A year or so after he learnt about the pancreatic cancer, Steve Jobs bared his soul (Stanford University Commencement Address 2005): “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool — to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” In the six years left to him, he turned communication, mobile computing and digital entertainment upside down, by living that philosophy to the hilt. Apple built new domains around his insight that consumers would love touch-screens and ditch the mouse, which Apple itself had turned into standard equipment. Several years after Apple launched the iPhones and iPads, those devices remain the benchmarks in consumer gadgetry.
The touch-screen revolution was not the first time that the adopted kid who was a college dropout, once described by a venture capitalist as “that refugee from the human race”, transformed digital consumption. Mr Jobs did that routinely throughout his 35-year career. Arguably, he has been as influential in shaping the lives and tastes of ordinary folks as earlier giants of innovation like Edison, Graham Bell, Baird, Ford and Berners-Lee. His curriculum vitae is too well known to need reiteration. Several other tech moguls (Ellison, Gates, Dell) dropped out of college, so he’s scarcely alone in that regard. What made Mr Jobs unique was his ability to look sideways at technology, and sense how it could offer a holistic new experience. That was reinforced by a reverential approach to design (which he learnt by studying Sony, whose products he used to take apart in order to understand how they were made). Design, Mr Jobs said, “is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation”.
The deceptively simple, zen sense of aesthetics was evident from the early-era Macs, which defined personal computing. The average human being prefers colour screens; she likes changing fonts; she prefers clicking on icons to typing verbose commands; she doesn’t want to flip through manuals. All very obvious – but only to Mr Jobs (and his partner Mr Wozniak) in 1979. Later, during the long exile from Apple, he turned that radar on entertainment and Pixar set new standards. Returning to Apple, he bet on an easy-to-play digital music gadget, backed by a library of singles downloads. Apple retains a stranglehold on the $0.99/download market, eight years after the first iPod. Mr Jobs never had truck with the market research beloved of the more cautious. He was supremely confident that his “non-linear life experiences” would help him stay ahead of the curve in sensing what consumers loved, usually long before they knew it themselves. He usually got things right and he had the courage to keep trying when things did go wrong.
That Stanford speech went viral within hours. Not only did it offer an insight into the wellsprings that drive innovation; it was also a wonderful example of somebody coming to terms, in unsentimental fashion, with mortality. A Buddhist, Mr Jobs believed in nirvana. Most of his customers would agree that he earned enough good karma to achieve it.
