Today is the first anniversary of Steve’s Jobs passing, and as a result there have been some great tributes coming in, including the one from Apple themselves. However here are some of the others, from leading tech blogs, writers and celebrities. Note that some have been taken from this time last year.
Steve Jobs is still missed.
You hear it on stages, like when Marc Benioff, chief executive and co-founder of Salesforce, urged 90,000 attendees at the firm’s Dreamforce conference to fill in the visionary hole that Steve Jobs left.
You hear it at cocktail parties. At one by Morgenthaler Ventures, for instance, Apple team members who worked on Siri talked about how they missed Steve Jobs yelling at people.
You hear it on the streets. While standing in line for the newest iPhone – which included one of eBay’s top search experts, Andy Edmonds – people noted that the industry was a bit more boring without Jobs.
Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD:
That Steve Jobs was a genius, a giant influence on multiple industries and billions of lives, has been written many times since he retired as Apple’s CEO in August. He was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or a Henry Ford, and set the mold for many other corporate leaders in many other industries.
He did what a CEO should: Hired and inspired great people; managed for the long term, not the quarter or the short-term stock price; made big bets and took big risks. He insisted on the highest product quality and on building things to delight and empower actual users, not intermediaries like corporate IT directors or wireless carriers. And he could sell. Man, he could sell.
Steve Wozniak:
Mat Honan, Wired:
Jobs has joined the pantheon of greats who advanced science and industry and society itself — a modern-day Tesla but appreciated in his own lifetime. He’s our Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, one of those rarefied individuals who had not only a vision but the will and force of personality to execute it through America’s greatest cultural triumph: the public corporation.
[…]
Jobs, like the titans of industry before him, realized that when we think about how the world works, we are actually thinking about the way people have made it to work. And that means that if you don’t like the way the world works, you are free to change it. Which is exactly what he did.
[…]
What we talk about when we talk about Steve Jobs is ourselves. Our relation to him, or to who we want him to be. We talk about him in a way that helps us understand both him and ourselves, to make sense of how he could be way up there while we’re stuck down here, tapping away on one of his machines, praising its design, bitching about its Maps. And if you think you’ve heard or read it all, just wait. Just wait.
The Webby Awards (including Barack Obama, Bono, George Lucas, Bill Clinton):
