Stephen Fry on Steve Jobs

I missed this when Stephen Fry wrote it a few weeks ago, just after Jobs’s death. Brilliant:

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme — the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before. Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.

The whole piece is great, and so much great stuff has been written about Jobs and Apple in the last month, but the above paragraph is just perfect.

★ Tuesday, 25 October 2011