Rajiv Rao charts the many revolutions that Steve Jobs ignited.
I have given too much of my money to Steve Jobs for this to be a hagiography. I can’t count the many instances when I've cursed him, as my iPods stopped working and my Macs imploded. But, truth is, Steve has been running my life for 20 years. Not many people realise that in addition to by-and-large inventing the personal computer industry, Jobs revolutionised four others, forever.
I first caught sight of an Apple, a stylish IIe, when I visited my aunt in Canada in the 80s. There was some hope that I would take to it like a duck to water and script lengthy sheets of complex code in BASIC. Instead, I spent vast amounts of time aimlessly playing 'Castle Wolfenstein'. A few years later, I was using a Mac desktop in my office at Fortune magazine which had an ethernet connection with which I could check my new ‘Excite’ mail account, using Netscape’s Navigator. My Mac desktop monitor was as big as a tank, with a multicoloured apple as its logo. I felt like I was part outcast, part cult member, since the only other people I knew who had Macs in New York City were folks in our art department.
Back then, in the 90s, the coolest product was Motorola’s clamshell StarTAC phone. Intel’s Pentium processor was a billboard star, Java was hot but not made from beans, and the Linux operating system looked to unseat Windows NT. The posterboys of the technology world were the flamboyant Larry Ellisson, often photographed lounging in his Japanese garden in a kimono, the boyish Michael Dell, the nerdy Bill Gates and Intel’s elder statesmen, Andy Grove. Steve was nowhere on the scene.
That’s because Jobs, after getting fired from Apple in the 80s at the age of 30, had purchased Pixar from George Lucas for $5 million, and grittily kept the firm afloat, though it was close to shutting in ‘91. From almost out of nowhere, Pixar dazzled us with the super-hit Toy Story; thereafter, ‘Pixar’ became synonymous for quality animated story-telling in people’s minds. Its hits—Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Cars and a host of others-have ruled animated movies since and changed the industry in fundamental ways. No longer do thousands of artists painstakingly sketch each cell for a movie. Also, animation is now a reliably, mega—profitable product that studios regularly count on to stem their losses.
In the early 2000s, I was back in New York City for grad school and had acquired a svelte Sony VAIO, one of the hottest laptops at the time, which made using the ungainly Windows somewhat bearable. I finished one degree and decided to do another, this time in film-making. At film school, almost all of us were shooting our films on digital video and cutting these on our Mac laptops using Final Cut Pro— software for film editing that Apple helped develop, instead of the far more expensive and elaborate process of using film stock and $45,000 Avid editing machines.
This was the future of film-making. Lying in your bed, cup of coffee by your side, trying desperately to string together the right shots in digital format which were lying on an FCP timeline. In 2003, legendary film editor Edward Murch, known for his work on Godfather and Apocalypse Now, edited the entire Hollywood movie, Cold Mountain, using FCP software which cost less than $1,000. This was the bonafide future of film. Thanks to Steve.
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By then, listening to and accessing music in a digital form had become de rigeur. The music industry was terrified by what was happening to music sales because of file-sharing sites like Napster and Limewire which facilitated free downloads and where many of us (illegally) acquired our first robust digital music collections.
In 2001, Apple’s iPod caused a seismic shift in both design and functionality of MP3s. But it was iTunes, iPod’s co-pilot, which transformed the music industry. While it bemoans Jobs for the influence he wields over pricing of songs, he became the industry’s de facto saviour in a rapidly evolving, tech-savvy, population that has become habituated to the concept ‘free,’ and where downloading anything is just a torrent away. In 2008, Apple became the number one music vendor in the US and in 2010, delivered its 10 billionth song download.
Steve just kept bringing on the hits. When he launched the iPhone in 2007, the world received a breathtakingly designed product never seen before. In some ways, it was a logical extension of the iPod, but much more. You could tap it, brush it sideways and expand or contract the visuals using a pinching-like motion. For the first time you had a phone that elegantly combined the web, music, telephony and video. The Pew Internet project says that less than five years after Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, more than a third of US adults have smart phones, more than a quarter of whom rely on these as a sole means for Internet access. Its many design features were instantly imitated, breathing new life into competitors.
Then, there is the iPad, essentially a large iPhone, a logical extension of the product line and a potential laptop-killer, which has already caused netbook sales to tank by over 50 per cent. Not since Moses have tablets created such an upheavel amongst humans. Once again, it’s taken a year or two for competitors to ape the product and launch similar versions, thereby expanding the industry.
It is not simply that Steve’s products are iconoclastic, have other-worldly design and superb utility. They have dramatically altered consumer behaviour worldwide. They have also given life to entirely new economic ecosystems, which have in turn given birth to completely new business models on which a whole rafter of products, companies and industries have thrived.
Not bad for a guy who dropped out of college.