Steve Jobs

The media and the internet are replete with articles, tributes, and pans of the life and career of a man named Steve Jobs, who passed away this week. Some people who worked with him call him a tyrannical micromanager, difficult to work with, and he may have been. I'm not one of those people; I never met him, and I can't say. It's certainly a characteristic of innovators. Edison, for example, liked to work long hours and expected much of his employees.

There are people who consider him little more than a successful pitchman, a person who shamelessly took other people's ideas and work and hawked them as his own; both might be true to some extent. On the other hand, his name is on some 300 United States Patents. Your name can't be there if you are just a manager or company owner; the law requires that only those who actually participated in the invention can be on a valid patent. With all the patent lawsuits Apple has been in, if Jobs was not legally on those patents, somebody would have been happy to point that out.

Then there's the "reality distortion field" that supposedly surrounded Jobs. According to his critics, this caused people by the millions to line up and buy products they neither liked nor wanted. Here is a partial list:

• Apple ll: first widely available consumer personal computer, not a kit-built
  hobby machine
  
• Macintosh: intuitive graphical user interface with mouse, menu bar with
  drop-down menus,built-in peer networking capability, with Microsoft
  Word and Excel, What You See Is What You Get document display,
  multiple fonts and typefaces(the interface was modeled after
  one demonstrated by Xerox PARC research labs,where management,
  in its best imitation of the Dilbert comic, had decided not to
  implement.)
  
• iPod: easy to use digital music player eliminates cassettes and CD's
  
• iTunes: easy and inexpensive access to music by track or album
  
• iPhone: creates market for smartphone with intuitive touchscreen OS and
  computer capabilites
  
• App Store: applications online and available anytime
  
• iPad: creates tablet PC market
  

Jobs vision and his goal, from the time the Macintosh was conceived, and which was achieved in the iPad, was to design an "appliance computer that would turn on and just work." Other computer makers of the day were determined to stay with the command line interface. That is, after all, how computers worked; the user was expected to learn a few hundred arcane commands to get the job done, and IT people would teach a user the ins and outs of the application they deemed best for any user. However, when Microsoft copied, or "innovated" the graphical user interface some years later, PC use took off, and there is virtually no computer system which does not use it today.

"Reality distortion field?" Hardly. Jobs had a "clarity field." Jobs saw that there are hobbyists and enthusiasts who want to build their own computer, get "under the hood" into the operating system; these folks generally tend to become the IT people. But he saw something they could not. 98 percent of the users do not want anything to do with the operating system or the hardware; we want that out of the way; it's just a tool. We don't buy a device to work on the device itself, but to use the device.

And Steve Jobs, more than anyone else, saw clearly and made that possible.

If you're interested in more about Steve Jobs, you might want to order his authorized biography coming out at the end of this month.