Of all the CEOs ever retired, Steve Jobs caused the greatest noise on the blogosphere and social media. A couple of days ago when his resignation was announced, my twitter timeline was literally full of Steve Jobs tweets. Only one out of about 20 tweets had a different subject. This effect caused a lot of people to express their annoyance on the overload of Steve Jobs news on online media.

One of the things I dislike on people, is impiety. So I’d like to take a couple of minutes to remind you who is Steve Jobs and why all this fuss is taking place.

• At the age of 21 and without having any money at all, he co-founded the company that popularized personal computing.
• He popularized the mouse. Did he not, our computers could be still running some weird text based OS like windows 2.0
• His company NeXT created NeXTSTEP which later became OSx. The worlds most popular UNIX desktop operating system and till now the only viable competitor of Microsoft Windows. If Jobs had not created NeXT, our computers could be still running Windows 95.
• He popularized the touch screen interface on mobile devices. Otherwise, instead of the mobile revolution we are witnessing these days, we could be still stuck with some lame Nokia running Symbian.
• He turned tablet computing from a theoretical and experimental concept to the next generation of computing with the revolution called iPad.
• At the moment of his resignation Apple INC was the most valuable company in the world.

Now forget what you just read and consider that the large majority of people younger than 40 is spending more than 12 hours a day in front of a computer screen, either at work or at home. And for the rest of the day most of us use frequently a smartphone with a touch screen.

So if we put technology aside for a moment and try to think in absolute terms, it’s no exageration to say that Steve Jobs shaped the way our generation will spend half of it’s entire life. He literally helped to turn the information age from an intellectual conversation topic, to a day to day life reality for everyone. If that’s not enough for a media flood, then I don’t know what is.

And before you call me a fanboy, I should point out that I’ve never owned an apple device in my entire life. Not even an iPod.