kloncks is probably utilizing hyperbole in making comparisons with the great thinkers of western civilization.

That said, we do still talk about Edison, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, over a century later. A millennium? Probably not, but the point is valid, even if off by roughly half an order of magnitude.

Sure, no one's saying Jobs will be forgotten to the sands of time any time soon. Yet 1000 years is a little bit of a stretch, especially when you try to size him up next to the ancient greats.

Lots of differences: for a start, much more will be remembered of our times than is remembered from 1000 years ago. Historians in the future will be trying to determine what is important from too much data.

So you'd expect that someone who rises in the general consciousness now to actually be far more impactful than the 'ancient greats'.

A better analog to Jobs than the ancient Greeks might Michelangelo, and we still talk about him, because what he did for that time was incredible. In fact it's still incredible. Jobs didn't just build amazing products for our time, but amazing products for the future as well. We didn't just fall in love with his products, we fell in love with him and Apple as well. [And FYI, I'm not a fanboy!]

This must be the first entrepreneur/capitalist/CEO that has been mourned on such a global scale, and that in itself is remarkable; there's no one who comes close. Maybe Warren Buffett, but outside of the US he's not that well-known. The only person I can think of from modern times might be Walt Disney, someone who was similarly creative, demanding, and left a cultural and commercial legacy behind.

The problem with that analogy is Michelangelo's work actually survived all that time, the iPhone etc's will be replaced by something from Apple or another company, and the devices will get tossed and forgotten just like all the other generations of technical devices that preceded it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com