I’m a bit late with this one, because I’ve had to collect my thoughts.

Firstly, let me say that I… I am sorry for his family and friends, and their suffering and loss. His demise is a loss to the IT community, to some degree, and I would not have wished him dead. Ultimately he was a man with his wildly documented success and somewhat less documented flaws.

I do have an issue, however.

The media as a whole seems to be evangelising him, and crediting him far more than is due. I find this disrespectful to the IT industry as a whole, and more so disrespectful to his memory.

Steve Jobs had a great eye for the future, product design and inciting a fanaticism that few can rival, perhaps aside from the pope. Lets raise a few points though, for historical accuracy:

Apple created the MP3 player: This is simply not true, and one of the most irritating falsehoods the media seem to perpetuate. Companies such as Creative Labs and iRiver were developing remarkable MP3 players way before Apple even looked at the market. Apple were actually late to this, and I believe only made the splash they did through marketing and fanaticism. If anything, the iPod was a step backwards in it’s reliance on iTunes and proprietary nature.

Apple created the GUI: Kinda. Apple licenced the ideas of Xerox and benefitted largely due to Xerox’s incompetence and lack of foresight. Xerox even attempted to sue in 1989. Apple did not invent the GUI, they simply made it a commercial product. This is a demonstration of foresight, not genius.

Apple invented the smartphone: Wow, before the iPhone was even an idea, I owned a Symbian and Windows smartphone. They were pretty good, and not a far cry from what we consider a smartphone now. The main difference between smartphones then and now is power (which would have come from Moore’s law anyway) and the various application market places. RIM’s Blackberry and the original Android (before Google’s acquisition) were on-track with this. Apple simply packaged up an acceptable UI in expensive hardware. It’s amusing to see the patent wars in the smartphone market – I’ll credit Apple with multi-touch and clean design, but now Apple is copying their competitors and making security mistakes worthy of Microsoft 10 years ago (Siri usable on locked phones for example).

Apple created Mac OS X: Yes. Yes they did. Canonical created Ubuntu too. By create, what we mean here is: Assembled an operating system from existing technology created by other companies. As much as Ubuntu is Linux, Mac OS X is Nextstep, and by extension OpenBSD. They both happen to share their roots in free Unix clones, and you can download a large portion of Apple Mac OS X as Darwin. They’ve had to keep a portion of their operating system open source because it was based on an open source project. Mac OS X includes a massive amount of open source software, and isn’t a far cry from Linux itself. It’s shipped with Apache, PHP and even Safari is a version of the KDE projects Konqueror.

The difference between Canonical and Apple? Canonical makes a large contribution back to the community that fed it.

If you’re going to praise Steve Jobs for his fantastic contribution to technology and computing, do you with respect to the facts.

Steve Jobs, master of design and foresight, RIP 2011.