Many folks asked this past week how I’ve felt about Steve Jobs’s death, and wondered why I haven’t written about it. When I first heard the news, I thought of a graph Jonathan Franzen drew in “How to Be Alone,” about how Franzen’s ailing father made no concessions to Parkinson’s and then, when that effort… Read More

I have sometimes been a critic of Steve Jobs: for outsourcing manufacturing, overlooking charities, diverting idealists, sidestepping the web or simply demanding the best. But long before that, Steve Jobs was a critic of me. I hear him whenever I do something mediocre or make a business decision that has no soul. I hear him whenever I… Read More

Have you seen the articles on TechCrunch about the workers in the Chinese iPhone plant maimed in the line of duty without receiving medical care? The overwhelming response in the comments has been a kind of fatalism you rarely see in Silicon Valley: observers all agree that we as consumers are powerless, that Apple itself is powerless,… Read More

For years, it has been fashionable for business-people to approach any problem — choking baby, lonely Friday, cold soup, global warming — by asking Jeff Jarvis’s question: “What would Google do?” But the most admired technology company in the world isn’t Google. It’s Apple. And when it comes to the most admired technology executive, Steve… Read More