When Steve Jobs died from complications related to pancreatic cancer on 5 October 2011, the news was received with an outpouring of grief unprecedented in the history of industry and commerce. It was the lead item on television and radio news channels around the world. It filled the front pages of countless newspapers and magazines and trended on Twitter. Tributes were left in extraordinary numbers on internet forums and social networking sites; there were 35 million online tributes from China alone. Leading figures from the worlds of politics, business and entertainment issued statements mourning his passing and celebrating his remarkable life. It was the sort of response usually reserved for cultural icons such as Princess Diana, or for the most beloved stars of music, stage and screen. Yet it was not so surprising that Jobs evoked such a response, for his businesses impacted – and continue to do so – on all of our lives.
You do not need to be a Mac user, iPod addict or disciple of the iPhone for his life’s work to affect you. It is not too strong to say that none of those institutions mentioned above – the news media, the entertainment world, the internet, politics or business – would exist in the forms that they do today without his influence. For he not only equipped each of these sectors with tools that changed the way they work, but also altered society’s attitudes on how we relate to technology and how we seek to do business. One trending tweet summarized how the world had been defined by three apples: ‘The one that Eve ate, the one that dropped on Newton’s head and the one that Steve built.’
‘There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.’
BARACK OBAMA
What was most remarkable about the tributes paid to Jobs was how millions of people who had never come into personal contact with him felt a genuine bond. They were all members of Team Jobs, each with a slightly different take on what he had represented. For some he was quite simply a genius: an inventor, innovator, boundary-pusher and visionary. A maverick. For others he was an inspiration: a man who could spot a good idea, tweak it to greatness and then sell it with unparalleled success. A sort of P. T. Barnum figure for the modern world, cropping up at intervals with the latest ‘greatest gizmo on earth’, which he successfully persuaded us we just had to have.
To those rather less enamoured of him, Steve Jobs was a bully, an icon of consumerism and a plagiarist. All of these views have at least some legitimacy. If he was a great man, he wasn’t necessarily always a good one. What is beyond doubt, though, is that he was a genuine one-off.
With Steve Wozniak, he revolutionized the personal computer business. That alone would have been enough to secure him a sizeable footnote in twentieth-century history. In truth, for a while it looked as if that would indeed be his great contribution. But then he got his second wind: from the mid-1990s he transformed animated cinema and the film industry in general by giving Pixar its wings. Then, as the old century faded and a new one bloomed, he oversaw a period of almost miraculous creativity at Apple. The iMac rejuvenated the PC world, and was soon followed in short order by the iPod, which turned the music business on its head, the iPad – which has, among other achievements, underpinned a change in the way we read that was all but unthinkable ten years ago – and the iPhone, which, for many of its owners, has come to represent an entire ‘life in a pocket’.
Over the course of his remarkable career, arguably Jobs’ greatest achievement was to turn the essentially nerdy into something stylish and sexy. He addressed the geek in each of us and made us feel as if we were imbued instead with the spirit of Ned Kelly. He also understood that, by embracing innovation, he would get some things wrong along the way. Even as the arch perfectionist, he accepted this as long as every bit of knowledge was wrung from the experience to ensure better results next time. In his own words: ‘Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.’
Underlying all Jobs’ work was a belief in getting the simple things right. Of course, he realized that products need a visceral appeal, as evidenced by his comments to Fortune Magazine in 2000: ‘We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.’ But he also knew that you can make a product as sleek and irresistible-looking as you like and it will all be for nothing if it doesn’t do the job. As he said in 2003: ‘It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.’
As the creator of era-defining must-have products, Steve Jobs was not merely a rule-breaker with the Midas touch but rather someone who rewrote the entire rule book. He was a man who was intent on making, in his own words, ‘a dent in the universe’. By that reckoning, he was a phenomenal success. So let us take a look at both what he said and what he did – frequently admirable but sometimes less so – and begin our journey inside the mind of this remarkable figure.