With Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible, Esquire magazine has given Apple's boss what almost amounts to another obituary, with the implication that he's going to die sooner rather than later. It says:
It is true that his cancer, originating not in the ductwork of the pancreas but rather in the islets of Langerhans, is slow growing and, in the words of one expert, can be addressed "with curative intent"; it is also true that even after surgery, the average patient lives about five years.
But the 6,700-word story doesn't show too much respect for the living, dishing the dirt on what some people really think of him. It says:
Nobody wants to be the guy who points out that Jobs is "an obnoxious asshole" or "just a horrifying human being" -- because then Jobs has already won, simply on the basis of scale. Better to be the ex-Apple-employee who says, "The question is not whether he's an asshole. That's beside the point. The question is whether he can be an asshole and a good Buddhist."
"For most people, he'll go down in history as the guy who made technology user-friendly," says one executive. "But to people in business, he'll be remembered as the guy who only did deals where he had all the leverage -- and used every bit of it. It's not enough that he wins. You have to lose. He's completely unreasonable."
Author Tom Junod makes rather a lot of the fact that Jobs was adopted and apparently needs to prove himself: "he has, shall we say, control issues that many adoptive parents would recognize."
He also makes quite a lot of Jobs's desire for some sort of immortality, while pointing out that today's iPod is tomorrow's landfill, just like the old Sony Walkman.
Raised but not answered (not surprisingly) is what happens to Apple after Steve Jobs dies. As a company, Apple is now more of a one-man show than ever before. He is irreplaceable, and if he hadn't returned to the company, it seems unlikely that Apple would have survived. How long it would survive his death is a key question.
