atomy, geology, sculpture, cartography, botany, mathematics, engineering, painting, writing the list is virtually endless. Jobs? Well, he made gadgets. Cool gadgets, to be sure, but to compare him to da Vinci is not only an incredibly inaccurate, modern overreaction, but something of an insult to those who appreciate the genius of the Italian renaissance man. To put it another way: da Vinci designed bridges, came up with the ideas for the helicopter, solar power, the tank, the calculator, he made discoveries in optics, hydrodynamics, anatomy, and oh, yes, he also painted the two most famous paintings in world history, "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper." By comparison, Jobs made the iPhone and the iPad. He belongs "alongside" da Vinci? I can't believe that Jobs himself would have done anything but scoff at the notion.
Well, okay, I guess I should remember that Masayoshi Son is a businessman and perhaps not the most gifted at making historically relevant analogies. But his words reflect a popular sentiment among many social critics today, namely, the "Tyranny of the Now." It's a philosophy that seems to believe that anything noteworthy that happens in our time is the greatest, most significant event ever, and all that other stuff you know, history simply doesn't matter. Therefore, Jobs is da Vinci, and Obama is George Washington and Bono is Elvis and Albert Pujols is Babe Ruth and who cares if the comparisons don't really add up? What matters is the now.
Nobody's asking me, of course, but if I was to try to put Steve Jobs into an appropriate context I'd lay off the da Vinci and Edison and Ford comparisons and focus more on the great designers who have had lasting influence on everyday things: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, hell, even the designers at Whirlpool and Maytag and Jenn-Air or the genius who came up with the Lucky Strike "bull's eye" logo. Jobs was an innovator, to be sure, but he was fundamentally a designer, a man who had a refined sense of simplicity and elegance that attached itself to all of his creations.
I think it's a distracting and inaccurate notion to turn all savvy businessmen and forward-thinking artists into mystical, larger-than-life Supermen who seemingly grab Fortune's Wheel and spin it at their leisure, forever changing the course of modern evolution. More than one obituarist has claimed that Jobs "changed the world" but I think it's more likely that Jobs happened to be the right man at the right time with the right opportunities. Try to imagine if Jobs had never existed don't you think that something like the "Mac revolution" still would have taken place? It's a historical inevitability. And I think it's hardly a coincidence that Jobs and Bill Gates were born in the same year both were the right age at the right time with the right circumstances to nudge the world into the computer age. If it hadn't been them, it certainly would have been someone else.
In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected, a lot of political experts were adamant that the historical precedent of an African-American becoming President was due mostly to the man's inherent largesse, that his personal greatness was most responsible for his sudden elevation into the world's most important job. It's a simplistic explanation, for Obama's election was contingent upon a number of social and historical forces converging at the right moment: the miserable George W. Bush years, the changing, younger demographic, the shifting of the nation's population to cities, the heightened concern about the way America is viewed internationally all of these forces, combined with Obama's admittedly strong personal charisma, helped make the election possible. Even three years later, it's astonishing to remember that Obama carried Indiana in the general election not since LBJ had a democrat won the state, and I think it will be another 50 years before it happens again. It's a tantalizing thought, but I'm convinced that a Barack Obama Presidency would have been unthinkable in 2004 or 2012: it had to be 2008, when everything fell i