Thursday, October 06, 2011
Steve Jobs and America's company, Part II
I was going to mention in the post below how Steve Jobs, Bill Gates et gang came along at a time in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when so many people were writing off America as a has-been industrial power. That bout of national handwringing came to an abrupt end once the ‘80s boom took hold, led by America’s emerging high-tech titans.
Virginia Postrel covers roughly the same ground, only much better and more deeply:
Andrew Sullivan:
I was going to mention in the post below how Steve Jobs, Bill Gates et gang came along at a time in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when so many people were writing off America as a has-been industrial power. That bout of national handwringing came to an abrupt end once the ‘80s boom took hold, led by America’s emerging high-tech titans.
Virginia Postrel covers roughly the same ground, only much better and more deeply:
To understand the cultural significance of Steve Jobs, you have to go back in time: to before the iPad or iPhone or iTunes, before Apple Inc.’s comeback products made candy-colored plastics and iAnything cool, before Jobs got kicked out of Apple, even before the Macintosh hurled a sledgehammer at Big Brother.Good stuff. Read on. It's a trip down the old corporate memory lane. ... Virginia via Instapundit.
It’s 1981. Most people have never heard of Silicon Valley. The country’s most famous businessman is Lee Iacocca, the head of Chrysler Corp. He’s famous because in 1979 he engineered a government bailout -- loan guarantees -- that saved the company.
Andrew Sullivan:
The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces - personal actualization and a free market.
