WWJD

Screenshot from iBooks "Steve Jobs"

I downloaded the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs and have been making my way slowly through the 927-page electronic document. At the pace of a chapter a day, I won't be done till mid-December.

The juicy bits--tantalizing hints about Apple's future products, Steve Jobs' opinions about powerful and famous people and the advice he gave them--have been well-publicized.

What's intriguing to me are the stories of the people and experiences that shaped him: the adoptive parents who inculcated their values, the birth parents who struggled with culture clashes (his father was Syrian) and economic hardship, the teachers who recognized his talents, the youthful nerds who competed and collaborated with him, and above all the unique confluence of engineering can-doism, risk-seeking capitalists, state-of-the-art science, and social informality that marked the soon-to-be-nicknamed Silicon Valley in the Sixties and Seventies.

More who knew Steve Jobs will undoubtedly write their first-hand accounts in the months ahead. We'll pay attention in the vain hope that we can better understand how Steve Jobs could combine vision and action unlike anyone we have ever known.

Because he was right so often about so many big things, his pronouncements have become revered as the closest thing we have to Scripture in these iconoclastic times. Steve even anticipated this development; he advised Tim Cook to never ask what would Jobs do but "to just do what's right."

Too late for that. Until the moment he left us Steve Jobs continued to see truths to which most of us are blind. "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

The "Steve Jobs" display does remind one of the 1984 commercial, nicht wahr?