How will Apple manage without the man who made it over in his own image?
Written by The Indian Express
2 min read
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Steve Jobs has announced his long-rumoured resignation. After 14 years of making corporate history and setting the rules of the technology-media world,he will now hand Apple over to Tim Cook. The man who urged his first team to put a dent in the universe,can claim credit for several,starting with the Macintosh in 1984.
A year later,he was forced to leave Apple,and spent more than a decade out,until coming back to helm the company in 1997 though during that out-time,his company created OS X and iOS,the operating systems that Apple now uses,and Jobs also started the animation phenomenon,Pixar. And in the years since,Steve Jobs remade Apple. He was a tech auteur,someone who left his own singular imprint on his creations rather than leaving it to teams of designers or the wisdom of crowds. Famously disdainful of market research,he created what he wanted,and others discovered they couldnt live without. All Apples products reflect his pared-down,elegant design sensibility.
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And so,Steve Jobs pretty much inaugurated the post-PC world,and clinched Apples place in that future. Despite initial scepticism,the iPod rendered comparable music devices pointless,the iPhone changed smartphones just as the iPad transformed personal computing. That insistence on think different has also been Apples liability,its inability to play well with existing systems,its closed and,some would say,sterile appliances. But with Steve Jobs marketing wizardry,Apple is now arguably the worlds more valuable brand,and his departure is unlikely to dim its immediate profits. But his impact on the tech industry and the larger culture is still not easy to comprehend,in small and big ways. Many of the things we take for granted touchscreen phones,or even apps,iTunes,which began the end of physical music. Apple introduced the floppy disc drive in 1978,and just as brutally eliminated it a few years back Steve Jobs was never afraid to throw away and start again. Throughout his magnificent and restless career,innovation has been the only constant.
