Long before the popularity of the internet, I kept buying books and magazines every time Steve Jobs was either the main or cover story, or he filled the inner pages with stories and articles alike. It wasn’t his ability to lead a company that was most glaring; it was his penchant desire to deliver a product with “tunnel vision” concentration that no amount of market research could ever analyze its success. Steve Jobs created products based on his “gut!” As simple as that!

My First Apple

My memory of Apple dates back to the days of Apple II Plus, circa 1981. I never got to own the first Apple II when it became popular in Asia because I started the personal computer love with the Sharp MZ-80A, the cassette-driven personal computer that used the once-popular Z80 CPU chip. However, the first personal computer I owned was a Commodore 64 (yep, the 64 meant 64 kilobytes of memory or RAM) connected to my Sony KV1420 colored television with a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive that had its own MOS 6509 CPU, a rarity in its days. Later, my Dad bought me an Apple II Plus clone where he too later spent countless nights playing Karateka, Prince of Persia and Taipan. The Apple II Plus was indescribably the first personal computer to be cloned, with as many as more than 190 versions all around the world – who could forget Franklin’s ACE, Pineapple, the oversized Agat from Russia, and the ITT 2020 that was popular in Europe, to name a few. In the Philippines, most of the clones came from (you guessed it!) China.

I was hooked as a computer hacker only in the sense that we hackers hacked the innards of our personal, stand-alone computer – instruction sets of the operating system, the disk operating system (DOS), and even the peripherals one had to buy to expand the capabilities of your PC like graphics cards, CP/M cards and 128K cards. I was even part of those guys who at one point in their lives slept in dark computer labs hacking university mainframe- and mini-computers. In my hacker world during those days, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates were part of my roster of kings. Though I’ve already read about the Altair computer six years after it was introduced, the Apple II and its successors (before the IIc and IIe came out) were all about open architecture – every the excited amateur was able to tinker with the motherboard, including programming EPROMs to soup-up the Apple. The IBM PC and its successor PC/AT even mimicked Apple’s open architecture. Open was good for hackers, not for businesses. That was the turning point of converting the personal computer into a business machine; and computers were then screwed tightly only for authorized repairman to open, troubleshoot, fix and close it back shut faster than you can spell Mississippi!

The Simplicity of Form and Use

Reading about Steve Jobs through the years was always a wonder because I kept waiting for him to throw his fits of professional fury (“This is a piece of shit!”) or express his boredom in front of boards of directors and men in gray flannel suits. He lights up, however, when it involves rock stars and creative geniuses, more so when it comes to the craziest art deco which he bought for the Redwood office of NeXT. He would invite selected press people to take a sneak-peak at his next invention long before it would be publicly unveiled, only to pull the square-shaped cover to reveal a block of concrete, revealing to the surprised journalist that the cement block demonstrates how his NeXT computer will be shaped to look like.

Steve was about form and the simplicity of use. He may have gotten his simplistic philosophies from his trip in India where he wore the traditional sarong attire instead of his hippie jeans and t-shirts, slept in abandoned places and shaved his head; or his hanging around the Hare Krishna center in California, his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, his frequent visits to Zen-like centers, and his hippie life in a California commune where he met the future mother of his daughter, Lisa, the name of the Apple computer that preceded what became a global phenomenon – the Apple Macintosh.

The Survivor Hypnotist

The ups-and-downs of Steve’s career somehow happened much earlier than mine. Steve is a survivor, getting free meals by having to walk seven miles or sleeping in abandoned buildings and haggling for the price of food during his trip to India. He’s also an impressionable person – he would do his best to impress people but only to those he knows he can gain something from, present day or in the future. Even in his hippie days, many men and women got swayed with his ideas of earthbound or outer space; like his college buddy Dan Kottke who went with him to India and after days of acquiring lice and dysentery would just keep uttering, “Dear God, if I ever get through this, I’ll be a good person, I promise.” The charisma of being swayed, swooped and taken by Steve was like being put in a trance.

Tunnel Vision of the Visionary

I’ve always seen Steve as a product development person and never as CEO material. Boards of Directors got it when they ousted him into Siberia (not literally) during the days of John Sculley, the Pepsi guy who Steve recruited to run Apple for him, using the now famous line, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Between the visionary and the suit, the latter won the graces of the board when word of Steve’s autocratic nature blew up to proportions during the development of the Macintosh computer. Steve, having a tunnel vision in products, alienated himself from almost everyone in the Mac team and outside. Thus, a power struggle erupted between John and Steve, and in the spring of 1985, the Apple board sided with John. Steve was history and he was sent packing to solitude in a building far, far away from where the action was. A few months later, Steve resigned.

