The Web Remembers Steve Jobs: Our Guide To Tributes Elsewhere

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On the anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, Cult of Mac is marking his passing with a series of tributes running throughout the day.

Apple has turned its own homepage over to honouring Jobs, including a message from Tim Cook. It’s stirring stuff, the kind of thing you’d simply never see from any other company. But then Steve wasn’t just any other boss.

The whole web is full of Jobs comment and tribute articles today, so here are some links to some of the ones we’ve read and enjoyed this morning.

Over at Wired, Mat Honan writes an honest and heartfelt tribute, comparing Jobs with history’s greatest engineers and industrialists Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford:

Even when we don’t discuss Jobs directly, he is still in our conversations. If you talk about mobile anything, you’re talking about Steve Jobs … There’s not an important mainstream technology product or service out there right now that isn’t a result of or response to Steve Jobs. It’s not so much that we want to keep talking about him; it’s that there’s no avoiding it.

Honan adds this wry observation:

Future generations will examine what influence he had and what he meant to our culture in ways that we cannot see yet. Perhaps in a drama about the people who built post-industrial America, viewed on some unimaginable interface that is as much a descendant of Jobs’ iPad as the iPad itself is of Edison’s electric lightbulb or Tesla’s radio.

At CNN, David Goldman suggested Jobs ability to say “No” until Apple products were perfect was one of the company’s greatest assets:

Jobs’ genius was never in the logistics of running a company; it was the “yeses” and “nos” of knowing which visions to pursue and which to abandon.

Writing for BBC Online, blogger Robert Scoble said Steve Jobs was still missed in Silicon Valley, for all sorts of reasons. One of them being Jobs’ “instincts”, which guided Apple through many a minefield in the past:

We know a new contextual age is coming where our mobile devices will serve us, but we don’t have someone like Jobs who is telling us how we’ll get over the uncomfortable feeling that we’re being stalked by the technology we’re carrying around.

The Guardian‘s technology editor Charles Arthur wrote a nice piece on Tim Cook’s year as CEO since Jobs died, saying the company had already taken subtle new directions with Cook in charge:

… Cook is trying to mould the company to see itself not as a scrappy underdog – as it was under Jobs until recently – but as what it actually is, a business giant, even though (as Cook once put it) all the individual products it sells could fit on a tabletop.

Seen another great Jobs tribute today? Post a link in the comments.

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