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RIP Steve Jobs

 

October 6 2011

Yesterday's passing of Steve Jobs has greatly saddened me. When he left Apple, I knew his days were numbered and have been praying for him and his family.

I am very sad that I never met nor even seen this great man. But, I do admire his accomplishments.

Personally, I think Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was making UNIX for the masses. He started with NeXTStep, which became Rhapsody, and finally became a mainstream hit in the form of Mac OS X.

Fans of open-source software can not ignore Apple's significant contributions to Free software; not only have they greatly improve Konqueror's browser to give us Web Kit, they also have contributed a lot of code to the GNU GCC toolchain.

I think another one of Apple's strengths is how focused their line-up of computers has been under Jobs' leadership. For example, Apple only sells two types of laptops: The Macbook Air and the Macbook Pro. Lenovo, as a point of comparison, has some 13 different series of laptops (Thinkpad T, X, X tablet, L, W, and Edge; Ideapad B, G, S, U, V, Y, and Z). By having a single strong leader at the helm, Apple has been able to keep their product line very focused which minimizes customer confusion.

My prayers are still with Jobs' family and I am sure he found peace with himself in his last days. He has left this world with a great legacy and has changed the face of computing.

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