Steve Jobs dies

It's a sad day for the technology community. Steve jobs has died at the age of 56. He had been fighting cancer for a few years, and unfortunately it got the better of him. He was a truly great man, and the world won't quite be the same without him.

Steve jobs inspired so many people over the years - starting with the home brew computer club, which encouraged so many spotty youngsters to get involved in computing - right up to the amazing stuff he has produced with apple over the last few years. I imagine that Apple will struggle to maintain the high standards and driving vision that Jobs has provided for them. During the nineties, when Jobs was ousted from the board, Apple bombed badly and it's product range really struggled to capture the market. Once Jobs was brought back into the fold in 1997, the quality and innovation in apple products grew and grew after the production of the first iMacs, and later, the iPod.

Steve jobs had a visionary spirit that very few people have in combination with business accumen. There are many technologists that are great leaders, and can take floundering companies and build them into something bright and shiny, but so few people have such an in built sense of what the user really wants. He was reported to say that there was no point asking the user what they wanted - by the time you had designed and built it, they would want something else. This means that Steve had a sense of what people would really want, and love, in the near future. He could design something, and commit to manufacturing it, believing that when it hit the market, people would fall in love with it. But, he also knew that engineers were often the worst people to design user interfaces. It's a tough paradox in the computing world that the people who need to work out how to make machines interact with humans, can be terrible at it.

I think Jobs was good at detaching himself from his technical persona, and could see the iPhone, or iPad as something that must just work; and work for anyone - not just computer geeks. A child, housewife, business man or octogenarian must be able to pick it up and be able to use it without reading a manual, or learning qwerks. Jobs got this right, and many other companies have attempted to copy him - most are failing badly, but I suspect they are quietly relieved at today's news. It will open the market up for shoddier, poorer designed products to take over from an Apple that I suspect will slowly wither and falter.

Steve, you were a great man, and an inspiration to so many of us. We will miss you.

 

P.S. - yesterday was a bad day for legends. Bert Jansch, a truly great folk and Jazz guitarist who inspired many great people such as Jimmy Page and Paul Simon sadly passed away. My father was a huge fan of his, and often played his signature piece 'Angie' to us on his guitar.