Steve Jobs and the Legacy of a Visionary

It is almost Midnight. It is the end of a rainy day in LA. The day that Steve Jobs passed away from a world he shaped with his ideas about technology, business, and how to live life moving forward. I've spent the last several hours since I got home from work reading up on a man who's ideas permeate every facet of my life. I learned that thinking of Jobs as an inventor who brought us the iPhone was wrong. He wasn't the inventor turned engineer. He wasn't "like Bill Gates but the Mac version". He was never the Engineer. That was Steve Wozniak. His co-founder of apple who actually designed the first Apple I computer. He wasn't the inventor who developed object oriented programming and the mouse-cursor interface. That was the engineers at Xerox PARC. He wasn't the Animator who revolutionized animation technology. That credit belongs to the John Lasseter and the creators of Pixar. He wasn't the one who invented PostScript. And from what I understand, he wasn't even running apple when they were selling macintosh computers to College students headed for their dorms, it was being run by John Sculley the man who had pushed him out. Steve Jobs was a visionary. He was the one who saw the potential in Steve Wozniak's little box of chips and circuits and convinced him to start a computer company. He was the one who while taking a tour of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center saw "a strange device called a mouse, that you could use to move a cursor around the screen. You could open files and folders, copy and paste content inside them. It was simply a breakthrough." Steve said "Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday." He was the one that saw the potential in Pixar that George Lucas didn't. It was he who encouraged the founders of Adobe, Warnock and Geschke to make PostScript into a standard computer language. And even though he wasn't the head of apple computers when it was selling the Macintosh computer to college students around the country, he was the one who spearheaded that division of apple and gave it direction. A friend rightfully called him a champion and facilitator of innovation. He developed a better computer because he saw that there was a need for one. He developed the iPod because he saw a use for one and unlike anyone else, he saw how it could change the way we consume music and how it could make his company flourish. He was the visionary.

In hind sight, its easy to call Jobs a visionary. Yesterday they announced the iPhone 4s and I blogged about it on my Macbook Pro while editing video in Final Cut Pro and listening to music I downloaded on iTunes. I can't go a single day without having my hands on an apple product. How can you not give him credit for being a visionary when we spend every day surrounded by tangible reminders of his impact on the world. Yet some of his greatest contributions are things that we don't touch. Steve Jobs changed the way companies develop market positioning because he saw that you could change the market and move everyone else's position around you. For instance, in 2003, Benioff and a few members of his executive team at salesforce.com went to talk to Jobs. Jobs told them they needed to build an ecosystem around their software. They did just that, by designing an ecosystem that it initially called the "app store," which basically let people buy apps and run them in Salesforce software. Steve later did it himself with iTunes and the App Store for the iPod and iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the way advertisers develop brand strategies. His iMac, iPod, iPhone, iLife, iEverything naming strategy proved that product iDentity is something that involves every aspect of how a consumer interacts with it, including the spelling. He changed the way we approach design and saw the aesthetics of design as the visual manifest of designs true function; re-inventing the way things work. His ideas were so far ahead of the curve that everyone to this day is still making sense of how revolutionary and important his ideas actually were. He taught the world how to envision realities that didn't exist and how to manifest them into being. When you think about it, foresight is the basis and function of intelligence; to more accurately predict and initiate future outcomes. In that way, you can definitely call him a genious. Looking at the length and breadth of Jobs' reach and the degree of impact he had on our world and its future, It becomes pretty evident that in the end his greatest legacy was showing us how to be a visionary. The world is all the more dim and blind without him in it to see and light the way.

RIP

-MM

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. "

- Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencment Speech)

"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts"

-Albert Einstein




This is the first apple computer. Where people saw a wooden box with chips and circuits inside, Steve Jobs saw a company. He talked Steve Wozniak into starting a company and sold his VW van to pay for building the first boards.

Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said — and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company.

- Steve Wozniak (Co-Founder Apple Computers)

"...Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."

-Steven Paul Jobs

"We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade."

- Mike Markkula

"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

-Steven Paul Jobs (Recruiting PepsiCo executive John Sculley)