I actually feel like crying.

I imagine this underlines yet again that no one gets a guarantee on how long a ride they’ll get on the planet. In this case, I’m a bit torn because every indication I ever read was that Steve Jobs had a bit of a tendency to be something of a tyrant (and a bit of a dick) but there is no denying this man had an incredible impact on the world.

A lot of people think of Apple and immediately think of Jobs but the truth is there is another Steve and that Steve was responsible in large part for putting Apple on the map to being with.

But if I can give Jobs credit for anything, I can give him credit for returning to Apple when it was floundering, when the company was at its lowest point and for revitalizing it in a way people could have hardly believed possibly. If Apple is a success today, if Apple has come back from the brink, it is in large part to the dynamic efforts of Steve Jobs.

I wouldn’t have a job or a career today if not for Jobs so I owe him and a lot of the people I know in my professional life owe him as well. We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude for changing the landscape in both a good way and a bad way.

This is akin to losing the Edison of our generation:

In the annals of modern American entrepreneur-heroes, few careers traced a more mythic sweep. An adopted child in a working-class California home, Jobs dropped out of college and won the title “father of the computer revolution” by the age of 29. But by 30 he had been forced out of the company he had created, a bitter wound he nursed for years as his fortune shrank and he fought to regain his early eminence.

Once out of the wilderness of exile, however, he brought forth a series of innovations — unveiling them with matchless showmanship — that quickly became ubiquitous. He turned the release of a new gadget into a cultural event, with Apple acolytes lining up like pilgrims at Lourdes.