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First - I’m not ashamed - the article is RIGHT ON! The article is mostly a listing of facts! I literally had this same discussion with a friend of mine yesterday - and I’ll be glad to take you down a similar set of reasoning..

You are unable to grasp the concept of same business different tasks. Jobs was not an engineer, never claimed to be. Engineers are notoriously bad visionaries. They tend to assume people know things they don't. They also tend to diminish those who can't do tasks they "should" know how to do. Take the early Linux systems. If you weren't a capable tech person, installing it was impossible. And the typical response from the Linux community was that if you couldn't install it, you shouldn't use it.

First - what did Steve Jobs directly invent? He has his names on several patents, but that is because he was the CEO of the company!

Are you CEO of a company? If it's so easy, why didn't YOU do it? I mean, Jobs started in a garage, he wasn't a silver spoon child. You have an engineer's mindset, that only engineering is a worthy task, everything else is fluff.

Will start our story with the Apple-1. Woz did all of the engineering, SJ was the business head. He didn’t invent it - Woz did.

Woz did it with Jobs' direction. You and I wouldn't be talking about Woz's work without Jobs.

Did SJ invent the Graphic Computer Interface? Nope - that was done at Xerox PARC. He hired technologists who ran with the idea, and created a low-cost implementation (which still cost to much to gather much market share) and marketed the MacIntosh.

You're right Jobs hired people, and directed the effort. Without Jobs, Gates would have grabbed more of the X system and turned it into an unrecognizable pile of goo.

Jobs was NOT AN ENGINEER... he was an idea man. He wasn't Edison, or Tesla, or Ritchie, he was the right guy, in the right place, at the right time. And, he was incredibly talented. If he wasn't, why didn't you do it? Or why don't you do it now? Make the new Apple?

I'll stop here, because if you can't grasp the difference between a visionary and an engineer, then your myopic view won't be broadened. By the way, I'm an engineering type, but I can appreciate the talents of those on the creative side.

Well sir, I’m working in a 5 person start-up right now. Maybe it will be the next apple... time will tell.

You show your own myopic view point by painting all engineers with the same brush, and can’t read the nuances of the things I said. I listed facts in a brief manner. Doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the business acumen the man had in any way, shape, or form.

Further - the REAL point of the article is that people HAVE been comparing him to the likes of Edison. He wasn’t Edison. Heck - neither was Ritchie. Edison was the the end-all - he was both the technologist AND the Visionary.

Look - Jobs was a hell of a CEO. It can be argued that he saved Apple by force of his will second time around there. In 1996, Apple was dead company walking until he came back.

His affect on the interaction with the way the public interacts with technology is what he was good at.

On the other hand - Ritchie’s contribution to the fundamentals is what made his contribution important. He created the tools the rest of us use to build this technology.