I expected the Steve Jobs’ passing would garner considerable headline media coverage and tributes from around the world, but I underestimated the extent of the outpouring.
I cannot recall a business person’s passing that was as profoundly felt as that of Steve Jobs. Not ever. The reaction from people upon hearing of his death has been compared to that for Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. After all, Steve Jobs was, in his own right, a global celebrity who had achieved “star” status.
I’ve both read and listened to comments from journalists, computer analysts, industry observers, as well as colleagues and contemporaries of Steve Jobs. During the past week some have drawn a comparison to Thomas Edison, the icon of American inventors who gave us light bulbs, the phonograph and the motion picture camera.
Like Edison, Steve Jobs was one of those individuals who comes along once every 75 years to do things that affect lives and hearts, and do it in a way that stirs emotions. Of the reasons that Steve Jobs is missed, for me there are three:
- Jobs was a visionary and a creator, first and foremost. His dreams were brought to life through the company he co-founded. Importantly, his dreams connected to the dreams of tens of millions of people who, through his products, experienced the joy and wonder in using them that Jobs had envisioned in creating them.
- He was imperfect, just like the rest of us. Adopted, raised in a humble environment, and a first semester dropout at college, Steve Jobs was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was brash, impatient, demanding, intolerant and difficult to work for and work with. Achieving early success that made others envious, he suffered the ultimate indignity when he was fired from the company he co-founded by the very same person he had hired to help it. Even his most ardent adversaries felt for the man at this sad turn.
- Yet, he was his own Phoenix, rising from the ashes. Jobs defied the odds, making a comeback to Apple as its CEO, and then set out to achieve accomplishments that even the best of fairy tales cannot match. Steve Jobs became to personal technology what Walt Disney became to childhood imagination, and what J.K. Rowlings became to children’s fantasy books. Apple redefined the personal technology landscape not through brute competitive force, but by creating offerings that were irresistible to tens of millions of us. In his own language, Jobs wanted to “seduce” us by cloaking functionality under the most elegant of designs, and creating an experience with the customer that was unique, compelling and without substitute.
Steve Jobs achieved enormous success by giving us things we could only imagine, and appealing to the universal desire for novelty, simplicity, wonder and delight, with functionality sandwiched in between. Just like Thomas Edison did.
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