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Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Steve Jobs
  the tributes being paid Jobs are (imho) for specific products. Thus betraying the utter lack of insight of the commentators paying such tributes. The real stand-out creation of Steve Jobs isn't the iphone or the ipod or some piece of hardware -- it's Apple, the corporation. Which, as the smarter pundits recognize, is a corporation that develops products and grows like a start-up -- except that it's a start-up with a gigadollar revenue stream before it gets started on the double-digit percentage annual compound growth....
• scentofviolets commented on Steve Jobs
  Thus betraying the utter lack of insight of the commentators paying such tributes. Er . . . no. Don't confuse what is being said here with what is being said in the world at large. One more time: my contention is that if Jobs had died five yous later than he actually did, the extravagant public kudos he's been receiving in absentia would be much more muted. And this is because he is linked in the public's eye with the most recent and very material, very physical product offerings - the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad....
• scentofviolets commented on Steve Jobs
  Actually, I misread what you were saying; please excuse my last comment....
• brucecohenpdx commented on Steve Jobs
  These three road maps are normal for any billion dollar and up tech corporation. What we want to know is whether Apple has a fourth road map, the Hari Seldon Steve Jobs guide to the 21st century. It used to be said that Sony -- under Akio Morita -- was working to a fifty year plan. Yeah, though I'm skeptical of how useful it would have been. When I worked for Intel we had a 5 year plan in effect at all times; but we made a new one every six months and it was usually totally different from the...
• Charlie Stross commented on Steve Jobs
  The first generation of visualization glasses They already exist. Not made by Apple, and there are two categories: gold-plated and overpriced to MIL-spec, and cheap rubbish (plugs into your iPod to allow you to watch movies in flight). The picture is rather like mp3 players before the iPod; rubbishy solid state ones with 64Mb of capacity (yes, Mb, not Gb -- enough to hold about an hour of over-compressed mp3, to compete with the then-ascendant tape walkman) or over-priced and over-sized hard disk ones in the form factor of the portable CD player, or (I'm thinking of Archos here) a...