14 DAY TRIAL // Time magazine’s finalists for Person of the Year 2009 now include Apple's iconic CEO, Mr. Steve Jobs, who won Fortune's CEO of the Decade title earlier this year. Jobs is the single business leader on this year's Time list. The full list of 2009 Candidates is: Angela Merkel; Barack Obama; Ben Bernanke; Iran Protesters; Olympia Snowe; Somali Pirates; Stanley McChrystal; Steve Jobs; Timothy Geithner; Usain Bolt.
Time posts its pros and cons, as reproduced below. Here’s its reasoning:
"Pro: Named CEO of the Decade by Fortune in November, Jobs has continued to show the rest of the consumer technology world how it's done. His iPhone App Store surpassed 1 billion downloads, proving that people will still pay for certain kinds of content, and a new version of the iPhone and its software kept improving on the original.
"Con: Jobs spent the first six months of the year away from the daily management of Apple to deal with his health problems, including undergoing a successful liver transplant. While consumers continue to snap up the iPhone and its apps, more and more customers in major cities are griping about the poor wireless coverage that comes with it from AT&T. What's more, new rival smartphones like the Google Android devices and Palm Pre have started to give discerning techies a reason to at least consider switching from the iPhone."
Softpedia note
Undergoing liver transplant and AT&T’s oscillating quality of wireless services are factors that affect the image of Steve Jobs as "Person of the Year?" Leaving health issues aside (which seem so irrelevant at this point), does Time suggest Jobs should have slapped around AT&T’s technicians to improve the coverage for iPhone owners? This "negative" factor hardly seems a con for the iPhone and implicitly the brain(s) behind it, as a concept. The services AT&T provides for iPhone users have nothing to do with the way Jobs and Co. thought out the device before even making their picks amongst carriers worldwide. Nevertheless, it’s good to see Apple’s CEO is a candidate to the Person of the Year title.