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In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.
We mentioned much of the good Jobs did during his career
earlier. His accomplishments were far-reaching and impossible to easily summarize. But here's one way of looking at the scope of his achievement: It's the dream of any entrepreneur to effect change in one industry. Jobs transformed half a dozen of them forever, from personal computers to phones to animation to music to publishing to video games. He was a polymath, a skilled motivator, a decisive judge, a farsighted tastemaker, an excellent showman, and a gifted strategist.
One thing he wasn't, though, was perfect. Indeed there were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees - the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements - have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple's success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company.
Comment: While the writer of this article has some interesting points to make about Steve Jobs, using Bill Gates as an example of a great philanthropist is far from being objective.
For more information on Bill Gate's "philanthropy" read the following articles:
Bono and Bill Gates-Backed Global Health Charity Exposed as a Fraud
Bill Gates: Cell Phones Can Track Newborns For Shots
Bill Gates Funds Covert Vaccine Nanotechnology
Bill Gates Calls for "Decade of Vaccines"
Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes on Crowd