End of an Era

Last month, after Mr. Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, I wrote about his many accomplishments and why I thought he would go down in history as one of the world's greatest inventors/entrepreneurs. Little did I know how soon we would be writing his obituary. Even though I'm a real Apple fan who has seen Mr. Jobs in person giving one of his famous keynote addresses, I never met him or even saw him off-stage. So why do I feel this great sense of loss?

As I mentioned last month, I feel privileged to have witnessed his many accomplishments and I've benefited greatly from many of the products his company produced, yet I can't explain why I feel poorer today than I did the day before he died.  After all, Apple hasn't gone anywhere and by all accounts the company is richer than ever and has a great many ultra-talented people to carry on its winning ways. You can bet there are many more magical products to come out of Cupertino, even without Mr. Jobs to mentor their development. Some estimate the Apple "pipeline" of products is full for the next five years. No, I don't think I'll be short of shiny Apple gizmos to lust after. So, what is fueling this feeling?

Answering that requires a little retrospection on my part. Those who know me understand what an unapologetic geek I am. Having spent the better part of the last 25 years completely immersed in technology both personally and professionally, I have witnessed an evolution of sorts. When I started, computers were the sole realm of nerds with pocket protectors who took solace in the fact that they were the only ones who understood how the multitude of ones and zeros in just the right order and combination did useful things. Today there are over 30 million iPad owners who routinely out-compute in ten minutes what would have taken us hours (if not days) to do when I began. The ones and zeros are still there doing what they've always done, but my twelve-year-old need not know about them when she slides the "slide to unlock" button on her iPhone.  She doesn't have to type a single character to make this pocket computer perform feats we could have only dreamt of in 1982.

While we mere mortals were waxing about ones and zeros, patting ourselves on the back for being clever enough to write some simple programs, Steve Jobs was busy inventing the Macintosh. The first personal computer designed for regular people (those without pocket protectors), built to purposely obfuscate the technical and clarify the utility of the device. He had the vision to understand that a technological revolution would never happen if left in the hands of nerds. Making technology simple, useful and available to everyone would be the key to Apple's success. In 1984, by introducing the first Mac, Mr. Jobs set the course of personal computing for decades to come, even though there were many of us too blind to see it at the time. A graphical interface? A mouse? Why waste so many precious computing resources making that kind of stuff work when a few typed commands would do the same thing? Why indeed.

In 2001, there were dozens of portable digital music players on the market. Some were pretty good, but most were nearly unusable for all but the most determined music fan. Apple released the iPod with its simple "click wheel" interface and iTunes software for managing digital music and within two years they owned the market. How come? The iPod didn't sound better. It played the same music as all the others and it was much more expensive. The answer, its beauty and simplicity. As Mr. Jobs famously said at the iPod's introduction, "1000 songs in my pocket". Again, he understood better than any of his peers that being successful wasn't about the technology, but what people could do with it. Six years and over 100 million iPods later, Apple overtook Wal-Mart to become the world's largest music retailer and the iPod comprises over 80% of the portable music player market. These truths make it easy to forget just how revolutionary the iPod was.

While the iPod was busy changing the music industry (and minting money for Apple), Mr. Jobs turned his attention to smartphones. There were a few companies making very credible devices at the time. Palm transitioned its PDA business to include smartphone offerings. Microsoft did the same with it's portable operating system and the Blackberry guys were hitting it out of the park with their devices. Surely there was no room for Apple in this fray, right? Again, who used the smartphones? Techies? Business executives? What about the other 90% of the cellphone market? While these other companies had made some small inroads into the consumer market, Mr. Jobs saw the error of their ways and blew them all out of the water in 2007 with the iPhone. What, no buttons? No stylus? Its beauty and simplicity was an immediate success. Quite literally, a child could pick one up and learn to use it in minutes. I know, mine did. Today, after selling over 100 million iPhones, Apple is the worlds largest smartphone manufacturer. Now, because of the device's mass appeal, Palm has all but disappeared, Microsoft is struggling to play catch-up and Blackberry sales are on a steady downward trajectory. Astonishing if you remember Apple wasn't even in the business until June of 2007.

Last year, Mr. Jobs astonished the world again with the introduction of the iPad. Everything Microsoft and their hardware partners unsuccessfully pushed for ten years was swept away in one afternoon. Taking the same ideas of beauty and simplicity that embodies every Apple device and manifesting it in a tablet form factor resulted in the same success enjoyed by its predecessors. Apple sold almost 15 million of them the first year, more than its competitors' (if you call them that) total for the ten years prior.

I have only skimmed the surface of what Steve Jobs accomplished in his all-to-brief lifetime, yet any one of the above accomplishments would make him an historical icon. Taken together, the true genius of the man becomes evident. He made the most complicated things simple and accessible for all of us. Witnessing the results have been nothing short of awe-inspiring. We've all been on this Steve Jobs hit train for the past ten years, dazzled by every new piece of wizardry it had to offer. No wonder I'm a little sad the ride is over.