ce n'est pas une pomme...

'This is Not a Photoshop...' My Apologies to Apple Inc & Rene Magritte

October 5th 2011. Roughly, 146,000 people died yesterday. One of them was an entrepreneur and inventor from California. Few people on this earth were as influential to the course of human history as Steve Paul Jobs. The image of technological messiah propagated by his followers, and himself on occasion comes as no surprise when you examine the spiritual vision and white-hot ambition with which he pursued his goals. Steve Jobs didn't just want to make computers, he wanted to make art and change the world. It would hard to argue that he achieved any less. But what did Steve Jobs really do? Was he a genius? An Inventor? A Designer? Or was he just the best salesman the world has ever known.

It could be argued that Jobs took other peoples inventions and designs, passed them off as his own and built upon them the most prolific technology company in the world. It's no secret that Steve Jobs was a bastard to work with. He expected nothing but brilliance from his disciples, and anything less was met with utter contempt. He was a child of the sixties and bought into everything that went with the 60s brand. Sandals, jeans, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. He smoked weed got high, took trips... to India among other places, but behind the peace and love attitude he was filled with frustration and anger. His introspection could be called narcissism, and though he believed that a person's environment was critical in influencing 'who' they were, he seemed to neither know nor care how his behaviour affected the people close to him. He refused to accept paternity for his first-born, Lisa, and was forced by the courts to pay child support, despite being worth around 214 million dollars at the time. Lisa and her mother were forced to live on welfare payments for the first two years of her life. He alienated those close to him, even Steve Wozniak who had been his stalwart companion and business partner since they met working a summer job in HP during high school.
Who was this guy...? How does someone with so much anger and negativity foster such a positive, creative atmosphere? One that nurtures design ethic and extracts fanatic loyalty? My first guess is that he was a Jedi. But let’s examine the other possibilities.

Steve Jobs had something that Steve "Woz" Wozniak recognized from the very beginning. He had a way with people. And no matter how clever a person is, no matter how much they know, they'll only go so far, that is to say they can go pretty damn far... but to get as far as Steve Jobs you need to be able anticipate people's expectations. The other thing Jobs had was the left field approach. He knew that all the academia in the world would make you a very smart and very dull person without art, culture and taste. So the smoking and tripping he did during the 70s, his travel to India, his exposure to literature and the arts, wasn't just your average, privileged, gap-year, self-discovery (I say it wasn't *just* that). Those years were like the R&D phase for what would make him a genius in the fields of design, marketing and sales. He became the guru of aspiration.

Apple I. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

When you think about it, it Apple were the first technological company to launch campaigns based on desire. It doesn't look like it, but the Apple I was the first computer that was targeted at the home user. You could use any keyboard and plug it in to a television and that was that. Woz may have been the brains behind the hardware, but if Woz was the Internet, Steve was the World Wide Web. Jobs' talent wasn't building machines it was building dreams. He could take an idea and distil potential from it in the form of pure gold. When he was bad he was horrid, but Steve Jobs knew how to work a crowd, and more importantly, an investor. He knew the language of design, of getting what he wanted. It was the winning combination of Wozniak's tech and Steve's silver tongue that got funding to create the Apple II and from there... Apple skyrocketed from the Jobs family garage to the most successful company on earth.

There are tonnes of articles talking about the life and death of Steve Jobs, I'll list some good ones at the end of this post, so I don't want to get into writing an obituary for the guy. I just keep seeing articles that paint him as a million things other than what he really was. In his life I, think he invented one thing on his own, the neXT computer and OS which flopped but became the basis for Mac's OSX which we use today. It was one of the first PCs to have Ethernet and Tim Berners-Lee wrote some of the first HTML on it. That alone would have made him a historical figure, but it was his ability to harness the creative power of others to produce game changing machines and devices that make him one of the cornerstones of recent history.

The Life of Steve Jobs - Gizmodo
Steve Jobs and the Business of Design
Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 by Steven Levy - Wired