Jobs’ desire to keep reinventing was allied to a startling ability not only to spot trends but to create them, too. In 2007 he told delegates at the ‘All Things Digital’ conference: ‘Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.’

Keep moving

Determined to remain creative and, just as importantly, to maintain revenues, Jobs was always on guard against standing still. Taking the opportunity to land a few blows on Microsoft and IBM, he once attempted to explain why Apple had overtaken them. His theory was that such companies begin as innovative forces – until they achieve some sort of market domination. At that stage, he argued, the quality of product becomes a secondary concern to keeping revenues growing. And thus, he concluded, senior management becomes dominated by sales people – those with the most obvious ability to make a quick impact on sales revenues – at the expense of the designers, engineers and dreamers.

Watch your rivals

By the early 2000s, Apple needed a new shot of energy. Its Power Mac G4 Cube had not sold brilliantly and the iMac was becoming familiar. The company hungered for a product to re-establish its credentials as a ‘dent-maker’. It was against this backdrop that Jobs had one of his ‘Eureka’ moments.

Like everyone else in the technology sector, he was acutely aware of the growing number of unregulated file-sharing websites that were springing up, feeding an audience hungry for cheap media streamed through their computers. Manufacturers were responding by fitting out their computers with decent CD and DVD software. There was also an array of MP3 players – effectively new Walkmans for the digital age. But when he took a close look at the market, Jobs became convinced that the existing competition was, in his opinion, nowhere near up to the job.

It was time for Apple to diversify. Jobs determined that it should create the finest digital music player out there, a machine that would dominate the portable music market like Walkmans and Discmans had dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. Though the technology was already available, Jobs was intent on binding it into a device so brilliantly designed, so pleasing to use and so far beyond anything yet conceived that it would blow every other MP3 player out of the water. His plan was to take what was already there and stretch it into something better, more efficient and more beautiful.

In 2010 Jobs would say of the iPhone 4.0: ‘We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best’; he could have said exactly the same about the iPod a decade earlier. This was the classic Jobs modus operandi, reflecting a man who saw himself less as an inventor and more as a refiner. He himself would admit: ‘We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.’ In this way, the iPod was born.

Look for gaps in the market

As we have already seen in ‘How to Create an Instant Design Classic’ (here), the iPod became an immediate style icon. But it was not such an instant sales success. At the time of its launch in 2001, there were only two real options for loading songs on to it: either you uploaded songs from your own CD collection or you got tracks through an illegal website. With the music industry fearing utter implosion, Jobs had his next great moment of inspiration. He approached major record labels about the prospect of making their artists’ tracks available for a small fee via an Apple-run online store using existing iTunes jukebox technology. There were, of course, some major artists who decided to remain unavailable – notably the Beatles but also the likes of AC/DC – but within a week of launch, iTunes sold a million tracks. Over the next two years it sold a billion. It was, quite literally, a lifeline for the music industry. More importantly for Jobs, it was a massive success for Apple.

At thirty years old, Jobs had spoken of the ‘one more great computer’ he had in him. Now in his mid-forties, he had followed up the iMac with the iPod. Where people had been writing off the company a few years earlier, they now saw it as almost peerless. The Jobs-inspired second wind continued to blow. The multi-functional iPhone came to the rescue of all those people who were becoming loaded down with gadgets, its touchscreen technology something that until recently had seemed like nothing more than science fiction. ‘I do not want people to think of this as a computer,’ Jobs said. ‘I think of it as reinventing the phone.’ So the man who would be Edison outdid Edison.

And if people were at first nonplussed by the arrival of the iPad (a touchscreen tablet) in 2010, they soon came to love it for the games they could play, the music they could listen to, the websites they could surf and, not least, for the library of books they could carry. At an age where he could have been forgiven for slowing down, Jobs had done the opposite. Apple was no longer simply a leading computer manufacturer but rather the giant of the global technology sector.