The Genius of Steve Jobs

[Minor Axis]

The Oct 2011 Rolling Stone Magazine has a most excellent article on Steve Jobs. While he might have been a genius, and made millions of us happy with his companies products, the kudos for the great products has to be tempered with some not so insanely great human qualities, in fact based on what I've read, some below average qualities. My guess is he matured a lot in the years after denying parenthood and throwing his girlfriend out after she became pregnant with his child. I realized this happened decades ago and maybe he changed for the better over the years. Of interest, as early as a teenager, he thought he would die young.

"Steve had the best and worst qualities of a human being," says one Mac veteran. "They were both in him, living side by side."

Jobs couldn't get top management at Apple to agree (to the Macintosh concept), so he simply hijacked a team working on another project, took the best ideas form Xerox and elsewhere, and added some of his own. The result was a renegade team at Apple, hidden away in a building off the main campus, that was tasked with creating the first Macintosh.

The big lesson for capitalism is that Steve, deep down, did not believe the consumer was right. Deep down, he believed he was right. And the consumer would respect a strong aesthetic point of view, even if it wasn't what they were asking for.

However Jobs quest for perfection backfired on him when after being ejected from Apple he would show them by building the perfect computer at a company he founded called NeXT. What he created there was "strikingly distinct". Consumers who bought NeXT computers still swoon over the most beautiful machines ever built, but they were too expensive for the market place ($10 grand), machines from the onset that were headed to the computer museum as "artifacts built by an obsessively perfectionist man who had confused art with commerce."

How interesting that the NeXT OS proved to be the savior of Apple. Job's genius prevailed turning Apple into one of the most successful companies.

 

[pjbleek]

just hope someone can carry his torch.....

 

[Guyzerr]

So he was human after all. Interesting..................