Gracious tribute

I particularly like Google’s tribute to Steve Jobs, because it is so elegant and precisely in-line with their core mission.

Rather than try to convey his importance in mere words or even images, they simply give over their home page for a day to honoring him. Not in any sort of splashy way, but in that unobtrusive and cleanly designed way they have of doing things that was clearly influenced by Mr. Jobs himself.

The tribute is simply the following statement, with an embedded link:

The link itself, I hasten to add, goes not to a tribute page, but rather to the homepage of their arch-rival, a company with whom they are often in direct economic competition for consumer eyeballs — Apple, Inc.

This is what Google does best when it is at its best: Quietly, and in an understated way, send you off to the place on the internet where, in that moment, you want to go.