On the passing of Steve Jobs (repost from fb orig posted Oct 5, 2011)

What I think may not be obvious, to even industry veterans, is that what most believe are novel and revolutionary about what Steve Jobs did at his second stint at Apple are neither new nor revolutionary: the ipod, the iphone, itunes, et cetera.

These all existed in large part long before any iProducts came out.

No, what Steve Jobs should be remembered for is being able to make the business deals and assemble a *complete* product that made these things a success:

• ipod, appleTV, iTunes - having the hardware able to play music AND being able to buy recent music immediately in one ecosystem.
• iphone - a great phone AND access to apps at reasonable prices (the deal with AT&T)
• macs - having a great UI AND a great OS (remember NeXT anyone?)

Steve, without you no one would likely still:

• be able to buy media on their devices at a reasonable price and download it OTA. (Remember ringtones?)
• be able to buy apps and have a extensible mobile computing environment. (Remember J2me apps?)
• run a desktop OS for more than a week :>

Godspeed Steve and thank-you! You've changed the world forever. I hope that we're lucky enough to see something like this again in our lifetime.