Just like with Michael Jackson’s death and the Gulf Oil Spill, I found out about Steve Jobs announcing his resignation in my Twitter stream. I follow over 50,000 people, and for about four hours, around 30% of all the tweets I saw were about him. My technology company in Atlanta is certified by Apple, and I’ve worked closely with that company for many years. When I heard the news, although it wasn’t unexpected, I felt my heart sink for just a moment. I am of course very happy that he will get some much needed rest, and I’m sure it was the right decision for him or else he wouldn’t have made it. However, for selfish reasons, I was sad.
I, along with countless other people around the world, have gotten years of inspiration and ideas from Steve Jobs. We’ve all followed his career, and many of us can probably remember more than one ah-ha moment we’ve had thanks to him and his vision. He is one of the first technology icons I can remember who lived his life as a true geek, and he never apologized for it. He was a geek when it wasn’t popular, and he paved the way for the rest of us to embrace our dreams and quirky ideas and run with them.
Over the past several days, the Internet has been flooded with Steve Jobs infographics, charts, articles, statistics and just about everything else you can think of. A lot of it is junk that you can tell people threw together just to publish something. I sifted through most of it, and found two tidbits that I really liked, and I wanted to share them with you today.
The first one is a little chart created by Business Insider. It illustrates that in 1996, Apple’s market cap was $3 billion dollars. Today, only 15 years later, Apple’s market cap is $347 billion dollars. That is only $12 billion dollars less than the most valuable public company in the world, which is Exxon. The value of 100 Apple shares in 1997 was about $1,369. The value of 100 Apple shares in 2011 is about $150,590. Wow, if that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is.
The second one is an infographic created by Gigaom. As their site reads, “The infographic below presents a history of the most memorable moments and products in Jobs’ career, as well as a selection of some quotes that sum up a lot of his feelings about design, the competition and the computing landscape.”
Thank you, Mr. Jobs, for giving us vision, inspiration and motivation to be our best and do our best. Thank you for helping us to imagine a world far beyond where our eyes can see!
Click Here For Enlarged Image
Via: [GeekOSystem] [Gigaom]
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