Dear Tipsters, Here is a more critical assessment of the consumerism of which Steve Jobs is a part. The writer is Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2063546/Chief-Rabbi-blasts-late-Apple-boss-Steve-Jobs-helping-create-selfish-consumer-society.html
And a follow-up "clarification". http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/149901#.TtvlqXrfW1g Sincerely, Stuart _____________________________________________________ Sent via Web Access "Floreat Labore" "Recti cultus pectora roborant" Stuart J. McKelvie, Ph.D., Phone: 819 822 9600 x 2402 Department of Psychology, Fax: 819 822 9661 Bishop's University, 2600 rue College, Sherbrooke, Québec J1M 1Z7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected] (or [email protected]) Bishop's University Psychology Department Web Page: http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy " Floreat Labore" _______________________________________________________ ________________________________________ From: Mike Wiliams [[email protected]] Sent: 04 December 2011 16:01 To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re:[tips] Thank you Steve Jobs,but ........... I guess the easiest way to deal with the contribution of Steve Jobs is just to quote this passage from his biographer, Walter Isaacson: The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth write large: launching a startup in his parent's garage and building it into the world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art and technology in ways that invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovation by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. As a result, he launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole industries: 1) The Apple II, which took Wosniak's circuit board and turned it into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists. 2) The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphic user interfaces. 3) Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle of digital imagination. 4) Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand. 5) The iPod, which changed the way we consume music. 6) The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry 7) The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email and web devices. 8) The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos. 9) iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our content and let all our devices sync seamlessly. 10) And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where imagination was nurtured, applied and executed in ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on earth. No, Steve Jobs did not invent the MP3 format. However, without the IPod, the MP3 format would have languished in the bowels of brain-dead MP3 players and the music industry would have been dead after a few years of rampant piracy. Steve Jobs brought his imagination to all these products. Without his imagination and incredible drive to change the world, we would likely still be using brain-dead products like CP/M. MSDOS, Wordstar, dBase-II, Sony Walkmans and Windows. Systat was the first stats package to try a GUI. The interface for SPSS is just plain brain dead: "Legacy" Menus? Steve Jobs also brought a philosophy of product development that proved incredibly successful. The software and hardware must be united. If you design using an open architecture, you design for a common element and not excellence. Bill Gates could never yell at the engineers at IBM, Dell or Gateway to make the hardware match his software. As a result, Windows was designed for the common medium, the mediocre. Jobs could demand that Bill Attkinson figure out how to layer the windows for a 9in Mac screen because all they had was 128K RAM to work with. Bill never had that control and Microsoft produced a brain-dead interface when he knew Windows could be better if he had Job's level of control. The legacy of Steve Jobs is independence, imagination and the reality distortion field. If we don't distort reality from time to time, we will remain stuck in a world of crappy, brain-dead products and systems. Mike Williams --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13510.2cc18398df2e6692fffc29a610cb72e3&n=T&l=tips&o=14626 or send a blank email to leave-14626-13510.2cc18398df2e6692fffc29a610cb7...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=14627 or send a blank email to leave-14627-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
