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I am a member of a cult. That cult is Apple. Its prophet was Steve Jobs. I am not a shareholder of the company. But I am – and have been for 31 years – a devotee of its products.
This started in 1980, with purchase of the Apple II for a World Bank research project I had promoted. I did not myself use the machine. But I could see the immense advantages of having such a computer for our own use rather than relying on remote access to a mainframe computer under someone else’s control.
The first Macintosh I owned was the second model, the 512K, which I bought in 1984. It transformed my life, personally and professionally. By today’s standards, its memory was minuscule and its speed that of the snail. Yet it gave its users word-processing, graphics, the spreadsheet and, above all, an intuitive interface. Away went typed commands. In came the mouse, windows, files, folders and WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”).
Apple, under Steve Jobs, took the pioneering work on the graphical user interface of Xerox PARC and turned it, via its work on the Apple Lisa, into a mass-market product. This interface has since become the one every personal computer uses, though only after it was copied by Microsoft, in Windows.
Since that first Macintosh, I have owned more models of the computer than I can remember. I am typing this on my latest iMac, a miracle of elegance, in which the screen is also the computer. I own a MacBook Air, an iPod and an iPad. I am a devoted user of iTunes. I run an Airport wireless network. I am an admiring visitor of Apple retail stores. I do not use an iPhone, mainly because the FT has provided me with a Blackberry.
I have only owned one Windows PC, a Dell, because I needed to use a programme that could only run on it. It was a disaster. I do use Windows at work, because that is what the FT relies on (alas). The machines are functional, but ugly. They lack the poetry of an Apple product.
Steve Jobs was, of course, more than the co-founder of Apple and architect of its second coming. He was also the founder of Pixar, which revolutionised computer-generated animation, and NeXT, which gave the Macintosh its current operating system, vastly superior to its predecessors.
Steve Jobs transformed the computer industry with the Apple computer and the Macintosh, the film industry, with Pixar, the music industry, with iTunes and the iPod, the mobile phone industry, with the iPhone, and the publishing industry, with the iPad.
His innovations altered the way I live my life. They have changed yours, too, even if you have never owned an Apple product. Every one of his innovations has been imitated by others. Windows was merely the start. He changed the game. Others played catch up and, given the customary determination of Steve Jobs to keep Apple products a walled garden, the followers have often succeeded. But they have followed in a giant’s footsteps.
Inevitably, any successful business does things many critics despise. Apple is a successful company and so a tough one. It has had scandals, over backdating of stock options, for example. It is determined to squeeze out the last ounce of profit, as publishers know too well. But the widely held view that Apple needs to be ashamed of outsourcing its production to Asia is wrong. In this, Apple has been a big part of a process that has brought huge benefits to both sides. Without such outsourcing, the pace of China’s rise would have been far slower, for example. Indeed, Apple has relied heavily on Asian technological prowess in its products.
The life of Steve Jobs also raises some powerful questions:
First: what is the role of design in technology? Answer: enormous.
Apple has surely become the greatest contemporary exponent of the philosophy of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, which decreed that form should marry function. In Apple’s best products, the elegance of form is an expression of its function: nothing needs to be added and nothing can be taken away. The product is both a useful machine and a work of art. Who says modernism is dead? Steve Jobs has made it live, for our era.
Second: could Steve Jobs have been anything other than American? Answer: I think not.
The genius of American capitalism, at its best, has been to serve a mass consumer market. Indeed, the possession of a mass market of consumers prepared to try new things has been the biggest advantage that US business has possessed over the past century, or more. It is an advantage that the European Union, China or India could, in principle, now match. But the latter have not yet done so.
Steve Jobs worked for that mass consumer market. His companies made products not for businesses but for consumers – for people like himself, if neither as savvy nor as gifted. It is surely no accident that the breakthroughs in the mass-market use of technology have come from the US, not just from Apple, but also from the current leaders in search and social networks.
I would suggest that there are other aspects of the uniquely American nature of his success. It is embodied in the individualism that permeates his famous address at Stanford University in 2005. Steve Jobs was a quintessentially American combination of an entrepreneur and a member of the counterculture.
This symbiosis went together with an equally American belief in a better future. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured that characteristic perfectly, writing, in The Great Gatsby, that “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that is no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.”
Steve Jobs ran towards the future more successfully than any other businessman of my lifetime. It is impossible to create the future if one does not start with the belief that it can be far better than the present. This was what the Florentines believed in the 15th century. It is today a defining characteristic of American civilisation, albeit perhaps a waning one.
Third: what does the life of Steve Jobs tell us about leadership? Answer: a great deal.
Many have written about his abrasive and demanding personality. That is hardly surprising for such an innovative business leader. More interesting is his view of his relationship with his company’s customers. He did not ask them what they wanted. He made his company create what he knew they would want once they realised it existed and then sold it to them.
Mr Jobs was a great showman, in the American tradition. But he was not selling snake oil. He was selling gadgets that would do things he knew people would want, in ways people would want to do them, as soon as they realised they existed. What is more he knew that people would want things that were both useful and beautiful, with each quality married to its counterpart. He appealed, in this way, to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” – our desire for novelty, practicality and beauty. And that is what turned Apple into a cult.
Fourth: what is the role of education in success? Answer: smaller than we believe.
Steve Jobs never finished a college degree. He is not the only technology pioneer of whom this is true. No doubt, a proper education is needed by anybody who wishes to achieve a high level of professional competence in any field. But is this true of the dreamers who dare to change the world? For them, the opposite seems to be true. The weight of received opinion can be crushing.
Fifth: was Steve Jobs irreplaceable? Answer: possibly.
Would the world of information technology look the same as it does today if Mr Jobs had never lived? Would we have the WYSIWYG interface or still be typing in commands? Would we have the integrated digital music store and player? Would we have the keyless phone or the tablet computer? Would technology be so easy to use by ordinary people?
We assume that someone else would always make a specific scientific discovery, because the knowledge is “out there”. Once humanity had discovered the scientific method, everything would, at some point, have been discovered, including even Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. We also believe, surely rightly, that a work of art is irreplaceable. If Mozart had not written Marriage of Figaro, nobody would have done so. With the composer’s untimely death, we lost uncountable masterpieces.
Artists then are irreplaceable in ways scientists are not. But what about people who insist upon the integration of technology with design? Are they replaceable, like great scientists, or irreplaceable, like great artists?
Finally: will anybody take his place?
Answer: I doubt it. And that will make the world more boring.
