Thank you, Steve
BLOGGER: ERIC M. DANIS
Should it surprise anyone that the phrase “Steve Jobs changed the world” generates 50 million search results on Google? Legions of Apple fans are mourning the sad passing of Steve Jobs, innovator extraordinaire, while commentators struggle to assess the true impact of his incredible legacy.
He was certainly a major driver of the connected world. My four-year-old, who eagerly grabs my iPad 2 whenever he has the chance, surely will never be able to fathom what life was like before Steve Jobs (along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak), revolutionized the way we work and live by creating the Apple II, which popularized home computing.
That was of course merely the tip of the iceberg for Jobs, who following the launch of the iPod in 2001, then went on to flip the music industry upside down by launching iTunes in 2003. Over 200 million registered users have downloaded approximately 15 billion songs from the largest online retailer in the world, with “iTunes in the Cloud” set to make a big splash. Jobs continued propelling the connected world forward with Apple’s innovative iPhone, whose beautiful design and simplicity played a significant role in the smartphone explosion and helped mainstream mobile data usage. And then the roll-out of the iPad showed us Jobs’ vision of the “post-PC” world we will all soon be living in.
According to Forbes’ Ted Anthony, perhaps Steve Jobs’ greatest ability was in transforming Apple into a company that gives people exactly what they want, “before we understood it ourselves. We wanted easy to use. We wanted to lose ourselves in what our gadgets did … We wanted, in short, intricate simplicity.”
Giving customers exactly what they want, in a simple and intuitive fashion, is the main goal today for service providers in what has become a customer experience-focused market. Steve Jobs set the bar pretty high – we all should keep trying to reach it.
Steve Jobs changed the way I thought about technology. Nothing needed to be text entry any longer. I didn’t need to know how to make batch files to do multiple things in a row with just the click of a button. His greatest gift was not his fastidiousness, it was his ease of making technology consumable. People fundamentally understood what he was going for and how easy it was to get there. Children and adults alike got it.
He will be missed, but hopefully the PC industry will continue down this path.
beautifully put and i 100% agree with the message you conclude with. simplicity, knowing what the cutomer wants before they even realize it. great message for us. by the way, if you want to see what a visionary the man really was read this interview from 1985 – fascinating: http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/
beautifully explained and he has proved it “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is matter of choice”.
I created a little tribute:
http://www.thecommcouch.com/?p=470
When it comes to defining and shaping the customer experience, Steve Jobs (and Apple) is probably king. Here’s to the sad passing of a great innovator, visionary and master of the customer experience.
Steve Jobs set an example that, there is no extreme for inovation.
Steve Jobs – Michaelangelo of IT Products.He was great Innovator and at the same time had good aesthetic sense….
Steve Job and Apple showed the world the difference between Quality and Excellence
This is a loss to innovation , creativity and transformation of technology .He executed into perfection what he thought and implemented his thoughts and made it felt through touch and made us feel the innovation.He will stay as an immortal deity with whatever he has given to the field of IT we will remember him every day through the various I’s that are available and the ones that are going to come as for sure the Flagship and legacy will be carried for greater hieght with the times to come .
Thank you steve for making us realize what a touch can do in our life !!!!
Well done, Shai (as usual). Thanks for sharing.
God Bless you Steve, may you rest in peace.
I had the honor of working at Apple right at the time when Steve was being replaced, rather uncermoniously by John Scully. Even then many knew he would be back and when that happened I was extremely happy because I had seen his enormous leadership and passion for his company, Apple. Working for Apple was not like having a job. Steve instilled in everyone that was there a passion for what we were doing. Sales people were not selling they were evangelizing and leading people to what we knew was a better way to get everyday work tasks done ,without having to know how the computer was doing it.
This simple idea was what I felt Steve was all about. Put the power of personal computing in the hands of many, and make it as simple to use as possible. Steve’s delight in beautiful technology separates Apple from almost every other technology company, and his vision, creativity and style will be missed. My prayers and thoughts are with him and his family during this difficult time.
You should all read iLeadership. It is written about Steve’s iLeadership style and his trials and tribulations of all the companies he touched…we could all learn a lesson from this book.
God Bless Steve Jobs!
Has anyone read the recently-released biography? If so, what did you think?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100114281/the-steve-jobs-biography-is-my-book-of-the-year/
Thanks for all the comments.