Steve

As many of my colleagues mourn the death of a great tech icon, Steve Jobs, I pray for his soul, and hope (sincerely) that he makes it to Heaven. For all his flaws, he was a good neighbor, an optimist, a great strategist, an opponent of pornography, and he built up the tech industry in ways the future history books will show.

Much of my life has been lived along with products created or conceived by Steve himself (see my ongoing computing history here), and my current profession would be nowhere near as interesting as it is without his continual push towards extending the reach of technology into my life.

Through it all, we must remember what Steve (as well as many before him) has pointed out:

Once you realize the death is a part of life, you will live life more fully.

In other words,

"For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it"
(1 Timothy 6:7).

I'm going to be reading Steve Jobs (the authorized biography) when it is released on October 24, 2011. I enjoyed reading iWoz, which spoke to much of Apple's successes in the engineering field, but the design and strategy aspects of Apple's success will likely be covered in-depth in this book.