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I don't actually feel happy he passed on or I'm not really that sad over a great sense of loss (esp by something as insidious as cancer I do not wish on anyone), but I'm more disappointed he never became more of a philanthropist. He convinced people to purchase things with extremely limited capabilities and with massive profit margins because of charging 2-5 times what an item actually costs. Not sure how people never got he was just shaking them down from one product to the next, but credit to him he pushed the envelope making the world embrace Apple products and prompted millions to embrace digital technology, online media and mobile communications in ways they never did before and he was a worthy adversary for anyone in a competing sector forcing them to produce better hardware. He was marketing genius, he got people who knew nothing about tech to buy overpriced, proprietary nonsense so I have tremendous respect for him, but I don't dislike him for taking advantage of stupid consumers. It's just business.

Whether you liked the man (or his accomplishments) or not, it's hard to deny that this is the end of an era. Once Bill Gates dies, the two most famous faces of the personal computing revolution will be gone and we'll start to forget just how this whole trainwreck got started.