IMHO, "no individual has made as much of a difference" is clearly local to the thoughtspace defined by "what Jobs has meant to the world of technology", so refu

IMHO, "no individual has made as much of a difference" is clearly local to the thoughtspace defined by "what Jobs has meant to the world of technology", so refutations comparing Jobs to bin Laden should probably throw a compiler error. And I suppose we'd eventually have music players and smartphones without Apple. But the schedule of their appearance, and the elegance of their demonstration of possibilities, seem pretty important to the shape of those eventualities. We can learn a lot figuring out why the Wright Brothers were the first to "just" figure out pitch and yaw -- or we can ignore them and focus on aerodynamics, knowing that all breakthroughs happen eventually.