That Esquire profile of Steve Jobs

Hmmm… Just finished reading Tom Junod’s profile. A bit contrived and over-written. And it concludes lamely by asking what peaks remain to be scaled by Jobs now that he has transformed the mobile phone business? “Well”, Junod writes.

there is the “cloud,” as it’s known in geekspeak — the treasure trove of our disembodied data, the digitized version of ourselves that exists beyond ourselves, the next step in the virtualization of the human experience. It’s being posited as the basis of a mobile Internet, or what some people call “a new Internet,” but its lure is the lure of finding a way out of our bodies and into the invisible, and that’s the oldest of human dreams. And so, while everybody else wonders how to get there, how to gain purchase on the ether, Jobs, with his iPhone, offers the same possibility he always has, the possibility of getting there one glittering box at a time. But his soul is in those boxes; it’s never been unlocked, and the service he introduced at the June keynote — a service called MobileMe, which staked his claim on the invisible, or at least announced his readiness to compete for control of it — was deemed, upon its launch a month later, a “disaster” . . . “a failure” . . . “Apple’s worst product launch in the ten years since Jobs returned from exile.” The digital ether would seem as uncongenial to Steve Jobs as heaven itself. But still it beckons, and still he has to answer its call. What other choice does he have? He is already halfway there.