When historians look back at the life of Steve Jobs, they will
chronicle a man of contradiction and genius. But for the legions of
Apple fans, it's personal.
Steve Jobs led a company that became one of the world's most valuable enterprises, and easily the most beloved by its customers, with a series of innovative and always elegant products that brought value and pleasure to people's lives. This is why you are seeing an outpouring of genuine sentiment at his passing.
Jobs's career was in every sense astonishing. He helped create Apple, the first serious personal computer company. He was banished
Steve Jobs led a company that became one of the world's most valuable enterprises, and easily the most beloved by its customers, with a series of innovative and always elegant products that brought value and pleasure to people's lives. This is why you are seeing an outpouring of genuine sentiment at his passing.
Jobs's career was in every sense astonishing. He helped create Apple, the first serious personal computer company. He was banished
by
the managers he recruited. But his years away were hardly a
wilderness. He led Pixar's ascent to one of the world's most creative
film studios as it revolutionised animation, and he founded a
"failure", NeXT, that became the foundation for the modern Mac
operating system. Those years gave him the knowledge and skills he
needed to lead Apple into its best years.
But what set him most
apart from his peers was an exquisite sense of product design and the
ability to intuit what people would want, and use. Combined with his
leadership (and salesmanship) skills, he was the most formidable CEO
of recent times.I've been a fan and follower of the Apple way, especially when it was by far the best alternative to the Microsoft empire – and when it
was the best in class, period. I bought my first Apple product in the 1970s.
But
in the past half-decade, as Apple became increasingly powerful, I have
found myself less enchanted with a company I'd supported with my
words and, ultimately, tens of thousands of dollars of my own money.
Where Steve Jobs had been the freedom fighter, he was becoming the
emperor, creating a regime of secrecy, manipulation and
control-freakery to
accompany the ongoing, even accelerating, innovation.
My
respect – no, awe – for Jobs's genius has only grown, but I couldn't
ultimately follow him into a walled garden, however comfortable,
that contradicted what I believed in, and what he once stood for. I
was no longer his kind of customer, though; he aimed now for the masses
who preferred to live in Apple's warm but controlling embrace, and he
succeeded.The competition hasn't yet matched Apple's marriage of hardware and software, so elegant, easy to use and playful. But the sense of style that Apple made so popular increasingly permeates the electronic devices we use today, no matter who makes them, and that trend seems likely to continue.
That is one reason why Apple's long-range
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