Maybe (definitely) I'm easily touched, but I sure found the NYT's description of Jobs' last days pretty stirring. And, like a lot of kids my age, I came across Jobs' commencement speech to Stanford years ago and have tried to take its lessons to heart. It's a powerful speech, and I really do bear his words in mind. I also can remember watching Pirates of Silicon Valley on TBS twice in a row back in high school, lying for four solid hours on my mom's couch. More recently, I was hypnotized by a 20 minute presentation on zoning plans he gave to a town council, and the gorgeous vision he showed there.

I'm an admirer of Steve Jobs.

I've been railing on Apple's closed ecosystem for years now, but nothing they've done with iOS or their Store policies has been wrong somehow, ethically or legally. They can always do what they want with the things that they build.

My problem has been with two things: what a world would look like where Apple has no competition, and the absolute conflation of control and design that they inspire in others. Maybe, by virtue of sheer polarization (I'm not immune), my frustration has sometimes strayed from those channels, but I think that they're just about the only valid ways I could critique Apple from the outside, as someone who doesn't use Macs or iOS.

Another way is the Mike Daisey way, by going to Foxconn an Apple fan and coming back with a moving show about the ethics of manufacturing, and the courage to write a critical op-ed in the New York Times the day after Jobs' death. It's a good op-ed.

Jobs, through Apple, has expanded the imagination of the entire worlds of technology and human interactivity. Because these are vast worlds whose intersection will dictate massive portions of the future of the human condition, including the vast not-West of Asia and Africa, we should all take Jobs' influence on this extremely seriously.

Because I do take it seriously, I think it perfectly legitimate to be extremely grateful for Jobs' persuasion of the industry that simple, human technology is possible, and to be extremely frustrated at the persuasion of consumers that that kind of technology is only possible when you give up all control over it to a single entity.

The dearth of wildly successful counter-examples makes combatting this view difficult. Android and Ubuntu are the closest out there. Sadly, I think Android's success is based more on market forces and an intelligent business model than on its design, or on people like me who love the hell out of its principles. They've worked well with the oligopoly we have. Ubuntu's message, beautiful as it is, hasn't sunk in yet.

But the flaw in arguing that elegant design requires proprietary control is that there really aren't any successful other examples of that at all! We've had decades of companies all working feverishly at getting people to jump on their closed platforms, and, video games excepted, Apple is the only company with one that's both successful and a joy to partake in. Apple's success is because of Steve Jobs and the culture of beauty that they project and attract, not their locked down devices.

I don't think I there's any denying that we'd all be better off if we could have another 20 years of Steve Jobs being around. He created the market for digital music, made it okay to wear jeans at work, defined what a modern phone is, defanged Flash, made it profitable for small shops to make apps, and let more independent game developers have their dream job. Everyone else is to some extent a follower, and we on this side of the digital divide owe him big for all of that.

And as you appreciate all that, remember that it didn't have to be the package deal like Steve told you it did. Everyone's got their flaws, and he had his too. Let's learn from them, and each be the kind of visionary for our own ideals that Steve Jobs was for his.