Opinion Steve Jobs: The man and his machines

But nobody ever does,even when they copy Jobs’s moves down to the last eyebrow twitch. Why not?

Here’s a guy who never finished college,never went to business school,never worked for anyone else a day in his adult life. So how did he become the visionary who changed every business he touched? Remember the “Think Different” ad on his return to Apple in 1997? “Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones,we see genius.”

In other words,his story boils down to this: Steve Jobs refused to go with the flow. If he saw something that could be made better,smarter or more beautiful,nothing else mattered. Apple has attained its levels of influence and success because it’s nimble. It’s incredibly focused. It’s had stunningly few flops. And that’s because Jobs didn’t buy into focus groups,groupthink or decision by committee. At its core,Apple existed to execute his visions. He oversaw every button,every corner,every chime. He lost sleep over the fonts in the menus,the cardboard of the packaging,the colour of the power cord. That’s just not how things are done.

Often,his focus flew in the face of screamingly obvious common sense. He wanted to open a chain of retail stores — after the failure of Gateway demonstrated that the concept was doomed. He wanted to sell a smartphone that had no keyboard,when physical keys had made the BlackBerry the most popular of smartphones. Over and over again,he took away our comfy blankets — our floppy drives,our dial-up modems,our camcorder jacks,our non-glossy screens,our Flash,our DVD drives,our removable batteries. How could he do that? You’re supposed to add features,not take them away,Steve! That’s just not done!

Eventually,of course,most people realised that he was just being ahead of his time. Eventually,in fact,society adopted a cycle of reaction. Phase 1: Jobs takes the stage to introduce a new product. Phase 2: The tech bloggers savage it. (“The iPad has no mouse,no keyboard,no GPS,no USB,no card slot,no camera,no Flash!? It’s dead on arrival!”) Phase 3: The product comes out,the public goes nuts for it,the naysayers seem to disappear into the earth. Phase 4: The rest of the industry leaps into high gear trying to do just what Apple did.

And so yes,there are other geniuses. There are other brilliant marketers,designers and executives. Maybe,once or twice in a million,those skills coincide in the same person. But will that person also have the vision? The name “Steve Jobs” may appear on 300 patents,but his gift wasn’t invention. It was seeing the promise in some early,clunky technology — and polishing it,refining it and simplifying it until it becomes a standard component. Like the mouse,menus,windows,the CD-ROM,Wi-Fi.

Suppose,by some miracle,some kid in a garage somewhere possesses the marketing,invention,business and design skills of a Steve Jobs. What are the odds that he will be comfortable enough to swim upstream,against the currents of social,economic and technological norms in pursuit of an unshakable vision? Zero. The odds are zero.

Jobs is gone. The ripples of that loss will widen in the days,weeks and years to come: to the people in the industries he changed. To his hundreds of millions of customers. And to the billions touched more indirectly by the greater changes that he brought about,even if they’re unaware of it.

In 2005,Steve Jobs addressed graduating students at Stanford. He told them the secret that defined him in every action,every decision,every creation of his tragically unfinished life: “Your time is limited,so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important,have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”