A Painful Loss, A Tremendous InspirationA Painful Loss, A Tremendous Inspiration

Steve Jobs' passing is a sad day for the IT industry, but hopefully it will be an inspiration to the next generation of entrepreneurs who will take these ideas and that passion for excellence to the next level.

I was carrying out the trash (and taking the dog for her evening walk) when my son, iPad in his hand, told me that he'd seen a news flash from CNN that Steve Jobs had passed away. I have recorded this event in the same memory block as where I was when I heard JFK was dead.

As a life-long student of our field, I keep track of our "luminaries" (particularly the ones I've met), and Steve Jobs is in a class by himself. His impact was not in the hard core scientific or technical areas (though he clearly had a good grasp of that as well), but in kicking those technical types hard enough that they saw past the "gee whiz" attributes of what they were doing to how that would relate to the user. You can win a Nobel Prize for cramming more transistors on a chip, but Jobs' contribution went far beyond that.

I don’t think Steve is ever going to win any "nice guy" accolades. I met him twice (both brief airport encounters--before Apple got the corporate jet), and while he was minimally "cordial", he was definitely not a "man of the people". Many of the people who worked for him apparently felt the same way. In his autobiography Idea Man, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has a passage describing a Jobs meeting he attended with Bill Gates where Steve virtually dismembered an Apple employee whose demo crashed in front of the Microsoft boys.

No, "warm and cuddly" was not a key element in the Jobs’ makeup, but there aren’t many positive personality attributes that routinely correlate with "genius". Let’s talk about accomplishments. The Apple II was a pretty good idea (given the technology of the day), but the Mac was pure genius. Apple had tried for a system with a logical, graphic user interface, WYSIWIG, and the other attributes Jobs learned in his historic tour of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, but the Lisa was cumbersome and priced out of the reach of normal users. Then we got the Mac; I got mine in January 1985. Xerox pioneered the GUI on the 8010 Star workstation that sold for $16,000, but the original Mac was priced under $3,000.

With that one stroke, Steve Jobs demonstrated to the world that the key to a successful technology wasn't processor speeds or obtuse technical drivel, but accessibility. Millions of people could sit down at a Mac and figure out how to use it without reading a mind-numbing manual that described how to get a DOS or CP/M system to do something as basic as print the damn thing I just typed!

Like most geniuses, Jobs hit some foul balls. Lisa was a bomb, and NeXT, the company he founded after he was squeezed out of Apple, had a neat computer aimed at the education market but priced way beyond any school district's budget--too bad he didn't have E-Rate to fund this adventure!

Jobs' real genius became evident when he took those core ideas of accessibility, to ease of use, and end user focus to areas beyond desktop PCs. Jobs saw the Sony Walkman and created the iPod. The iPod morphed into the iPod Touch. Whoa, let's stick a phone in that thing and we've just entered a completely new market called "smartphones". Expanding the user experience idea, Jobs developed a whole industry focused on the applications that can run on this thing. At the outset, the network-centric apps crippled AT&T's data network, but hey, AT&T should have seen that coming. Meantime, the iPhone fans were so enthralled with this amazing pocket gadget, they’d blame AT&T regardless of who was at fault!

Just when you thought they couldn't top that, Apple came out with the iPad. Hardware vendors had been trying to develop a market for tablets for a decade, but failed because they were looking at a tablet as a stripped down laptop. Apple started with the idea of an iPhone, used the same operating system (for which they already had hundreds of thousands of applications), and put a bigger screen on it. In short, they created a whole new class of intelligent mobile devices with an addictive user interface.

The big question regarding Jobs' legacy is? Did he create devices, or a company that could continue to churn out such amazing products? By all accounts, Steve was a demanding, controlling, intimidating, no-holds-barred perfectionist, and all of that emphasis on "perfection" screams out at you when you use an Apple product. Certainly Jobs had the ability to envision these ideas, marshal the resources to execute them, and craft a customer experience that leaves the rest of the IT industry looking like a bunch of blacksmiths banging on hot iron to get crude and misshapen results.

Regardless of what happens to Apple, Steve Jobs should be a model of what IT should be striving for as an industry. Think about the user experience. Think "outside the box". Start with the idea of what would be great for a user rather than how we can “secure, manage, and above all else "‘control" this--that's stuff’s important, but it should be addressed within the realm of user requirements and preferences.

Steve Jobs' passing is a sad day for the IT industry, but hopefully it will be an inspiration to the next generation of entrepreneurs who will take these ideas and that passion for excellence to the next level.

BTW- Sorry for any typos in this post, but I’m using my MacBook Air in bed, and the encroachment of even my "moderate paunch" on the track pad will reposition the cursor, select and delete vast swaths of text and wreak havoc on whatever I’m trying to do. Steve, I wish you were here to get this thing straightened out.