Most obituaries for Steve Jobs, who finally lost his struggle with cancer yesterday, will be gushing. And with good reason. The man was undoubtedly a genius of a rare order. He typifies almost every aspect of the modern technology culture, from his early years as a hacker and hobbyist, to the design-focused consumer device era of the 21st century.
Jobs' career spans my entire life. As long as I can remember, Apple has always been there, in one form or another. At school, I wrote rudimentary code on an Apple IIe. At university, I learnt assembler not on the more common Intel 8086 platform, but on the Motorola 68000 CPU of the Apple Macintosh.
Finding myself in journalism a few years later, I was once again surrounded by Apple machines, since at the time it dominated few markets other than the desktop publishing and graphic design industry. And nobody needs reminders of how Steve Jobs, who once was fired by his own management, returned to Apple in a blaze of glory to lead the company to the summit of not only the IT industry, but the entire corporate world.
A life so varied, so rich, so influential, so dominant, is impossible to capture in a few words. Delving under the surface, however, there are anecdotes from his early life that in many ways defined not only his own contribution to the computer industry, but exemplified the industry itself.
Both Steve Jobs and his business partner and friend Steve Wozniak, whom he met in 1969, were electronics geeks. Typical of the post-hippie era, they were anti-establishment types, and developed the famous “blue box”, used for making free calls on the AT&T network - an old but very much illegal hacker trick known as “phone phreaking”.
Jobs was a college dropout, although he continued to attend lectures in oddball subjects that he enjoyed. Those subjects weren't wasted on him. Of a calligraphy course at Reed College, in Portland, Jobs later said: “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”
After a pilgrimage to India in the early 1970s, whence he returned a bald-headed, sandal-wearing Buddhist, he got a job with Atari, where he worked on the game Breakout, contained on a circuit-board. The company offered him $100 for each chip he was able to eliminate. Jobs had little knowledge of board-level electronics, and recruited his old friend The Woz, who 'magicked' away an astonishing 50 chips. Jobs paid him $350, which he said was half of the $700 Atari had given him, and pocketed the difference.
A life so varied, so rich, so influential, so dominant, is impossible to capture in a few words.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
Both became members of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, and while Bill Gates and Paul Allen worked on BASIC and built the Altair 8800 kit computer, Jobs and Wozniak built the computer that would eventually become the Apple I.
Offered to Hewlett-Packard, the machine was rejected as unsuitable for its market. Admittedly, it was to be some time before Jobs would marry design to electronic functionality. An original example, complete with a casing that customers had to construct themselves, is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution.
The first 50 were sold to the Byte Shop for the controversial price of $666 each. Jobs knew how to get attention, even then. And Hewlett-Packard was not the only company that lost out on an opportunity that would eventually change the world.
When the Apple I was in tentative production, Commodore International expressed an interest in buying Apple Computer. Jobs had just raised $1 500 by selling his VW bus and Wozniak had chipped in $250 from the sale of his HP 65 programmable calculator. They wanted $100 000 for the company. Commodore declined.
A few years later, the Apple II sported an actual housing, external disk drives instead of a slow cassette deck, and a sexy new six-colour logo that wouldn't be abandoned until more than 20 years later. By the end of 1977, Apple had sold 7 000 of its $1 300 machines. Apple - and Cupertino, California - was on the map.
In 1980, the company that three years earlier struggled to raise $100 000, listed in the largest initial public offering since the Ford Motor Company in 1956, and a valuation by the end of the first day's trading of $1.8 billion. Besides Jobs, dozens of Apple employees became instant millionaires.
Jobs would soon be pushed out of his own company, however. Despite launching the groundbreaking Apple Macintosh in 1983, management differences with John Sculley, the CEO that Jobs himself had brought in from Pepsi Cola to solve organisational and inventory problems, led to Jobs' ouster. Wozniak left two years later.
The company was hurting, and so was Jobs. He told Playboy: “I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I'm only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I've got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.”
He was wrong. He developed skills at Pixar film animation studios and NeXT Computer that he would use to re-invigorate a dying Apple, when almost a decade later - in 1994 - he was called back to save the company he founded. Not only had he acquired an amazing sense for the design and lifestyle needs of his customer base - turning them into slavish fans - but he cleverly created a customer lock-in model of which Microsoft could only dream. While Microsoft suffered customer rebellion and anti-trust lawsuits the world over, Apple was dearly loved and fiercely defended by its customers. Those who demonised it as worse than Microsoft - which included, at times, yours truly - never made any impact on the devotion of Apple's millions of well-paying fans.
The rest of the magnificent story of Apple's rise from its ashes to the top tier of valuable corporations on earth is recent history. Jobs himself summed up the story when unveiling the iPhone in 2007: “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these.”
Steve Jobs was that kind of a man. Deeply flawed in many ways, and a ruthless businessman, he was a visionary entrepreneur that embodied all the folly, the genius and the bravery of what has been the most life-enriching industry of the last century.
He epitomises how bold ambition, spectacular failure, clever negotiation, iron-willed determination, unwavering self-interest and individual ingenuity can combine to produce miracles. He used power that he deservedly earned, sometimes in ways that appeared to benefit only himself and his company. However, by doing so, he created immeasurable benefits for society at large, both through the many ways in which Apple's products have enriched our lives, but also indirectly by the competitive pressure he placed on others to do the same. Even if you've never liked Apple, and steered clear of its expensive walled garden, you have Steve Jobs to thank for the quality and usability of the alternatives that you prefer.
This morning, two comments came to me by e-mail, both of which are worth quoting in tribute to the life of Steve Jobs.
The first is from Trevor Watkins, co-founder of the Libertarian Society of South Africa: “[Steve Jobs] is a shining example of what one man of vision can accomplish; of the power of intellect and innovation to change the world for the better. He won the hearts and minds and pocket and ears and eyes of billions, as no politician could ever hope to do, and he did it without compromising his integrity, his principles, or even his quirky personality. No one had to die to make Steve Jobs great, not even Steve Jobs. He is a towering monument to how the free market system can and does work.”
In response, Leon Louw, executive director of the Free Market Foundation, added this: “The world has, and has had, a small handful of truly remarkable people. In my intellectual world they've been confined to the likes of [Friedrich] Hayek, [Charles] Darwin, [Ayn] Rand, [Thomas] Sowell, Aristotle, Newton and Einstein. I had not realised the extent to which entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs are equally extraordinary. We see monuments to politicians, generals and 'statesmen' everywhere, but seldom of the world's truly great benefactors. Steve Jobs is high on the short-list of the world's greatest people.”
So he is. In his 56 years, he accomplished more than most will do in a century. His towering legacy will cast long shadows over the world for years to come. He deserves a statue, even if he does owe The Woz a couple of grand.
Acknowledgements: Some of the material contained in this column first appeared in a Brainstorm article, Amateur Hour, published on 3 January 2008. I am also indebted for several facts and quotations to my father, Wobbe Vegter, who recently wrote a biographical essay on Steve Jobs illustrated with his collection of computer-related stamps.
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