Socially Mundane

You want to change the world. Don’t you?

We all do. Or, at least, we all did at one time or another. The whole “delusions of grandeur” thing in our younger days when we were still discovering the world and never realized how big and complicated it really is.

If I could live any dream life at all, it would be a the same life lived by Steve Jobs.

No, this isn’t some gushing tribute or my wish I were a bazillionaire or anything like that at all. Think about it, though: when was the last time in history the world-over felt genuine condolence over the death of a company C.E.O.? Sure, it’s happened before, but not like this in a really, really long time.

This is because Steve Jobs changed your life.

And his was the “perfect” life.

Steve Jobs literally invented the personal computer. They simply did not exist until he twisted Steve Wozniak’s arm into turning his geeky genius into creating one, rather than another one of his electronic “pranakster” gizmos.

And a disclaimer here: I am not a Steve or Apple historian and I don’t claim to be authoritative on what I am preparing to write. It is simply the way I remember how things unfolded, from my own personal perspective. I apologize here and now if I get anything wrong.

Steve’s goal was more or less to topple “big brother” and empower individuals. The Apple I was hand-made. The Apple II was the first ever in the universe mass-produced personal computer. The “Big Brother” in Apple’s 1984 Macintosh advertisement was meant to be IBM and secondarily HP.

But while Jobs was focused on attacking “Big Brother”, Bill Gates out-flanked him. With a prototype Macintosh (having it for developing reasons) copying (by concept) the Macintosh “graphical user interface” - and worked frantically to create the Windows GUI (which sat on top of DOS). Jobs was absolutely infuriated. His trust was broken. Steve Balmer (or perhaps Paul Allen) is rumored to have said Steve Jobs is the singular person in the world Bill Gates has never raised his voice to.

From this time forward Jobs - and Apple had turned covert and it explains the ridiculously tight secrecy the company is now known the world over for.

Jobs was a genuine lover of many arts. It showed in his creations: not only where Apple computers solid mechanically and electronically, they were stylish and the software felt smooth and natural. It was about the experience of using an Apple product.

Jobs was ousted from Apple because management decisions and direction conflicted wildly with that of it’s founder. It is said that founders of a company do well on the Board or in the development departments but fail miserably in management as the two skills (creative passion versus lock-step business management) mix as well as oil and water. However, we now know that general paradigm does not apply to Jobs and Apple.

When you do what you love to do, it’s not “work”.

Steve Jobs founded a new company: Next and commenced to starting everything all over again. New hardware and an entirely new, rethought operating system (“Next Step”) which was eventually purchased by Apple and is the main foundation for what we now know as OS X (Operating System 10).

Next wasn’t enough and so, apparently, Jobs was looking for additional interesting things to do with his resources. George Lucas was preparing to shutter his experimental “Pixar” efforts because it wasn’t producing a very good return on investment. Jobs jumped-in by investing large sums, eventually purchasing Pixar outright from Lucas.

When Jobs returned to Apple it was supposed to be a temporary thing until a new CEO could be found. Immediately upon his return he looked around and, to the shrill dismay of Apple fans, he started whacking with a hatchet - killing-off a lot of research and development projects, such as the Newton, and discontinuing a lot of various models of apple computer products. Completely slimming down the options on offer to consumers.

I remember a specific public quote from Steve during this initial shake-up at Apple: “Trust me. You won’t be disappointed.”

My timeline memory is real fuzzy at this point, but I’m thinking it was about nine months later, perhaps only six or maybe it was a year… Steve and Apple unveiled the very first candy-colored, all-in-one iMac. The “i” was supposed to stand for “Internet” or “Inter-connected” or something. The idea that the machine had no floppy disk drive because most (if not all) input and output would occur through networking.

This is the beginning of the end of the computer, (and ‘smart’ electronics) industry as we knew it then. If you’d have to pick a single point in time when the world changed, this was it.

Steve changed not only the world of computers right then and there…again, but the world. The rest is as they say “history”.

I’m not a “Steve deciple” or anything like that. My condolences to his family. I supposed I’ll miss hearing about and from him, but I am happy for him because he lived the perfect life. Consider this:

• Changed the world by literally inventing the personal computer
• Changed entire computer industry with Macintosh (graphical interface/mouse)
• Changed the entire computer industry with the first “must-have” laptop computer (Macintosh PowerBook)
• Changed the entire computing industry with the first ever “artificial intelligence” personal computer that understood and acted on voice commands and spoke back to you intelligently (Macintosh Centris AV)
• Changed the entire computing (and many electronics) industries with touch-based interfaces (Macintosh PowerBook and it’s “TouchPad”)
• Changed entire movie industry with the first ever 100% computer-generated full-length animated movie (Toy Story)
• Changed computing industry again (no more floppy drive, translucent “artsy” designs that, it seemed, every peripheral maker had to implement)
• Change the entire music entertainment industry with iTunes
• Changed the entire music player industry with the iPod
• Changed the entire telecommunications industry with the iPhone
• Changed the entire computing industry - again - with the iPad, which he said on stage just before he revealed it “This is the most important thing I have ever done.” Can you say this is not true?
• And finally: beaten, no - clobbered his competitors in the end: IBM left the personal computer industry years ago, Apple reached a market cap over and beyond Microsoft (value) and just not long ago: Hewlett-Packard announced it’s intention to leave the personal computer industry and focus on software (though that may change due to new CEO since the announcement)

He really did change the world in an indisputable, tangible and tactile way as you and I both are directly affected. He beat everyone who was ahead of him in competition.

The message of the 1984 Macintosh advertisement has finally come to pass. Except instead of the dialog being “…and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984” (meaning the movie and book story,) it might say something like “…and you’ll see why 2011 won’t be like any other year since the beginning of time.”

Big Brother as Steve Jobs thought of it technically doesn’t exist any more, in any form and so, Steve takes his final bow.

No doubt with a huge smile of satisfaction deep inside content in having lived what was surely overall a perfect life.

Steve Jobs demonstrates his NEXT computer, a hardware and software company he founded after his departure from apple in 1985. The NEXT OS became the foundation of Apple’s OS X and iOS and drives Apple’s hardware to this day.

This photo: March 30, 1989, AP/Paul Sakuma