To all the laudatory comments on Steve Jobs I want to add a discordant note: dont people find it tragic that for the past few years Apple, already a very successful company, had to rely on a dying man to be its chief salesman/spokesman? that Jobs, already a very successful man, kept dragging him out of his well deserved rest and recuperation to sell iphones and ipads at pubic events, just a achieve a few more successes? Even in 2008, before he had a liver transplant, he was dying, but the transplant deferred it by a couple of years.

Steve Jobs is known as a driven man; considering how hard he drove himself, he must have driven his subordinates really hard too, and it would have been very tough working for him, whether as Apple employees or employees of Apple contractors; remember the number of suicides at Foxconn, such an important part of the industrial success of Taiwan and China?

The same driven personalities pervade Wall Street, where already very rich investment bankers and hedge fund managers think of numerous schemes to entice money out of investors, to enrich themselves further; some of schemes, like mortgage backed securities, are merely dubious; others are downright fraudulent like Madoff.

I am afraid I see in Steve Jobs a serious sickness of American society, with its relentless pursue for greater success; in the mean time, the income of the working people has hardly risen for the past three decades; one consequence of this is stagnant consumer expenditure, thus making rapid economic recovery impossible. Apple's competitors, such as Samsung, had to keep up the same relentless efficiency drive and wage containment, thus spreading the same American disease around the world.

Many years ago Marx predicted that capitalism has a tendency to over invest and over produce, while competition would suppress wages and impoverish the working class, and this would be a world wide phenomenon; it is interesting but sad to see this confirmed by Steve Jobs

 we live in a world where sensual stimulus is all important;( I stopped going to movies after my daughter went to university, because they no longer have stories to tell - they are noisy and active with lots of special effects, and to me very tiring) internet, smart phones, ipads, etc, keep delivering these stimuli to people who want them; ideas, knowledge, contemplation, academic standards ..., have all been submerged under the tide of touchy-feelyness driven from behind by advertising money (both google and facebook are really advertising companies, because that's where their income is generated; they just deliver the ads in different frameworks)

it is a superficial world, and into this world Apple/Steve Jobs fitted well; that's their greatness; those who disapprove of such a world would also disapprove of steve jobs;

> http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column_comment-steve-jobs-wasnt-great-he-wasnt-even-close_1596888

 I believe a lot of such negative comments would appear in the next few weeks; people who already harbour reservations get fed up with all the praises (I reacted negatively to Michael Jackson's cult comments too)

I am actually neutral on steve jobs; neither hero nor devil, merely an interesting guy whose time happened to come, more than once, in his life history; if he exercised a bit of moderation he, and some other people in Apple/Foxconn, would have lived longer, but that might also mean less "greatness" of his particular kind; it was his own choice (the stressed out employees, unfortunately, had no choice).