Note: This was adapted from a really long comment at althouse.com based on her post here: http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/who-has-had-as-much-impact-on-business.html
I've read a lot of nonsense today about Steve Jobs. A man that brilliant deserves a little more respect from people -- many of whom may not have been alive in 1976 -- who are discounting what he did for Apple and technology in general.
For those of you saying Apple had zero impact on your life, yadda yadda, then you're not in publishing, marketing or graphic design. But every print or motion advertisement you've seen since 1979 was made with the assistance, if not solely on, a Mac. But first Mac -- following on Apple IIe -- opened up a world of personal computing before the PC world adopted those initials. That is, just a short few years after the CEO of IBM stated that the ENTIRE MARKET for computers added up to maybe 5 users, Apple proved that there was a viable HOME market for computing. The elegance and sophistication and power in the Mac design (aesthetic and operational) revolutionized many industries.
Every ad agency, art director, and small publisher adopted the Mac system because it was built to do tasks that the glorified typewriters sold by IBM just weren't suited well for. Creative ideas blossomed across the land by people using Macs. It doesn't matter if their market share was small, it was highly influential. And seeding schools with Macs was another brilliant stroke during Jobs first tenure as CEO.
Now, many comments here reflected the "sure they had great design but" argument. Your eliding a lot of unbelievable value with that big but in there! If you don't think Jobs mattered to Apple then you didn't see how they floundered without him, even though the designers had great ideas: Newton was a tablet computer long before the iPad but didn't have the elegance and power-packed features of the later iteration. It came out when Apple was rudderless. The kind of creative teams developed there needed a strong hand, a man with a good eye. Steve Jobs was that man.
And Apple welcomed him back in 1996 just in time to take advantage of powerful new chipsets and bigger brighter screens were being developed, as wireless systems were being designed and people were experimenting with hooking television and cable to their computers.
Sure it's easy today to look back and think the iMac and iPod and iPhone and iPad followed a natural progression. Maybe you even think anyone could have done it, but that's not the case. It would not have been this way but for Steve Jobs. Going against the norm for marketers, who are slavishly devoted to decoding customer signals and addicted to focus groups, Jobs lays it out in the quotes Ann posted today. They built the machine for tomorrow. Customers liked it. People bought it. They packed as much forward-thinking technology into the iPhone as they could, even things other phone makers didn't think of. Apps? People here have said, in so many words, that tell the people what to buy and they'll do it. Well, that's a clever, if cynical, way to phrase it. But it's completely wrong. Sometimes the customer DOESN'T know what he wants until he sees something and involuntarily says, "Wow!"
Steve Jobs knew how to organize an enormous multidimensional company made up of brilliant people and get them to make things that make people go wow. And, he did it in a way that can't be written about without using the word elegant. It's true.
If you're here today reading this comment then you know more about computers than your grandparents ever did. They have changed your life. And many of the things we use -- graphical user interfaces (as opposed to DOS commands), a mouse, a CPU separate from the screen and keyboard, a flat screen, app stores, huge catalogs of music )legally!) at your fingertips -- all those things are Apple inventions that were adapted to PC design over time.
Sure, Steve Jobs is not a revolutionary like Henry Ford, but after assembly lines, standardization and charcoal briquets what did Henry do? Steve Jobs kept going, kept pushing technology into directions that people needed but didn't yet know they wanted. It's easy to make fun of or even miss, because like any consummate master he made it look easy, even inevitable. But all these things were not inevitable and Apple is second to only Exxon Mobile in value right now, because it was led by a one-of-kind visionary named Steve Jobs.
