> Any man heading the company that has a product to sell can do what he did.<p>I disagree.<p>If the CEO is not a part of the equation, then either the engineers and designers at Apple just somehow randomly turned out to be just better than everyone else, or he IS part of the equation.<p>Nobody in the media is arguing that Steve Jobs drew up the iPod design on some graph paper and told people to build it. Everyone is praising him on his ability to work with engineers and designers to improve products and prepare them for consumers. That, and the ability to say no to stupid features tacked on by the builders. He is praised for knowing what customers wanted, before they knew they wanted it.<p>I can't imagine Steve designing the original iMac from scratch, but I can imagine him getting his team together and saying: "Consumers need a beautiful machine that they can take out of the box and turn on with no headaches or setup and connect to the internet. Let's make it happen.". THAT is how Steve thought differently.<p>I don't know how this article made it to the front page. It's uneducated flame-bait.
I love how the first half of the scan is cropped off at: "Jobs did not even eradicate poverty..." What a failure of a man.<p>I agree that the world needs leaders and visionaries in other areas besides computer products, but hey, I'll take what I can get.<p>I disagree with the rest of the article -- the claims that Jobs was not great, that he shirked his duty to humanity by not giving enough to charity, that he didn't "better the lives of his fellow human beings," that he promoted the idea of profit as motivation.<p>There are in fact simple refutations or counterpoints for most of this. A corporation that uses profits to fund future development is a perfectly reasonable vehicle for doing good in the world. Jobs was not primarily motivated by money. And he made explicit that his way of changing the world was by bringing it great tools for creative minds.