The last 35 years of technology history is unfathomable without Steve Jobs. Jobs was the one responsible for getting the most influential early personal computer to market with the Apple II, driving the creation of the first viable GUI computer with the Macintosh, ensuring that CGI animation became the de facto standard with Pixar, founding a company that produced the machine that the World Wide Web was invented on, being instrumental in the introduction of PostScript and desktop publishing, and on and on. He may not be the sole inventor of these things, but ask Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Ed Catmull, Tim Berners Lee, John Warnock, et al where they and their inventions would be without Steve Jobs.
The thing is, he didn't do all that. At least not by himself.
A lot of talented people built every single one of those things, and without them, Steve Jobs wouldn't exist.
As stated before, gathering those talents and driving them to make these things does take a lot of effort and he did that very well.
Behind that guy in the cover of the magazines there are tons of people that actually made those amazing things. Many gave ideas that in the end made that product a whole.
And finally, without Steve Jobs, someone else could have taken the spot. Or not. The thing is, you can't know what would've happened without him. So don't say that as a fact, it's at best a supposition.
>without Steve Jobs, someone else could have taken the spot
You could easily say that about the "true" inventors.
The point is Steve Jobs _was_ heavily involved in all of these major breakthroughs, spanning decades, industries, and personnel. He is an incredibly important and influential figure in the history of technology. Not sure why people feel the need to downplay his role when the very people he is supposedly stealing the spotlight from will attest to his genius (with the exception of Jef Raskin of course, who was a bit of a Svengali himself).
I think the difference is that the technologies Steve was so instrumental in creating were already being developed without him. The GUI and personal computer were pretty much already there, he just got to it earliest. Without him these things would have been created in just about the same time span with little difference.
This is distinct from, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, which was a solution from a direction which no one was looking. Everything Steve helped create was already underway.
I don't think that a concept computer costing tens of thousands of dollars that didn't exist outside of PARC's labs with an interface that didn't include dragging as one of its metaphors is "almost" the Macintosh, nor do I see much evidence for a industry trend toward a GUI outside of Apple's efforts and Microsoft's primitive attempts at copying Apple.
Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, only one year after the Apple Macintosh. PARC invented the idea of the WIMP GUI, not Apple. I think it's a little silly to say that the idea would have died within PARC.
Th idea of WIMP really wasn't "invented" at PARC. That organisation gets way too much credit. They amalgamated several concepts that had been developed since the late 1940's. I'm not suggesting that PARC's work wasn't important, but to blithely dismiss Apple's contribution and suggest that it all started with PARC it ridiculous.
Go and learn about Vannevar Bush and Memex, Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad, Doug Engelbart and his contributions like the the Mouse and his oN-Line System. The history of modern computing is simply not as black and white as you are trying to portray.
Finally, anyone that has used both Windows 1.0 (and 2.0 for that matter) will tell you just how awful it was, especially when compared to the Macintosh. Microsoft didn't come close to the ideas presented in the Mac until 1990 with Windows 3.0, and arguably it was the 3.1 release in 1992 that was useable.
I wouldn't say smartphones were on the way to what iPhone was. In fact, if you re-watch the keynote where the iPhone is announced, the reaction from the audience is fairly muted, because people were clearly afraid that a phone with nothing but a touch screen for an interface was going to suck really badly.
And none of them could really continue what Jobs had started. They didn't even have to innovate. And did Sculley come up with Newton? No, others inside Apple did. Yet he couldn't even sell that (and marketing was his thing!). It took the Palm Pilot to realize Apple's ambitions. Just as it took Steve Jobs to realize the ambitions of Xerox PARC.
