Wednesday, October 12, 2011

18 - Steve Jobs: A Dreamer by default



" In Steve's mind, there wasn't the slightest doubt :
 Mac was destined to change the world,
 and it would be the most insanely great product ever".
- John Sculley, 
Ex-CEO of Apple
The man who fired steve jobs
 from Apple



"..This is too amazing!..I wonder why somebody did not think of this before..". I was talking to myself when I first got hold of the Ipod Touch. I got such a delight from using it that I cannot put it in words.   Over the course of the year, I got hooked on to all things apple especially the mac and the ipad. For the first time, I understood what was meant by the term 'user experience'. It was just fantastic!!

Steve's apple finally
changed theworld.
Ofcourse, the man behind  apple's fantastic and industry changing products was no ordinary guy. He was the rock star of the tech world. He was a guy, who at birth, was put up for adoption by his real mother. He went to college only to drop out to purse his interests in calligraphy  and then leave everything behind and come to India to look for enlightenment. He returned later to his home country with a shaven head and in Buddhist clothes. While he admitted that he did not find god, he did however begin to perceive things in a different way. He began to see and desire  beauty in whatever he did. This ofcourse helped him in designing the mac while he was in apple which became a run away hit and was later copied by Microsoft when windows was first made. He was later fired from his own company because of his individualistic way of doing things without taking the company board into consideration. He started another company called Next and another one called Pixar Animation.  Years later, in a remarkable turn of events, apple bought Next and as a result, he got back into apple which was on the brink of financial collapse. Within a decade, apple became one of the most valuable company in the world on the strength of its products which were designed by steve jobs personally.

The most successful
executive almost always
wore his Levi's and black
turtle neck t-shirt
How did he do it? Did he really know that the world is a dream and can be changed by intention and visualisation? Reading about his thoughts and other people's understanding of him,  it seemed to me that he did not know this  but he instinctively followed this approach. He always visualized  that the mac would change the world and never had a doubt about it. He would say to his designers many times that he has visualised a product with an amazing user experience. He would not take 'no' for an answer because he never had a doubt about it. The entire apple engineering team set about turning steve's vision into reality.

Rest in Peace Steve
On October 5, Steve Jobs died. Did he change the world before he died? Some would say that he did, some would say that he did not. But to me, when I see my son ( 4 year old ) doing maths puzzles on the ipad and being excited about it, it becomes obvious  that he did change the world in a very profound way that we as yet, cannot fathom.




Links

Steve Jobs on Wikipedia
The stanford University address ( video)