Steve Jobs - And One More Thing!

STEVE JOBS - FINISHING LINE BUT ONE MORE THING #3

From the book "Steve Jobs" by Isaacson


The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ
large: launching a startup in his parents' garage and building it
into the world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many
things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas,
art, and technology in ways that invented the future. He designed
the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a
way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after
grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a
way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could
accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the
big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both,
relentlessly. As a result he launched a series of products over
three decades that transformed whole industries:

* The Apple II, which took Wozniak's circuit board and turned it
into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.
* The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and
popularized graphical user interfaces.
* Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the
miracle of digital imagination.
* Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining
a brand.
* The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.
* The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.
* The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography,
video, email, and web devices.
* The App Store, which spawned a new content-creation industry.
* The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a
platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.
* iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in
managing our content and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.

* And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation,
a place where imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in
ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on
earth.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.
His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times
magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician
Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come
out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental
processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information,
sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.

Steve jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our
era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now.
History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and
Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that
were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and
processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as
unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most
creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the
design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it
likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives
best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

And One More Thing...

Biographers are supposed to have the last word. But this is a
biography of Steve Jobs. Even though he did not impose his
legendary desire for control on this project, I suspect that I
would not be conveying the right feel for him - the way he
asserted himself in any situation - if I just shuffled him onto
history's stage without letting him have some last words.
Over the course of our conversations, there were many times when
he reflected on what he hoped his legacy would be. Here are those
thoughts, in his own words:

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people
were motivated to make great products. Everything else was
secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was
what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not
the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these
priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle
difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you
hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's
not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to
want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked
customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster
horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to
them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to
read things that are not yet on the page.
Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the
humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's
something magical about that place. There are a lot of people
innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The
reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current
of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great
engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express
themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the
original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the
seventies computers became a way for people to express their
creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo
were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to
quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.
People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don't
have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an
extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be
integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and
content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to
do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to
other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your
vision.
At different times in the past, there were companies that
exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long
time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel.
I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And
then today, I think it's Apple and Google - and a little more so
Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It's been around
for a while, but it's still at the cutting edge of what's going
on.
It's easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They've clearly fallen
from their dominance. They've become mostly irrelevant. And yet I
appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good
at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious
product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray
himself as a man of the product, but he's really not. He's a
businessperson. Winning business was more important than making
great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if
that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it's never been my
goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him
for the company he built - it's impressive - and I enjoyed
working with him. He's bright and actually has a good sense of
humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in
its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn't copy it well.
They totally didn't get it.
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like
IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and
becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the
quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts
valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move
the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers.
So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM
was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn't know
anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When
the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so
much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when
Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer
took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I
don't think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer
is running it.
I hate it when people call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what
they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or
go public, so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to
do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the
hardest work in business. That's how you really make a
contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You
build a company that will still stand for something a generation
or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and
Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company
to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be.
I don't think I run roughshod over people, but if something
sucks, I tell people to their face. It's my job to be honest. I
know what I'm talking about, and I usually turn out to be right.
That's the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with
each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit
and I can tell them the same. And we've had some rip-roaring
arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it's some of
the best times I've ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying
"Ron, that store looks like shit" in front of everyone else. Or I
might say "God, we really f... up the engineering on this" in
front of the person that's responsible. That's the ante for being
in the room: You've got to be able to be super honest. Maybe
there's a better way, a gentlemen's club where we all wear ties
and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I
don't know that way, because I am middle class from California.
I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to
be. I remember the time when Reed was six years old, coming home,
and I had just fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it
was like for that person to tell his family and his young son
that he had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody's got to do
it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the
team was excellent, and if I didn't do it, nobody was going to do
it.
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have
sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but
he didn't. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric
in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was
his greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitar,
and the audiences loved him. Then he brought out what became The
Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience
sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing
"Like a Rolling Stone" and someone from the audience yells
"Judas!" And Dylan then says, "Play it f... loud!" And they did.
The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving,
refining their art. That's what I've always tried to do - keep
moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born,
you're busy dying.
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express
appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that's
been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or
mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own
clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species
and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to
contribute something back to our species and to add something to
the flow. It's about trying to express something in the only way
that most of us know how - because we can't write Bob Dylan songs
or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to
express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the
contributions that came before us, and to add something to that
flow. That's what has driven me.


Coda

One sunny afternoon, when he wasn't feeling well, Jobs sat in the
garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about
his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study
of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual
transcendence.
"I'm about fifty-fifty on believing in God," he said. "For most
of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence
than meets the eye."
He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating
the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. "I like to
think that something survives after you die," he said. "It's
strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and
maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to
believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness
endures."
He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand,
perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're
gone."
Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I
never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices."
..........

Steve Jobs was a man of many good and bad character traits - often obnoxious, bad tempered, fits of rage, someone I personally would not have liked or gotten along with. He seemed to have mellowed some as he got older and became a family man. He was indeed a genius visionary, and had a uncanny knowledge of the people he needed to push forth his masterpieces of the items we now take for granted as part of our lives.
He was a man that sort for the meaning of life, but sort for it in the wrong places, that would not give him the peace of mind, he often wanted. He was a rebel of sorts from the 'hippy" age that led so many of them into Eastern religions....and some pretty weird physical ways of living - unbalanced ways, that often will bring physical destruction in one form or another to those who continue in them for some decades. He was a man who trying to figure out his physical life from this way and that way, could not see that wrong kinds of emotions, done far to often, bring poison to your body. I do believe it was the culmination of all these wrong ways of physical living that brought cancer upon him, yet it is true that some come down with cancer relatively young, who never lived the odd and at times wild living that Jobs lived. But certainly his odd and bad emotional and physical living would not have done his body or health any good.

Steve Jobs never sort for the answers to live from the Bible. If he had he would have found them. He died not sure what was at the end of physical life.

Steve Jobs like millions before was never called to salvation through Christ Jesus in his physical life time. He like millions before him will one day to raised again to physical life in the Great White Throne Judgment - Revelation 20. He and the others will have the Bible opened to them, and the tree of life will be there for them to take hold of, and they will have a chance to live in the pathway of the Lord, to find the answer to why they were created. Most of them will come to acknowledge Jesus is Savior, accept Him as their personal Savior, repent of their sins, be baptized, and live according to the word of God. Most in that day and age, will become the children of God, and will enter into the Kingdom of God.

I look forward to see you Steve Jobs in that Great White Throne Judgment, to see you find the answer as to why you were born, to see your nature change through the power of the Holy Spirit, into a humble, repentant, loving, and self-controlled man, that everyone can be friends with.

Keith Hunt
..........