Greg Beato, The Smart Set
Almost immediately after Steve Jobs announced he was stepping down as CEO of Apple, tributes to his technological vision and entrepreneurial flair began filling up the web. Jobs created an industry with the Apple II and reshaped another with the iPod. He made cyberspace tactile and dimensional with Macintosh and its graphical interface.
Over the course of the last 40 years or so, Jobs has imagineered, packaged, and sold the future with a deftness and persistence few others have managed: Apple lists him as one of the inventors on an astounding 313 patents. But as impressive and wide-ranging as this record of achievement is — it includes designs for computers, keyboards, mice, user interfaces, media players, product packaging, and even a glass staircase — it fails to acknowledge his greatest, most influential innovation of all: Steve Jobs invented business casual.
Or more precisely, Steve Jobs invented business casual in the same way he invented the graphical interface, the mouse, the MP3 player, and the smartphone. All these things existed before Steve Jobs coaxed talented engineers to produce his version of them — but it’s his version of these things that captured our imaginations, had the greatest impact on our culture, and changed the way we live. And work.
Read what almost amounts to an obituary of Steve Jobs in The Smart Set …