People want to live in important times and no one has more acolytes than Steve Jobs - he can do no wrong. When he was caught illegally giving himself stock options, which other CEOs went to jail for, he simply gave them back and even his most progressively anti-corporate fans dismissed the problem because the stock did not go down.
Thomas Edison never had that kind of fanboy culture. And so, given that people want to live in important times, they like to feel like people are smarter now, the politics more acrimonious and the achievements more substantial (the only exception seems to be baseball players - virtually everyone of every age believes modern players are for shit while the players of their youth were far superior, even if they were 40 years apart) - some even want to believe Steve Jobs is not only a modern-day Thomas Edison, he is better than Thomas Edison.
To those of us not in the thrall of his weird Jedi mind powers, Jobs is simply a clever systems integrator. If you ever opened up an iPhone or any other Apple device, they are mediocre components, off-the-shelf stuff. What he accomplished was tapping into the public vibe for how a product should flow and being able to explain it to engineers who did all the work in creating a great interface. He didn't make the electric grid possible or any of 300 other things Edison did.
Edison made the modern world possible - look at an early GE guest book to see the great minds he inspired - while Steve Jobs made crappy music formats popular and forced people to settle for less, like websites that don't work on an iPad because of his pissing contest with Adobe.
Vaclav Smil at The American has the smackdown. And, I might add, Steve Jobs never invented a creepy talking doll.
