A Steve Jobs for UCA Steve Jobs for UC

Maybe it's time the UC camp start thinking in Apple terms and try to inspire users rather than to just "satisfy" them.

No matter what you think of him, there's only one Steve Jobs. Merely the mention that Jobs will be taking yet another health-related leave of absence becomes worldwide news and fuels speculation of a potential move in the company's high-flying stock price. I won't comment on that other than to extend my wishes that he get well soon so can continue to do what only he can do, and wish that someone would do the same thing for UC.

There are few real "personalities" in the tech fields, but the Jobs persona transcends just tech. The products he has championed (no one knows who actually "conceived" them) have changed the market's entire expectation set. As I've mentioned in several posts, the iPhone isn’t my cup of tea, but clearly it changed people's appreciation of the possibilities of smartphones. It also helped pave the way for Android and Phone 7 and defined what people will expect going forward.

Even if you downplay the iPhone’s impact or try to paint it as an "incremental improvement", the iPad went right off the chart. This time Apple went out and created something that simply didn't exist before. I know there have been tablet computers since the '90s, but frankly nobody knew and even fewer cared.

Apple's products always involve that unique trade-off I think of as the "golden handcuffs". On one hand, they deliver a marvelous user experience that is clearly a testimonial to Mr. Jobs' obsessive product focus, but that comes at the expense of openness. While that almost fascist control mentality is an inevitable part of the deal, it also has a lot to do with how the company continues to provide a truly unique and marvelously polished product experience.

While his love of the limelight has put Mr. Jobs' face on everything Apple, clearly there’s more to this company than one guy in a turtleneck. The New York Times ran a great story about Timothy Cook and the other executives who make up the inner circle at Apple, but it is clearly Jobs who calls the tune.

Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs has put his fingerprints on every great product that Apple has produced and his greatest legacy may be his uncompromising attention to product design and functionality. However, while all of that creativity is being poured into consumer products, UC plods the track of the mundane. You look at Apple and you see true creative thinking. You look at UC and you see the outcome of 10,000 overly-long committee meetings.

I do appreciate the design features Dave Michels lays out in the "pro" side of the Microsoft Lync: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? feature he did with Matt Brunk. Lync’s feature set leaves the basic enterprise telephone a bit of an embarrassment, but I get most of that Lync stuff on my smartphone--and it's only a BlackBerry.

Maybe it's time the UC camp start thinking in Apple terms and try to inspire users rather than to just "satisfy" them.