There have been scads of columns, articles, and blog posts about Steve Jobs’s departure from Apple, the company he and his partners founded. I wanted to make three brief remarks about him
First, I wish him all of the best. My dad and my father-in-law both died of cancer of the pancreas, I’ve had some chance to observe it at first hand, and I’ve done a lot of reading on it. To say it’s a tough break is an understatement. I was extremely surprised to read that he’d been cured. The five year survival rate is extremely low.
Second, in all of the praise I haven’t seen much mention of Mr. Jobs’s single worst mistake: his hiring of John Sculley away from Pepsi. Sculley never understood Apple. Many of Apple’s great missteps can be laid a Sculley’s door. It took him ten years to bring Apple to its knees. Things move faster today.
Finally, it’s possible that a machine can do the work of fifty ordinary people but no machine can do the work of an extraordinary person. Steve Jobs is unquestionably an extraordinary person. Godspeed, Steve.
He started a business in his garage and not only built into the largest company in the US but revolutionized our relationship with computers, phones, music and movies.
There’s a story — possibly apocryphal — that Jobs once called one of the heads at Google during religious services to apologize for the fact that the “O” in the Google logo appearing on the iPhone wasn’t rendering quite the right color. Steve was working on it.
There are tons of stories like that, about Jobs’ obsessive attention to detail, to making sure everything was flawless and “on brand” from packaging through maintenance. That kind of vision probably cannot be equalled by his successor.
A really great man of business. I may share a bit of (watered) whiskey with my Apple fan boy son when Jobs dies. It will be the closest he’ll have come to losing a loved one.