I guess the easiest way to deal with the contribution of Steve Jobs is
just to quote this passage from his biographer, Walter Isaacson:
The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth write large:
launching a startup in his parent's garage and building it into the
world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many things outright,
but he was a master at putting together ideas, art and technology in
ways that invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating
the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do,
and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand
songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and
heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovation by being
good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did
both, relentlessly. As a result, he launched a series of products over
three decades that transformed whole industries:
1) The Apple II, which took Wosniak's circuit board and turned it into
the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.
2) The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and
popularized graphic user interfaces.
3) Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle
of digital imagination.
4) Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.
5) The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.
6) The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry
7) The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography,
video, email and web devices.
8) The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for
digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.
9) iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing
our content and let all our devices sync seamlessly.
10) And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a
place where imagination was nurtured, applied and executed in ways so
creative that it became the most valuable company on earth.
No, Steve Jobs did not invent the MP3 format. However, without the
IPod, the MP3 format would have languished in the bowels of brain-dead
MP3 players and the music industry would have been dead after a few
years of rampant piracy.
Steve Jobs brought his imagination to all these products. Without his
imagination and incredible drive to change the world, we would likely
still be using brain-dead products like CP/M. MSDOS, Wordstar, dBase-II,
Sony Walkmans and Windows. Systat was the first stats package to try a
GUI. The interface for SPSS is just plain brain dead: "Legacy" Menus?
Steve Jobs also brought a philosophy of product development that proved
incredibly successful. The software and hardware must be united. If
you design using an open architecture, you design for a common element
and not excellence. Bill Gates could never yell at the engineers at
IBM, Dell or Gateway to make the hardware match his software. As a
result, Windows was designed for the common medium, the mediocre. Jobs
could demand that Bill Attkinson figure out how to layer the windows for
a 9in Mac screen because all they had was 128K RAM to work with. Bill
never had that control and Microsoft produced a brain-dead interface
when he knew Windows could be better if he had Job's level of control.
The legacy of Steve Jobs is independence, imagination and the reality
distortion field. If we don't distort reality from time to time, we
will remain stuck in a world of crappy, brain-dead products and systems.
Mike Williams
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