The Good, The Sad and the Meh

This has been a rather interesting week for me from a technology perspective.

First, at the day gig, we are launching a new piece of software that effectively runs our entire business.  It’s a big change, so myself and Declan have been traveling and helping answer questions during training.  It’s the largest software launch that our company has probably ever done, and it’s all written in XPages.  Yes, XPages.

Declan has put together an incredible application and I’m very excited for it to go live.  It requires Lotus Domino 8.5.3 for some of the functionality, and lo and behold, that was released by IBM on Tuesday.

We’ve been testing 8.5.3 for quite some time, and actually wrote this application in all of the betas.  So we’re confident that 8.5.3 is going to work well, and very happy that it finally shipped. 🙂  That was the good…

On that same day another company in Cupertino, California announced a product of much speculation.  The general consensus on the iPhone 4S was “meh” but it’s still a pretty damn cool phone.  I’ve already gotten floods of requests for the new device (especially since it is now on Sprint) so that’s going to take off quite a bit I think.

Lastly was the sad news of the death of Steve Jobs.  I know there have been tons of eulogies out on the web, so I don’t have too much to add other than it does make me sad to see such an innovative person leave us so young.  56 IS young folks.  And cancer… well just fuck cancer.

Anyway, think of how profoundly Steve Jobs changed everything about computing.  From creating the first truly “personal” computer to revolutionizing the phone and tablet market.  There was no smart phone market five years ago.  No portable music market ten years ago.  No real tablet market two years ago.  No app stores.  Sure these things existed in small pockets, but no one ever really got them to work, and to take off, and be as wildly successful as Apple made them.

Jobs got the music industry to sell unprotected DRM-free music.  Got movie and TV studios to rent movies digitally.  Got periodicals to create digital versions.  Hell, they even got Adobe to create tons of support for HTML 5.

Let’s not forget his time running Pixar, the most successful digital movie creator in the world.

Steve Jobs was a one of a kind individual.  And one that I admired, and try to emulate on certain levels.  It was a sad day for technology, and a sad day for me personally.

I wore a black turtleneck and jeans today.  My little way of paying homage to someone I admired.  RIP Steve, you’ve made a huge impact on me, and how I compute on a daily basis.  Thank You.