Steve Jobs: One Last Thing

This documentary really doesn't give much insight to Steve Jobs. Oh wait, he liked to take walks. Wow! What a revelation. This whole thing was a badly put together mish-mash of people talking about Steve Jobs, with a couple of snippets of Jobs talking about various things. It was more or less in chronological order, but was rarely given much of a context. Hmmm, one guy remembers a raging argument with Jobs but can't remember what it was about. Probably the most interesting thing in the whole long slog of the documentary was the guy talking about trying to build a prototype of a mouse. This documentary should have either focused on the technologies that Jobs pushed into being or more about the person that Jobs was, what he believed in, what the corporate culture at Apple was like, and what affect he had on the people around him. Unfortunately, it really did neither, and basically left me with more questions and fewer answers about Jobs than I had before. A really dissatisfying documentary, poorly made and rushed. Give it a pass.

Very recently I watched the movie "iSteve" with Justin Long, plainly a parody of a bio-pic on the life and times of Jobs. So I was fortunate to run across this one, quite accidentally, on Netflix streaming movies. It is reasonably short, under one hour, and includes clips and interviews with the actual people who knew him and worked with him. I like to muse about this sort of thing, what if Steve Jobs had never been born? What would our computing, music, and communications world look like today? We would probably be OK, but I suspect it would look a lot different. Just as our world would be a lot different if Thomas Edison or the Wright Brothers had never been born. Steve Jobs was an enigma of sorts, brilliantly creative but ruthless when he thought he needed to be. After being mostly responsible for the success of Apple, he quit in frustration, Apple almost went bankrupt without him, and he rejoined the company to lead it to even greater success. No matter what one thinks about Steve Jobs, there is no way to get around the profound ways our daily lives are different because of him and his vision. I wonder if the next great visionary is stepping up yet, Jobs has been gone for almost two years.

Very recently I watched the movie "iSteve" with Justin Long, plainly a parody of a bio-pic on the life and times of Jobs. So I was fortunate to run across this one, quite accidentally, on Netflix streaming movies. It is reasonably short, under one hour, and includes clips and interviews with the actual people who knew him and worked with him. I like to muse about this sort of thing, what if Steve Jobs had never been born? What would our computing, music, and communications world look like today? We would probably be OK, but I suspect it would look a lot different. Just as our world would be a lot different if Thomas Edison or the Wright Brothers had never been born. Steve Jobs was an enigma of sorts, brilliantly creative but ruthless when he thought he needed to be. After being mostly responsible for the success of Apple, he quit in frustration, Apple almost went bankrupt without him, and he rejoined the company to lead it to even greater success. No matter what one thinks about Steve Jobs, there is no way to get around the profound ways our daily lives are different because of him and his vision. I wonder if the next great visionary is stepping up yet, Jobs has been gone for almost two years.

This documentary really doesn't give much insight to Steve Jobs. Oh wait, he liked to take walks. Wow! What a revelation. This whole thing was a badly put together mish-mash of people talking about Steve Jobs, with a couple of snippets of Jobs talking about various things. It was more or less in chronological order, but was rarely given much of a context. Hmmm, one guy remembers a raging argument with Jobs but can't remember what it was about. Probably the most interesting thing in the whole long slog of the documentary was the guy talking about trying to build a prototype of a mouse. This documentary should have either focused on the technologies that Jobs pushed into being or more about the person that Jobs was, what he believed in, what the corporate culture at Apple was like, and what affect he had on the people around him. Unfortunately, it really did neither, and basically left me with more questions and fewer answers about Jobs than I had before. A really dissatisfying documentary, poorly made and rushed. Give it a pass.