Steve Jobs’ Passing -- a Geek’s Perspective

“Good artists copy... Great artists steal”  P. Picaso
Aside from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs was the second-most influential entrepreneur who influenced my career. I grew up using Apple II computers in high school. I was fascinated with their power and relative ease of programming (through AppleBasic). What made the Apple II a success was software invented by Dan Bricklin -- VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. It allowed accountants, scientists, and engineers to ‘play’ with numbers. It offered thousands of business owners a reason to plunk down $3000 in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to gain insight into their businesses. IBM couldn’t release their first PC without an equivalent application from Lotus.

People mistakenly think that the Macintosh was the first computer that used a mouse and a graphical user interface; actually, the first commercial computer to use these innovations was the Apple Lisa, which debuted at $10,000. It was a flop. A smaller team at Apple, led by Steve Jobs, focused on a more elegant, consumer-friendly device which had a couple of nice applications--AppleWriter and Paint, included. But what really made the Mac a hit were “killer apps” such as Adobe’s PageMaker and Illustrator applications, which, used in conjunction with Apple’s LaserWriter printer, made desktop publishing and layout accessible to many talented designers around the world, including my aunt, Jan Leadholm. Of course, one can’t forget the innovative Mac commercial that aired at the 1984 SuperBowl.

In 1985, after losing a power struggle with John Sculley and the board at Apple, Jobs was fired. During this hiatus, he founded NeXT, a computer company later acquired by Apple for its innovative operating system: a version of Unix that had a nice, graphical user interface. In 1986 he purchased the computer graphics division from Lucas Films and spun it off as Pixar.

When I attended engineering school at Washington University in the early 1990’s, the computer lab had two rooms. One filled with PCs, the other filled with Macs. While much of the PC room was empty, there was hardly an empty chair in the Mac room. Students didn’t want to use PCs for writing their papers, they wanted something easy to learn and use.

While Steve Jobs is thought of as an innovator with a Midas touch, not all his ideas turned a profit. The Apple III was a bust. The NeXT computer, while innovative, was targeted at too narrow a market that was already serviced by Apple. After ditching the hardware division, NeXT turned a small profit in 1994. Following a similar theme was Toy Story, Pixar’s first blockbuster, which wasn’t released until 1995, nine years from the time Jobs acquired the division. But through failure, Jobs gained valuable insight. In one of the more viewed commencement speeches on YouTube,

he told his audience how his being fired from Apple freed him from the ‘heaviness of success’ and allowed him the freedom to create and start from the beginning. He became less full of himself. Above all, he learned from mistakes and incorporated those lessons into his subsequent successes. From the failure of the Newton, grew the success of the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. From the missteps of Apple’s MobleMe came iCloud.

As I write this, there are hundreds of students protesting outside Wall Street. They rail against capitalism, corporate greed and corruption, and have support in certain segments of our population. But as they blog on their MacBooks, or take photos with their iPhones, do they comprehend the shoulders they stand upon? Innovators like Jobs & Wozniak, Gates & Allen, Ellison, Page & Brin, Hewlett & Packard and others don’t happen spontaneously. They are nurtured by a drive of calculated risk and potential reward. You don’t get engineers to work tirelessly in the wee hours in an office laboratory to perfect touch screens or other technologies to beat competitors, known and unknown, without the outside chance of remuneration. This creates products that we all use and love. Technical innovations that, directly and indirectly, save and enrich our lives. Every country, every population, occasionally produces someone with extraordinary talent and vision. Where they end up depends on their environment’s ability to nurture and reward this rare talent. We’ve been lucky enough to live in an age that allows a disparity in wealth, because such disparity, like a tide, does raise all boats. We see when governments crack down on individuals with talent and drive, who "make too much." In the end, it doesn’t lift the rest of the citizens, but drives everyone further into poverty.

What the protesters don't realize is that for all the success of an Apple, or Microsoft, or Exxon, or Virgin Atlantic, there are a few spectacular failures, and millions of smaller ones as well. Capitalism requires failure as well as success. Evolution dictates winners and losers in its mutations. In his final story during his commencement address at Stanford, Steve talks about death. He talked about his diagnosis of operable Pancreatic cancer. He talked about how death makes way for new life. "Death is life's change agent." Wherever your spirit dwells, Steve, here's to you. Through your imperfections and mistakes, you've made my life, and the lives of millions of people, much richer.

UPDATE: A nice memoir of Steve Jobs from Walt Mossberg, http://allthingsd.com/20111005/the-steve-jobs-i-knew/