kpbhs"No one wants to die," Steve Jobs said in his now-famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford. "Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.
"And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
These wise words came out of Jobs just a year after he got up close and personal with the notion of death, upon learning in 2004 he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer. On Wednesday, seven years later, he finally arrived at that "destination we all share."
Above all, the loss of Steve Jobs is incredibly sad. But amid the raw, jumbled feelings in these early moments after hearing of his death, the other emotion that keeps surfacing is this sense of utter unfairness.
More up his sleeve
At 56, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, had given the world so much more than most people could ever dream - and he surely had so much more up his sleeve. And that is incredibly disappointing to consider.
The secret to his success, the key to why his death is being mourned more like a pop star than a CEO and the biggest reason his untimely passing is profoundly unfair, are all the same: His products were polished reflections of an obsession with the customer experience.
The consistent imprint across the products he touched over four decades - from the Macintosh, to the string of blockbuster Pixar movies to the lineup of iPods, iPhones and iPads - was an almost neurotic attention to the smallest details. And in the technology realm, he insisted on an unparalleled emphasis on usability, on inventing intuitive, easy-to-understand ways of interacting with devices that, in the hands of others, so often make us want to pull our hair out.
But everything he said and did made