Michaela Rehle/ReutersOne of the many memorials to Steven P. Jobs that appeared around the world following his death in October.Steven P. Jobs died nearly eight months ago, but the technology industry is not ready to let him go.
That was especially evident on Wednesday at the D: All Things Digital Conference, a tech industry gathering in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., that was the only event of its kind that Mr. Jobs blessed with his presence. He spoke at the conference six times over its 10-year history, most recently two years ago. His shadow this year was inescapable.
Edwin E. Catmull, a co-founder with Mr. Jobs of Pixar, and Larry Ellison, the Oracle chief executive and one of Mr. Jobs’s closest friends, participated in a joint interview billed as the “Lessons of Steve Jobs.” The two men described the by now widely known collection of qualities that contributed to Mr. Jobs’s success: his perfectionism, his obsessive attention and need for control over every aspect of a product and so on.
Mr. Ellison spiced his portion of the conversation with amusing anecdotes about Mr. Jobs, including an account of how the two met more than 25 years ago. Mr. Ellison said a peacock that Mr. Jobs’s then girlfriend had given him wandered onto Mr. Ellison’s property in Woodside, Calif., waking him up. He said the two conspired to get rid of the bird, which Mr. Jobs did not care for either.
Frequently, Mr. Ellison awkwardly slipped into the present tense when describing his late friend, as in: “If he thinks someone is better than he is in a certain area, he will listen. If he thinks you’re full of it, he will tell you.”
Nearly every other high-tech or entertainment industry luminary speaking at the event offered some form of tribute to Mr. Jobs. The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin spoke of his nervousness about taking on the challenge of writing a script for a biopic about Mr. Jobs based on Walter Isaccson’s biography.
“It was a little bit like writing about the Beatles,” Mr. Sorkin said. “There are so many people who know so much about him and revere him. I saw a minefield of disappointment.”
On Tuesday, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, talked about Mr. Jobs’s death as “absolutely one of the saddest days of my life.” After someone Mr. Cook did not identify told him it was time to move on from his grief, Mr. Cook said his sadness gave way to an “intense determination” to focus on running Apple.
Meanwhile, Sean Parker, a serial entrepreneur who is an investor in Spotify and a Facebook executive during its early days, said flatly that “there will never be another Steve Jobs.” Although he never met Mr. Jobs, Mr. Parker said he shared Mr. Jobs’s tendency to “micromanage product design.”
“Outside of that I would not put myself in his company, apart from occasional moments of megalomania,” Mr. Parker said.