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 into place, or never. Obama didn't "make history" in 2008 it's more the other way around.