Michael Wolff has written a piece on Steve Jobs for the April 2006 issue of "Vanity Fair."

This impressionistic piece is good. Wolff writes of Jobs

... it turns out that Jobs is not marginal, or eccentric, or even fanciful at all. His is the at-one-with-the-American-consumer golden gut.

Calling Jobs the "ultimate media guy," who has outdone Bill Gates at every turn, Wolff declares Jobs the real winner.

The reader wonders if the claim is valid - at least I wondered. Isn't Microsoft far and away more commercially successful than Mac?

Well, Wolff has that covered.

... one day in the near recent past everybody woke up and found out that while all the geniuses were blathering on about content this and content that, the media culture had, in fact, come to be dominated by machines. It's Steve's gadget-centric world which we just live in.

iPods, Razr phones, BlackBerrys, plasma screens, Xboxes, TiVos, laptops. Machines are the habituating, behavior-changing things. Machines themselves are fascinating, life-changing, cool, sexy.

The medium is the message.

I can't reprint the article here, but it is worthwhile reading.