STEVE JOBS:STEVEN P JOBS, the visionary co-founder of Apple, helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, films and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age. He died aged 56.
Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with pancreatic cancer, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.
By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalised on his intuitive marketing sense, Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centred on the internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion (€6.1 billion).
A wave of tributes to Jobs came this week from political leaders, including US president Barack Obama and Taoiseach Enda Kenny, as well as technology industry leaders and legions of Apple fans. Flags were flown at half-mast at Apple operations around the world, including its base in Cork, while Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, was transformed into a memorial.
“For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honour,” said Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. “I will miss Steve immensely.”
Jobs had developed an early interest in electronics. He was mentored by a neighbour, an electronics hobbyist, who built do-it-yourself electronics projects.
He was brash from an early age. In eighth grade, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he phoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.
Eight years after founding Apple with his high-school friend Stephen Wozniak, Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use.
After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another – the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories such as music players and mobile phones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.
During his years outside Apple, Jobs bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.
Starting with Toy Story in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit films, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.
Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.
It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.
“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book Insanely Great, which chronicles the creation of the Mac.
“Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”
To his understanding of technology Jobs brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party.
His worldview was shaped by the 1960s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said, “the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there”.
After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Oregon, in 1972, Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics – even people who knew him well, including his wife – could never understand.
Decades later Jobs flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and the Whole Earth Catalog, a 1960s counterculture publication.
Apple’s very name reflected Jobs’s unconventionality. In an era when engineers and hobbyists tended to describe their machines with model numbers, he chose the name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary habits at the time.
Coming on the scene just as computing began to move beyond the walls of research laboratories and corporations in the 1970s, Jobs saw that computing was becoming personal – that it could do more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and business problems – and that it could even be a force for social and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers were boxy wooden affairs with metal chassis, he designed the Apple II as a sleek, low-slung plastic package intended for the den or the kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital lifestyle.
He put much stock in the notion of “taste”, a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing”.
Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Jobs turned in the late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Jobs’s genius lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to strip away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained”.
Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
If he had a motto, it may have come from the Whole Earth Catalog, which he said had deeply influenced him as a young man. The book, he said in a commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, ends with the admonition: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
“I have always wished that for myself,” he said.
Jobs is survived by his wife Laurene Powell and their three children Eve, Erin Sienna and Reed; and daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with Chrisann Brennan.
Steve Jobs: born February 24th, 1955; died October 5th, 2011