If you had asked me what my first post would be in my blog, I would never have guessed I’d be writing about the Steve Jobs and his passing. I’m not an Apple guy by any means … but I can appreciate what he’s done.
I tweeted about his death last night and it really is a shame (beyond the typical unfortunate loss of life). He was still young and could have had decades of innovation still ahead of him. While I don’t particularly like Apple products, they certainly fit a niche part of the market. Apple products are expensive, sometimes too simple to use, and with overly polished form factors. And their fans love them. People identify with the products and the company.
Setting that bar high allowed others to create products attempting to emulate Apple’s success that trickled down to the rest of us. For instance, this is from a Google+ post I made (excerpted from CNET):
This is why I love Google:
“Google is to emotional sustenance what Jessica Simpson is to opera. The company has always existed to impress–then please–engineers, with real people being a secondary market. Real people don’t have to pay to use Google products. They don’t have to really enjoy them. They just have to use them, so that Google can make money from the advertising.”
This is why I do not love Apple:
“Apple works the other way around. It looks at real people, how they live, how they try and how they suffer and attempts to bring a level of fascination, ease and emotional uplift through gadgets that become friends, toys and lifelines.”
But one of Google’s greatest successes, Android, was possible because Apple (“Steve”) revolutionized the cell phone handset industry with its wildly successful touchscreen-only iPhone. And while Microsoft has been making tablets with PC manufacturers for ten years now, it took Apple’s (“Steve’s”) iPad to gain traction in slate computing. And of course, let’s not forget that success only paralleled by Sony two decades ago, people today don’t say CD player they say Walkman and people don’t say MP3 player, they say iPod.
The Eternal Flame
I’m a Google man through and through … but Steve, even engineers need some visionary inspiration.
