Alumni blogs: Remembering Steve Jobs

The following highlights are drawn from sites listed on our directory of alumni blogs. If you know of blogs by Princetonians that are not listed, please contact us.

Steve Jobs (Courtesy Matt Yohe/Wikipedia)

The death of Apple co-founder and technology giant Steve Jobs Oct. 5 sparked an outpouring of tributes and analysis. Princeton alumni were among the voices represented on several popular websites.

Julia Boorstin ’00 of CNBC’s Media Money examined Jobs’s wide-ranging influence on technology, from music and movies to television and advertising.

Huffington Post tech blogger Bianca Bosker ’08 memorialized Jobs as an inventor and artist, adding that he was “that rare figure who really did leave an imprint as enormous as his outsized reputation.”

On The Washington Post’s Achenblog, Joel Achenbach ’82 called Jobs the personification of the tech industry, with star power and the ability to reinvent himself. “Jobs always seemed to be the innovator, the rock-star genius revolutionary,” Achenbach said.

Moira Forbes ’01 of Forbes.com recalled a line from Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech, when he referred to death as “life’s change agent.” Jobs was able to find a novel way to view “a universal, yet deeply personal experience,” Forbes wrote.

Timothy B. Lee *10, author of the Disruptive Economics blog at Forbes.com, also drew on the Stanford commencement address in his spirited defense of “Jobsian Megalomania,” the message of never settling that Jobs promoted. “Jobs’s advice isn’t good advice for everyone,” Lee wrote, “but it’s a message that unusually-talented 22-year-olds ought to hear.”