I don’t see why people are fussing so much over Steve Jobs and Apple. Mr. Jobs will eventually leave the company. It will go on without him. It won’t be sexy, but then the computer industry hasn’t been sexy in a long time, nor has it really needed Steve Jobs. This was predicted.
John Dvorak was my all-time bestest PC columnist, first at InfoWorld and later at PC Magazine. In fact, at one time, I believe he had columns in at least a dozen different magazines, but nothing topped the original InfoWorld column, The Inside Track. It was biting and funny, even poking fun of his own masters at IDG. He tamed out at PC Magazine over the years. The other columns he phoned in.
I met John once in person at Comdex. I think I may have dropped to my knees and did the “I’m not worthy thing.” Regardless, later on I was on his radio show. I also got a cover blurb on his book Dvorak Predicts (shown above).
Okay. Enough fawning.
Dvorak wrote a column way, way back when. He compared the computer business to the early days of radio. It was a spot-on comparison.
Like radio, computers started out as a hobbyist rage. There were radio fanboys just as there were Mac and PC fanboys. The early days were nuts with everyone doing anything and everything, catalogs, mail-order, custom kits, and lots of money to be made.
Over time, Dvorak wrote, radios eventually became a commodity. There was consolidation, then eventually the excitement — the fire — was gone. Radios are still around, but you don’t see the weekly fan club meetings for radio users any more. Dvorak said the same thing would happen to the computer industry.
Dvorak’s prediction was written years before the Internet. The explosion of the web added a few years into the hobbyist aspect of computers, but I feel that the Internet. wave is over.
Truly, the hobbyist era of computers is in its sunset. The last of the original industry icons, Steve Jobs, is making his final curtain call. Long gone are others before him. There was once a time when PC users could tell you the presidents and CEOs of every major software or hardware developer: Mitch Kapor, Phillipe Kahn, Ray Noorda, and others have long made their curtain calls. You might not even recognize the names!
Other names you might recognize, but they’re fossils as well: Peter Norton hasn’t written his own software for 20 years now. Bill Gates bowed out last year. That leaves only Steve Jobs.
There is no need to fuss over who will replace Jobs because in the cosmic scheme of things, Jobs cannot not be replaced; the fan base that needed someone like Steve Jobs just isn’t there any more. The era of the computer corporate hero is past. Dvorak was right.
