[killtimeatwork]

> He's most certainly an important historical figure of our time

I wouldn't call him that. He's in second/third leaguer at best. His impact on the world was minor. He deserves biographies for sure (people with much less accomplishments get them as well), but let's not compare him to his contemporaries who were truly important historical figures of that time, like Nelson Mandela or Lech Wałęsa - people who radically changed lives of tens of millions of people.

In general, impact made by individual businesspeople is not that great, because all they do is follow market trends, which makes them fungible -i.e. if Jobs didn't push Apple to make iPhone, some other company would come up with the smartphone later on (the next step in technical/scientific progress is a logical consequence of the previous steps and is usually spotted by multiple companies/people at the same time).

Whereas in politics, the world is not an unidirectional march towards more progress, and, depending on actual leaders, things can get much better or much worse. So, a given leader makes much more of a difference. For example, if Hitler didn't want German race to dominate the world and didn't start WWII, tens millions of people would not have died - that's a huge impact in comparison. The Nazi party and even WWII could still happen without Hitler existing (somebody else might start the party to harvest all the German resentment of that period), but perhaps he'd be less rabid than Hitler, which would result in much less death - hence the actual delta of Hitler is huge. Even deltas of vanilla American presidents are much greater than Jobs'.

[fdeage]

For better or worse, I think he embodied the tech culture of our time more than anyone else. My bet is that he will be remembered as a capital figure for putting half of the planet on a smartphone, which is a huge cultural change (not necessarily a good one, but still). If he's "second/third leaguer at best", who would you put in the first league?

[killtimeatwork]

Like I wrote, for example Nelson Mandela lived in the same period and had much more impact.

> My bet is that he will be remembered as a capital figure for putting half of the planet on a smartphone

He may be remembered for that, but that's because people's poor ability to assess real impact. Similarly, far more people know about Elon Musk than about Norman Borlaug - with the latter being much more impactful.

[heliodor]

He'll be remembered just as much as we remember the railroad barons; which is too say, not that much. Such is tech.