Steve Jobs not dead, despite Bloomberg slip

Stephen Withers
Friday, 29 August 2008 09:54

Opinion and Analysis

I can't pass up the opportunity to mention that Bloomberg accidentally sent a draft version of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' obituary across the wire.

It's a longstanding practice for papers and other outlets to write obituaries of notable people ahead of time. And every now and then, one will be accidentally published. As Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) famously wrote to the New York Journal, "The report of my death is an exaggeration."

But like those embarrassing emails intended for an intimate friend or sworn enemy that find their way to a broader audience, once the cat's out of the bag, there's no putting it back.

So if you want to read the full text of Bloomberg's Steve Jobs obituary, along with the retraction, you can find it at Gawker.

The trigger for refreshing the obituary appears to be an observation made this month by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: "Every time I designed something great from when we were very young, he would say 'let's sell it' ... It was always his idea to sell it."

There was also a reference to Jobs recently suffering from what was originally claimed to a "common bug" but was more serious than that.

I'm not sure I'd like to see my own obituary, assuming that someone would bother to write one. And I'd imagine it would be additionally distressing for someone like Jobs, who has been through an illness that presumably would have made him all too aware of his own mortality. Perhaps being a Buddhist helps in such situations.