Written November 2011 by Cliff Feldwick
What can be said about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said in the countless cover articles in just about every major magazine? Visionary, impossible taskmaster, fashion idol. But probably the most important piece to me is that he wasn’t a geek. Sure, he made his mark as creator of devices that every geek covets (and has), but he was different from almost all the rest.
Jobs didn’t spend his time coming up with faster and faster
chips – there are plenty of people at Intel and Motorola doing that. And he
didn’t write software – there are legions of serfs working for Microsoft and
Oracle and software shops in
His vision was to take the power that these people were making available and use it to do something – often amazing, always simple. And any engineer will tell you that simplicity, or elegance, is the absolutely hardest thing to pull off.
So processors were getting faster and faster; putting that power to work in Word hardly makes the slightest difference. Ah, but now you can make a music player that actually keeps up – no pauses or skipping. And as graphics chips improve, you can add video in real time. Make a better flat screen, and suddenly the iPad appears – leaving ever other tablet in the dust.
No, Steve Jobs genius is that he wasn’t a “computer guy” – his sights were set much higher than that. He harnessed the power of computers in ways that ordinary people could use easily.
What can you do with
it?
I was at a house concert last weekend. House concerts are just what they sound like – people with large living rooms set out folding chairs and invite traveling musicians to come play for whatever the crowd donates. Everyone brings wine and munchies and mingles easily. And the music is often incredible – there are so many talented people out there, flying below the “major” radar.
The guitarist and chief songwriter of the trio playing commented that his output of songs had increased tremendously recently. Why? His story: “I was always just playing things, fooling around. And someone would say ‘What was that tune you did five minutes ago? That was really cool.’ And I’d say – I don’t know; just fooling around.” And it was gone. But “now I have Garage Band up and running all the time” – and it records and transcribes all his “fooling around” and saves it. This program has made a major difference in his life. Yet I’m sure Steve Jobs didn’t write it – although he may have encouraged it, incubated it and set it out – on a Mac – for all to use.
The true genius of Macs is not their raw power – that’s really not amazing. But they have integrated programs and features that allow visually (and musically) talented people to use them without having a degree in computer science. Some years ago I looked at a new Mac (old by today’s standards) and saw a cohesive set of installed programs that let you take your pictures and videos, edit them onto a DVD with entry points (just like the movie studio’s DVD’s), add music and captions, and duplicate them so everyone could be envious of your trip to Italy. And normal people, not geeks, could do all this, and do it well.
Jobs actually had a few spectacular failures as a computer dude – ask your favorite Geek about the Lisa (100,000 sold in two years, probably because it was incredibly slow, after $50 million in development costs) or the neXT (technically significant – including being used to write the first Web browser - but commercially a dud). But he learned.
It didn’t hurt that, during his time “in the wilderness” after being fired by Apple, he took a company called The Graphics Group (changed to Pixar) and, after unsuccessfully trying to sell a box called the Pixar Image Computer, started working with Disney on animated films. Toy Story was its first production, followed by many others, followed by Jobs selling out to Disney for buckets of cash. Nice work if you can get it.
What next?
In my own small memorial to Jobs, I pulled out an old Apple II, fired it up (yes, it still boots), took its picture with an iPhone and posted it on Facebook. What an amazing transition from start to finish of his career. It will be interesting to see what Apple does now that he is gone. It will be hard pressed to duplicate his success, fueled by his ability to pull people into his vision of what could be done. Most business people, busy trying to incrementally “improve” the so-so, could not do what he did in a dozen lifetimes.