I put it to you...
...that Wozniak represents a thoroughly benign but vital character in the pantheon of tech.
He may not be the man at the helm of the next big company, but nor will tens of thousands careers be disrupted or destroyed over one of his decisions.
He may never again have his creative finger prints on "the next big thing", but his frequent resurfacing reminds folks that the next big thing is waiting to be created.
He is not a Gates, or a Jobs, or a Ballmer, or an Ellison or even a Shwartz or a McNeally, but, in his favour, he will never be.
Wozniak may only be relevant for the space he takes up, but where his space is, is important. Alongside the obsessive business brains that make the industry profitable, Wozniak represents that equally important force of human imagination. He may only be a figurehead nowadays, but so are the other guys. They are the icons and newsbites that stand for a complex stack of complicated technical, industrial, and economic processes that they are really not in control of.
Wozniak is one of the few visible personalities who represent the creative energy that is equally important to prevent the IT industry plowing itself a rut into irrelevance. In the pantheon, he is the god of the awkward, blinkered, geeks who are too busy trying to realise a vision to worry about profit, or feasibility, or showering. All of the companies mentioned above, were founded, in part, by them and if they forget about them, they risk falling into irrelevance and decline. *cough*sun*cough*. They will end up being little more than diversified investment funds building profit through aquisitions and pathetic rejigging of service contracts *cough*oracle*cough*.
Woz may be a twit, but he's our twit. We, the fat, obsessive, dysfunctional, nerds, will not see him brung down!.
Bring me my dancing pants. The rhythm is about to take me.