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The death of Steve Jobs has rocked people the world over, affecting everyone from the most hardcore Apple fanboy to Barack Obama to all those gathered outside the new Apple store in Shanghai. While Steve Jobs will be remembered for revolutionizing personal computing, the music industry, consumer mobile products, film animation and even fonts, the other side of his legacy is one of hyper-control: Apple's proprietary software, the iPhone's closed-off ecology, App Store censorship and the company's labor law violations. If there was ever a company that capitalized on American consumers languishing in late-stage capitalism, it was Apple. And they did it by inventing "cool" products that we didn't even know we needed - till we needed them.

I promise I didn't write this in advance, waiting for the appropriate moment to unleash it from the vault of pre-conceived, pre-digested stories about the deceased the way one fills in the Free Space in the middle of "N" on the Bingo card. When people would ask me, what will you write when Steve Jobs dies, I declined to answer because I didn't want to think about it. I sincerely believed if anyone could beat pancreatic cancer, it would be him.

Over the weekend I finished reading the authorized biography of Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. It's a hefty 650 pages and spans the entire life and career of Steve Jobs, the iconic Apple co-founder who sadly passed away a month ago. The biography is well worth reading, I gave the book 5/5 stars. I'll even say that it should be required reading for technology entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to be a leader in our industry. The biography is a sympathetic one, so don't expect to read a great deal of criticism about Steve Jobs. Despite that, it's a well-rounded portrayal of a man destined to be remembered as one of the great product visionaries of our time.

There's plenty to learn from the biography. Here are three of the main lessons that I took from the book. Each comes from an aspect of Steve Jobs' own personality, which he managed to instill into his company Apple. (Note: don't worry, there aren't any spoilers in this post!)

It's time for free software to find a new voice. Once again, Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman is putting his feet firmly in his mouth. This time, Stallman says that he's glad Steve Jobs is gone.

It's no secret that RMS and Steve Jobs held firmly opposed views when it comes to software freedom. I didn't expect Stallman to hold a vigil at an Apple store for Jobs, or even to say much of anything at all. But his ill-considered response does nothing for the cause of free software, and actually does a lot of damage.

The death of Steve Jobs has rocked people the world over, affecting everyone from the most hardcore Apple fanboy to Barack Obama to all those gathered outside the new Apple store in Shanghai. While Steve Jobs will be remembered for revolutionizing personal computing, the music industry, consumer mobile products, film animation and even fonts, the other side of his legacy is one of hyper-control: Apple's proprietary software, the iPhone's closed-off ecology, App Store censorship and the company's labor law violations. If there was ever a company that capitalized on American consumers languishing in late-stage capitalism, it was Apple. And they did it by inventing "cool" products that we didn't even know we needed - till we needed them.

This is not an Apple-bashing piece. It is also not an attempt to cut an American icon down to size at a time when we're remembering the magnificent contributions of its fallen founder. This is about how failure makes us better.

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard, seen, or read comparisons of Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison since early yesterday evening. Jobs did not invent anything - not the personal computer, not the MP3 player, not the tablet. But besides that fact, there are certain other stark similarities. One: Jobs, like Edison, was a fierce competitor who sought to control not only the delivery channel for his products, but the market surrounding those products. Two: Like the finest scientist, Jobs studied his failures and Apple's very carefully, and unlike Microsoft, built his next success upon the smoking ruins of his failures.

Steve Jobs became an icon as one of the greatest innovators of the modern age. He follows in a great American tradition of innovation that have built the fundamental building blocks of the U.S. economy. History will be kind to Jobs. Students will read about his accomplishments in their textbooks for decades and perhaps centuries to come. In classic Jobs style, those textbooks will probably be built into iPads.

Where does Jobs stand in the pantheon of great American innovators? Certainly, he was one of the most inspiring and creative Americans of the modern era. Let's take a look at the history innovation in the United States and assess how these great people influenced how we live our lives today.

Following the news of the death of Steve Jobs on Wednesday night, millions of people took to the Web to mourn the founder and former chief executive of the biggest technology company in the world.

Everyone from Apple customers and admirers to other tech luminaries and the President of the United States expressed their condolences in the form of obituaries, blog posts, tweets and status updates on Facebook and Google Plus. Somber homepage tributes went live on Apple.com, Google.com and other major websites, and some publications like Wired and Boing Boing altered their homepages dramatically to pay tribute to Jobs.

Earlier today, the tech world was rocked by the sad news that Steve Jobs had died. I'd like to pay tribute to Steve Jobs, on behalf of ReadWriteWeb, for what he brought to the Web world. There will be hundreds of different tributes written by many tech publications - deservedly so, as Steve Jobs had a huge impact on many aspects of technology.

In this post I want to highlight 3 main things that I'm grateful to Steve Jobs for: 1) re-defining mobile computing with the iPhone and iPad; 2) his design philosophy; 3) his leadership. Steve Jobs strived for greatness in the products his company built, which resulted in a great user experience on the Web for millions of people.

I promise I didn't write this in advance, waiting for the appropriate moment to unleash it from the vault of pre-conceived, pre-digested stories about the deceased the way one fills in the Free Space in the middle of "N" on the Bingo card. When people would ask me, what will you write when Steve Jobs dies, I declined to answer because I didn't want to think about it. I sincerely believed if anyone could beat pancreatic cancer, it would be him.