Steve Jobs - the End of an Era

Steve Jobs has left us.   I was never an Apple user, due to my corporate customers’ use of the Microsoft operating system.  But as an entrepreneur, I have always been a curious observer of his career.  He’s one of the original Pirates of Silicon Valley who revolutionized the convergence between corporate technology and the consumer.

Steve not only brought to the consumer the original widely adopted PC, the Apple II, but created a home computing revolution with the introduction of the mouse and graphical user interface (GUI) with the Mac, which was co-oped from Xerox’ PARC research center. He had famously said about his taking of PARC’s discovery “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.’”  But Bill Gates and Microsoft one-upped him by co-opting the MAC’s mouse and GUI in the Windows operating system that went on to dominate the market and drive Jobs and Apple to a point of irrelevancy.   “It’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it” said Gates.

When Jobs returned to Apple in his famous second stint, be gave birth to the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, essentially creating the portable music store/player, smart phone and tablet markets.  He allowed consumers to enjoy and customize their entertainment while also keeping an eye on their corporate happenings through email, blogs, and other sources of information.  Thus he helped create ‘convergence’, a term that started cropping up around 8 years ago.   It refers to the blending of the line between corporate technology and consumer products (see my blog “The Technology Just Crept Up on Us…” http://bit.ly/jNLt9k). 

The impact on our lives is amazingly life changing.  Work life and personal life have blended together so subtly that we hardly noticed, mostly because of Steve Jobs.

The end of an era......