Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy died the same month as Jobs. Whenever I see articles about Jobs I always wonder about these two guys and their contributions.
Will the NYT write an article about Ritchie or McCarthy? Does the public know anything about them?
To me it just says something about American society that we obsess over Jobs yet forget two great men, without whom, Jobs never would have done anything interesting. Is it just because Jobs was rich that we care more? Is it because of his leadership, or place in the public eye? What does it say about our definition of success?
And every time there's an article about Steve Jobs someone posts this comment as if they are the first/only person to think of it. It came up many times at the time they passed.
It's obvious why Steve Jobs gets more mainstream attention; he was the face of a company that has a daily presence in millions of people's lives.
Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy are not known for the same reason that Georges Friedel (or anyone else involved in the development of LCDs) is not known. Poeple aren't interested in engineers, and engineers aren't usually interested in being public figures.
The list of engineers and scientists whose contributions were absolutely fundamental and necessary to the existence of an iPhone is literally thousands of people. Do you really expect everyone to know all these names? No.
You know Ritchie and McCarthy because you are interested in programming and UNIX. A chemical engineer would know someone else that you don't know. Your knowledge is not superior to someone else's. It's what you're interested in vs. what they are interested in.
Come on, this is obvious. Why do otherwise smart people think this is a good question?
Fundamental technology and science advances can touch a lot of people, and even tech-savvy people may be ignorant of the inventors. This is perhaps too bad, but totally understandable. It's a big world.
I'm specifically thinking about Nobel prizewinners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine since, say, 1950. That's over 200 people and I'll bet most tech-savvy people know only a small fraction. Yet, those discoveries are hugely influential. (As one specific example, say, Lauterbur and Mansfield who won the 2003 Nobel for their work in the 1980s on magnetic resonance imaging.)
It can be very humbling to speak with a person who knows some of this history. I sat in on a class in the physics of sensing technologies, and at the beginning, the professor listed the Nobel prizes pertinent to MRI, PET, CT, radar, spectroscopy, etc. It was a long list of people unknown to the public, and, alas, unknown to me as well. It's always going to be this way.
And the categories the NYT assigned to the three articles (business, technology, science) explain why it’s useless to try to decide who is more “important”.
And every single time I see an article about Jobs accompanied by a set of comments from a tech-savvy audience I see this same comment about Ritchie (and sometimes McCarthy) resurfacing. You can continue feeling sour about it, but not everyone deserving attention receives as much as they should, and not everyone receiving attention deserves it as much as they get.
Ritchie's and McCarthy's personalities and accomplishments just aren't as interesting to the general public as Jobs', which has little to do with our definition of success but more with the fact that, to be able to obsess over someone, we need them and their work to speak to our imagination, which is a lot harder when their accomplishments are less trivial to understand without any knowledge on their field of study.
General public's tastes and interests can be shifted. Many years ago, Chinese people value hardwork and intelligence. Now they admire same thing as Americans smartness and fame.
While that may be true, it most certainly hasn't happened in the last 3 years. Maybe over time people will stop valuing Jobs' work higher than that of Ritchie and McCarthy, but I think it is likely to stay like this for the forseeable future, just as it has been for quite a while.
2. People like Steve (or Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Elon, Jeff Bezos, Larry and Sergey...) bring together teams of people and lots of money on a problem.
3. The "lone genius" is great but leaders who bring tens of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment over their lifetime usually can have a greater impact. By getting consumers to pay, you can continue to fund even better products. Mobile technology will make great strides in the next decade because Steve Jobs planted the seed. Hopefully, Elon, for example, will eventually get to an electric car with a 500 mile range and rockets that make weekly trips to Mars.
4. Leaders like Steve find solutions to problems. When he worked on the Macintosh, the developers used 68k assembler. At NeXT he went with Objective C because that's what his developers wanted. If Eiffel had been more popular they might have gone with that. Using Unix was cool but if a good solution didn't exist, they could have copied Amiga OS. :-)
Even Ritchie and McCarthy might not have been able to achieve as much without other people's contributions. Clearly they didn't start out with sticks and stones. Even Einstein could've been useless if people before him hadn't laid down the required framework. He was just standing on the top of a human pyramid. The problem is that we only look at the guy standing at the top.
The mere idea of 'hero-worship' is flawed. Leads to dangerous consequences. Why do we forget the contributions of all those who were never named?! Nobody here can go very far on his own. I think it is high time we realized that all this was not built by one man or a few 'heroes'.
PS: I don't think the article describes Jobs as a great guy.
I see this opinion expressed so often when people talk about Steve Jobs and just how good he was at what he did.
That second part is just it, by the way. He was fantastic at what he did. Why does it matter that what he did was built off of things done by others? Dennis Ritchie, John McCarthy and Steve Jobs were all brilliant (and, by the way, am sure all of them used things also built by others while still being brilliant). The reason the world knows more about Steve Jobs than the other two is just obvious - he was the face of a company that build physical things people knew and recognised that they used every day. Steve Jobs was a brilliant marketer that orchestrated that a company be known by people and that he also be well know. That is why articles are published so often about him and not the other two.
TL;DR Why does it matter that Steve Jobs wouldn't have been successful without also using things created by others? That is true for every successful person. Who here knows who invented the electric guitar? Unfortunately, I don't. But I do know who Jimi Hendrix was and know that he was fantastic at playing it.
>To me it just says something about American society that we obsess over Jobs yet forget two great men, without whom, Jobs never would have done anything interesting.*
I have to disagree with this. You have absolutely no idea or proof what Steve Jobs would have done without Ritchie or McCarthy. Your entire line of reasoning is predicated on unprovable assumption. For all we know, Steve Jobs still would have been successful without Ritchie and McCarthy and that's why he's a more interesting figure. But that scenario is just as impossible to prove as yours.
The point is that Steve Jobs, just as the rest of us, was standing on the shoulders of giants. So why then do we obsess over him and not others? Why is he any more important than Dennis Ritchie?
It's not about Ritchie is/not more important, it's about Ritchie did not get the honor and people's appreciate he deserves.
Think about it, Jobs did great work with an big company, and he almost claimed all credit of Apple's works himself. While Ritchie did all his work (clearly more important than Jobs) with more self-reliance.
A salesman needs a product to sale. For a product to exist, the foundation has to be in place. The guys who laid the foundation need to be in order for the foundation to be in place.
God, I get tired of answering idiots like you. Geeks live in their own little world. Yes, those other guys should definitely be admired. I'll write up a better answer in another post because I'm basing calling you a clueless idiot, and you know what happens to those posts. :-)
Anyway, it really is important for geeks to get a clue about how the world works, and understand what business guys like Steve bring to the world.
Will the NYT write an article about Ritchie or McCarthy? Does the public know anything about them?
To me it just says something about American society that we obsess over Jobs yet forget two great men, without whom, Jobs never would have done anything interesting. Is it just because Jobs was rich that we care more? Is it because of his leadership, or place in the public eye? What does it say about our definition of success?