NYT's David Pogue eulogizes Steve Jobs

[pokerfan]

Forget the fact that he was one of those one percenter capitalists. Never mind that I've never owned an Apple product in my life. Setting aside that I'm not even a fan of the walled garden approach to technology choosing to rough it in the frontiers of open source land. Just ignore all that for a moment. We've still lost a unique innovative mind and we're all a little poorer today.

We've lost someone who truly could dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

After all, there are other brilliant marketers, designers and businesspeople. They’re all over Silicon Valley—all over the world. Many of them, maybe most of them, have studied Steve Jobs, tried to absorb his methods and his philosophy. Surely if they pore over the Steve Jobs playbook long enough, they can re-create some of his success.

But nobody ever does, even when they copy Mr. Jobs’s moves down to the last eyebrow twitch. Why not?

Here’s a guy who never finished college, never went to business school, never worked for anyone else a day in his adult life. So how did he become the visionary who changed every business he touched?

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Often, his laser focus flew in the face of screamingly obvious common sense. He wanted to open a chain of retail stores—after the failure of Gateway’s chain had clearly demonstrated that the concept was doomed.

He wanted to sell a smartphone that had no keyboard, when physical keys were precisely had made the BlackBerry the most popular smartphone at the time.

Over and over again, he took away our comfy blankets. He took away our floppy drives, our dial-up modems, our camcorder jacks, our non-glossy screens, our Flash, our DVD drives, our removable laptop batteries.

How could he do that? You’re supposed to add features, not take them away, Steve! That’s just not done!

More: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-imitated-never-duplicated