Everyone who paid even passing attention to Apple knew Steve Jobs‘s days were numbered. He had been in poor health for years, thanks to pancreatic cancer, and went on medical leave last January before handing over the CEO reins to Tim Cook on Aug. 24.
Still, even though I and others in and around his Palo Alto home had been hearing in recent months that he was sicker than most people knew, it’s a shock to hear he died today. It’s especially jarring just a day after the announcement of a new iPhone that at an event where he was conspicuously absent.
There’s already a memorial on Apple’s Web site, and Apple’s board just released an appropriately elegant statement:
We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.
As someone who mostly wrote Apple from the periphery, I’ll leave the deepinsights to others who tracked his career more closely. But his contributions to the computer industry, especially in design and marketing, influenced virtually every technology company in Silicon Valley and many other companies beyond. As I wrote in August when he stepped down:
Jobs’ enduring contribution has been less the way he talked about or positioned Apple products than the intrinsic appeal of the products themselves. Critics sometimes write him off as a showman or a mere designer (as if industrial design is a frill). But Apple’s position atop the world of business, not just technology, with an unsurpassed line of groundbreaking products from the Mac and the iPod to the iPhone and the iPad, proves otherwise. Apple is a living example of the prime importance of actually making great, physical products with a utility and flair that compels millions of people to wait hours or even days in line to get them.Still, you can’t deny that Jobs was also a master marketer. Both in his not-to-be-missed appearances introducing Apple products at Macworld conferences and other events and in the advertising he helped create, he managed over 30-plus years to prove again and again how lame just about every other technology company is at telling customers why they should buy their products.
And so an era has ended.
It would be dishonest to represent Jobs as a perfect leader, since no human being can be and it’s no secret Jobs could be difficult. But in a recent interview I did several weeks ago with Joel Peterson, chairman of JetBlue and a consulting professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, about effective management, he said this about Jobs:
In the end, Apple delights customers, it enriches its shareholders and its employees, it provides opportunities for growth and development. If you add up on the balance sheet all the things that it does, the fact that it has a person who at times behaves as a jerk to me is not all that troubling.I know several people who work directly for him, and they will say he is really difficult. But on the other hand, he is really competent, he is really honest–all of those things that go to the core of being an empowering leader.
In later years, Jobs seemed to become, if not mellow–never mellow!–wiser, and not just about computers or business. So I’ll leave you with the remarkable speech he made to Stanford graduates in 2005. I keep a printedcopy of it on my bedside table for those late nights when weariness makes it hard to remember what to do next with your life.
(Taken from Forbes)
