Our sick obsession with Steve Jobs ‘health’
For months and months I’ve been complaining about my own ill fixation with the Apple CEO’s well-being, or lack thereof. Others have noted the same in themselves, yet none of us is apparently willing to stop. Sadly, there’s a rather simple explanation for it all.
Just like our obsession with other celebrities, we really don’t care about Steve per se. What and why we want to know about Lindsay or Paris or Michael Vick or whomever has nothing to do with caring let alone good corporate governance.
New York Times, being a rich organization staffed with clever writers, found the perfect person to comment on the issue of Steve Jobs health, and his remarks could just as easily to be applied the Apple CEO as Madonna’s newest ward.
“Everybody knows that Steve has a grave illness and that he has devoted the same compulsive energy to making sure that the company runs well in his absence that he puts toward everything else there,” says Paul Saffo, a noted technologist and thinker. “If somebody sued because they were saying that they didn’t know about his health, they would not have a leg to stand on. This is sleazy entertainment, a sideshow.”
Knowing this will I or you be able to walk away from the next prurient piece purportedly about Steve’s health or why his “condition” should be made public so we can pick over it in the noon day soon? Like a cadaver on CSI: Cupertino?
Unbearded ladies…
Well, I’m going to try. Moreover, I’m going to confine my interest in prurient interests to the people who “leak” sex tapes and manage to have cameras present whenever they’re not wearing panties in public.
That is, until Jobs becomes one of “those people” we really should give him a break. Apple’s gonna keep making great stuff and that’s where the real action is, right?
Your take being…
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July 6th, 2009
It’s not just the Cult of Steve Job’s obsession with his health… it’s there obsession with him IN GENERAL that makes me want to stay far away from Apple… aside from having no products actually worth buying.
July 6th, 2009
Haha no products worth buying? Obviously you are quite a Microsoft fanboy or even worse, a Linux fanboy who thinks he is a computer God. Sure, Microsoft have some good products. Linux is great. Apple also have some good stuff, and iPods hold 75% of the market or so for a very good reason. You’re one man against many million, Yaro.
July 7th, 2009
Actually the track record of Apple sans Jobs and with Jobs are pretty different. It is a fair question if anyone but Jobs could have gotten the idiot media companies to buy into iTunes and kept them from bolting for greedy reasons.
Could anyone but Jobs have gotten the iPhone out? AT&T wasn’t the first carrier they asked for unprecedented control over the actual network.
The iPhone for all it’s wonderfully and revolutionary user interface sucked as far having other features phones had for years. No 3G and just now getting voice dialing? Lack of a MicroSD slot for no better reason than to force you to buy a more expensive model.
Hard to see the reviewers and normal pundits not savaging the the thing for it’s shortcomings if it was a Palm model or if Jobs hadn’t been doing his “one more thing…” let alone the sheer balls of pulling a computer company back from becoming irrelevant on the back of an mp3 player.
Amelio would have been lynched if he had switched to Intel and the Mac would have been just another clone. Jobs gave OSX to Apple.
I don’t care how talented Apple senior management is at carrying out his vision, a few years with no game changers and Apple becomes a successful electronic company with a stock price of normal levels.
Jobs is Apple, and a post Jobs Apple is going to be facing, rightfully, a credibility problem from investors.
If you love tech you gotta love Jobs. I find Apple products overpriced and overhyped personally, but would love to see him helm Apple for another 50 years.
We won’t see his genius again for a long time once he’s gone.