No Messiahs here.
“steve jobs turned apple around by turning liberal humanism into a huge marketing gimmick and selling it to hipster college students. he disguised market relations as social relations and made dumb 20-somethings think that the role of seller/consumer is some kind of intimate social bond as long as the company has commercials that appeal to their generic liberalism. this is why a bunch of people are acting like when some CEO billionaire who sold them a product died it was like they lost a personal friend”
Truly, I was always amazed at the kind of rabid following that Apple has achieved and the borderline cult of personality that has formed around Steve Jobs. I can understand people blindly following leaders, but a billionaire CEO with a sad streak of (attempted) authoritarianism?
I shudder to think what would have happened were we to replace Microsoft with Apple. The top down absolute control they demand for their products, on software AND hardware and the way they abuse the patent and trademark system in order to stiffle competition would have choked the free software movement by locking down hardware control as much as possible, and going after people who sought to bypass it.
I have really no sympathy for the man. As much of an icon of our age as he was, his company’s business practices did and continue to do immense harm in our culture. The rabid following he and apple have for having shiny products and a strong marketing section, is really sad in my eyes.
Just nitpicking here, but the word "abuse" implies there are also legitimate intellectual property claims. Apple (and Nokia, Microsoft, Sony etc.) all USE patents, copyrights and trademarks to their full logical extent, which is to create artificial scarcity for their benefit. There's nothing to abuse in an already unjust system.
I don't have much to add here, and I'm glad at least someone on the left recognizes Steve Jobs for what he truly was. Maybe he had some creative talent others didn't (when he wasn't ripping others off), and maybe his contributions were a net benefit to computer & cellphone technology, but none of that really excuses his assholish behavior and business practices.
Well, I used "abuse" in this instance to mean that apple goes even beyond the spirit of the law, regardless of how unjust that is.