Farewell Steve Jobs

Jobs was the last of the original titans of microcomputers. There were many folks in the early days, but only a few known by name. Steve Wozniak, Gary Kildall, and Bill Gates were the others.

Those titans (the known-by-name and the unsung) made the microcomputer revolution possible. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Digital Research, Radio Shack, Commodore, Heathkit, and even TI and Sinclair all made personal computing possible in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There are few titans today. Yes, we have Steve Ballmer at Microsoft and Larry Ellison at Oracle, but they are business folks, not technologists. The open source community has its set (Linus Torvalds, Eric S Raymond, and others) but the world is different. The later titans are smaller, building on the shoulders of their earlier kin.

Steve Jobs and Apple taught us some valuable lessons:

Design counts: The design of a product is important. People will pay for well-designed products (and avoid other products).

Quality counts: People will pay for quality. Apple products have been priced higher than corresponding PC products, and people buy them.

Try things and learn from mistakes: Apple tried many things. There were several incarnations of the iPod before it become popular.

One can enter an established market: Apple entered the market with its iPod well after MP3 players were established and "the norm". It also entered the market with its iPhone.

One can create new markets: The iPad was a new thing, something previously unseen. Apple made the market for it.

Drop technology when it doesn't help: Apple products have mutated over the years, losing features that most folks would say are required for backwards compatibility. AppleTalk, the PS/2-style keyboard and mouse ports, RS-232 serial ports, Centronics parallel printer ports, even Firewire have all been eliminated from the Apple line.

Use marketing to your advantage: Apple uses marketing strategically, coordinating it with products. It also uses it as a weapon, raising Apple above the level of the average technology companies.

Replace your own products: Apple constantly introduces new products to replace existing Apple products. They don't wait for someone else to challenge them; they constantly raise the bar.

Focus on the customer: Apple has focussed on the customer and their experience with the product. Their customer experience beats any product, commercial or open source.

Apple must now live without Steve Jobs. And not only Apple, but all of us. Steve Jobs' influence was not merely within Apple but extended to the entire computing world.