NeXT Computer was a management and financial disaster. Steve was still a great visionary, way out in space in his creative genius for knowing what the market would need for a computing device – simplicity with power and creative chutzpah. The NeXT Cube was never more than a piece of black equipment that was just too expensive for the corporate world or your everyday consumer. But what glared back to the industry giants was the operating system, the precursor to the Mac OS. Hence, after John Sculley’s demise due to disappointing sales results (at one point, Apple was about to put in the auction block), two more CEOs succeeded John with the likes of Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio. It was Gil who got Steve Jobs back into Apple as an advisor, not knowing that a power play was in the works by Steve with the Apple board and Gil was eventually fired and Steve replacing him as interim CEO. As a requisite for coming back to Apple, the latter had to pony up $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors of NeXT and 1.5 million Apple shares that went solely to Steve Jobs. It was here where NeXTSTEP, the NeXT operating system, became the foundation for the development of Mac OS instead of BeOS. The latter was a multimedia platform that never achieved the market share it was aiming for.

A Visionary Mogul for Creative Products

Talk about a “power play” drama well compared to the “Barbarian at the Gates!” (No pun intended about the Microsoft founder.) Steve was a visionary mogul for creative products, a master of the corporate board, and an inspirational speaker who can woo a following like everyone was drinking the same CoolAid. For one thing, he matured and grew up when it came to corporate life but maintained the zest of tunnel vision for product development and marketing.

But back during the tumultuous time at NeXT, when Steve had sold almost all his Apple shares to sustain his new endeavors and a lifestyle of the wealthy, he also bought a fledging company named Pixar from George Lucas when the latter gave up the patience to wait for the next graphical technology to be implemented in film. Pixar was part of Lucasfilm whose objective was to develop technology that could aid on special effects. Always a lover of hardware, Steve thought Pixar had opportunity if it successfully produced a graphics-oriented animation machine that could be incorporated into NeXT. After years of losing money funding the company, Steve was already looking for a buyer of Pixar. Then came the Disney contract which gave Pixar several years of film projects, starting with Toy Story. It was only when Disney decided to distribute Toy Story did Steve decide to hang on to Pixar. The film eventually went on to gross more than $300 million worldwide and history tells the tale of another Steve Jobs tunnel vision success. In 2006, Disney bought Pixar for a whooping $7.4 billion, making Steve, who was a majority stakeholder of Pixar, Disney’s largest individual shareholder and a board member.

Nice Guys Come Last

The glaring characteristics to Steve Jobs’ rise and fall are his tunnel vision to market wants, sticking to your gut, learning to dance with the men and women of power, hiring the best, being obscenely direct, learning the art of motivational speaking, minding your own business, and continuing to be a product and marketing guy even if you were CEO. The last, where some would contradict me, is being an all-around visionary asshole. I mean, is being a good Samaritan and nice guy a quality most successful CEOs in the world need to have? Steve Jobs may have given us several “I” products that changed the way we see the digital world but he couldn’t have done that if he was an all-around nice guy.

Consistency is Key to Success

There are only some, not all, of the Steve Jobs charisma we can carry on into our daily lives because we also need to be who people know us to have been all these years. Consistency with positive adjustments is key in half the success we want to achieve; the other half is intellect, knowledge, intuition and host of other qualities that drive our professional and working careers upwards. Steve Jobs was consistent; despite his failures, he never changed the way he was. He continued running development teams and corporations the same way as he started Apple in his garage with the other Steve, and up to the day he formally retired from his beloved Apple and his recent demise. He never succumbed to the run of the mill and kept his stance on his personal belief of what the world wanted. Of course, there was a love and hate relationship that the whole world had on Steve. Some may have not known about his brash antics but that is now coming out again as the world eulogizes on the last, true, great visionary of computing hardware for the masses.

I will miss what Steve Jobs could have continued to create if he were still alive today. There has always been that fancy in many of us to go with or help the misunderstood when others shun them away for fear of embarrassment or a co-conspirator to the errors of such men and women. Creativity when presented to ordinary people are many times misunderstood proposals; without a champion like Steve Jobs fighting against the established norms of life will we not have products that uniquely blend into our lives like love and marriage does to couples all over.

Rest in peace, Steven Paul Jobs. May you stand with the greatest of all men and women the world today misses and may we learn well from the history of your life you left us to study for all generations to come.

_

Story sources: Sony | The Economic Times | All About Steve Jobs.com | Wikipedia 1, 2, 3 | ABC News

Photos sources:

Photo by mgmax at Flickr.com | Steve Jobs and his NeXT Computer
Photo by eduardofeo at Flickr.com | Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage in 1975
Photo by sa_steve at Flickr.com | Apple II magazine advertisement
Photo by BackWest at Flickr.com | Steve Jobs and John Sculley
Photo by nerdery at Flickr.com | Pixar homage at The Nerdery

_