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Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Fallen Apple 

Tonight we pause with heavy hearts to remember Steve Jobs. As the face of our digital revolution, he changed the lives of virtually everybody on the earth as consumer electronics change the way that we communicate, do business, study the universe, and entertain ourselves.

When the home computer revolution began during the mid-70's, three firms captured the nation's attention. Standing next to established industry giants Commodore and Tandy was an unlikely competitor: the plucky Apple computer, founded by college dropout Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak in his parents' garage. The Old Apple II, with its green-on-black monitor, crude graphics and lack of lower-case letters, was a far cry from anything we'd consider a usable computer today. Yet it blew people away in the 1970's thanks to a then-revolutionary spreadsheet program called VisiCalc.

Apple computer soldiered on, with Woz as the hardware guy and Jobs as the man with the vision to grow his Apples everywhere. Even after the arrival of giant IBM into the personal computer market and the flood of low-cost DOS boxes that followed, Apple pushed a graphical interface (first pioneered by Xerox before the PC revolution began) and made computing easy to use for the masses.

The growth of his company required solid leadership; Steve Jobs used his vision to successfully lure John Sculley away from Pepsi to be his firm's CEO. The Jobs-Sculley alliance was destined to end in disaster, as slow Mac sales and Jobs's often-erratic decision-making forced his ouster from Apple.

If the story ended there, Steve Jobs would have still been a widely-known personality. But his vision and faith in the power of electronics to change the way we live drove him to perservere at his new firm, NeXT Computer. NeXT was innovative technically but a commercial flop. It was the former attribute that convinced then-CEO Gil Amelio to bring back Steve Jobs by buying out NeXT and using its operating system to bring the outdated Macintosh platform into the new century.

Steve Jobs wasted little time after the NeXT merger in becoming Apple's CEO, killing the Macintosh clone program, eliminating most of the company's slow-selling product lines, and unveling the iMac to a skeptical public. During fall 1998, iMac became the computer that saved Apple from bankruptcy. A company that had lost $2 billion over two years was suddenly showing a profit. And yet again, Apple was unveiling a computer completely unlike anything the industry had ever seen. Under the hood, iMac wasn't very impressive. But most importantly it looked cool. Steve Jobs gambled the company on the prospect that people would be willing to pay for a computer that was easy on the eyes, instead of being just another bland beige box. After so many years of having to digest specs on CPU speed, RAM and hard drives, the public just ate up the iMac.

Apple's string of hits under the new Jobs regime just kept growing. The iPod in 2001, iPhone in 2007, and iPad in 2010 still continue to keep us entertained and informed in ways most people would have dared not dream of when the Apple II launched in 1977. Apple didn't invent the mp3 player, smart phone, or tablet computer. But Steve jobs had the market savvy to figure out when consumers were ready to embrace these technologies, as well as the marketing genius and aesthetic savvy to say that his company's electronics weren't nerdy, but the new cool. The spirit of Apple's cult-like popularity and hipster chic were born out in the hugely-popular "I'm a Mac" television spots with Justin Long. They were enough to make me say that Apple's new slogan should be "Electronics for Hipsters."

And along the way, Steve Jobs cultivated the personality and charisma of a rock star. It was on display as far back as the unveiling of the first Macintosh when he triumphantly boasted that his computer would be "insanely great." But during Steve Jobs's second act, consumers knew that the unveiling of Apple's top-secret new product would change the world again. He was a consummate showman and public face for a company that was always leading with innovation under his watch.

Steve Jobs had plenty of blunders along the way, and his often-abrasive personality and drive to succeed alienated many people along the way. For me, the most shameful instance was the way Steve Jobs repaid Gil Amelio for bringing him back to Apple--by undermining his leadership and persuading the board of directors to fire him, all in the course of six months. Yet history does vindicate the Jobs ascendancy as CEO, particularly because Jobs killed Gil Amelio's Mac clone program which contributed to the Apple turnaround.

Apple will continue to prosper for years to come, but nobody can fill the shows of its rockstar CEO who had the audacity to dream of ways that machines would make our lives easier and help us to achieve new heights. He will be sorely missed.

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