The news of Steve Jobs passing yesterday has been followed by a great flood of testimonials, eulogies and obituaries. Yet with the ink still drying from a similar outpouring of analysis from 6 weeks or so ago, when Jobs announced his departure from Apple, much of the narrative has already been well versed.
One interesting piece of analysis I wanted to quickly share with readers (and record for myself, really) came within Stephen Fry’s post from last night, which many of you may have already read. Specifically, the paragraph below, which leaped out at me with its relevance to the data visualisation field:
As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before. Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.