mobeus's posterous

I had wanted to write something about Apple and it's design and innovation a few weeks ago. I had thought it was time that Apple looked at what it had done and reevaluated how it supported an industry that showed it no real respect and continually used them to break new ground before they would redesign anything.

And then Steve died.

That sad thing, as if that weren't sad enough, is having lived through my father's fight with pancreatic cancer I knew that Steve Jobs was living on borrowed time. Even if he survived the original cancer and was cancer free for 5 years, the chance that he would get cancer again was, unfortunately, very good. I know that sounds kind of counterintuitive, but just by surviving cancer once, doesn't mean your immune. And most of the treatments leave your system open to other infections.

While I was working for Apple, I had composed, but never sent, a letter to Steve saying he should treat each day as if it were his last and, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, suck the marrow out of life. I sent a shortened version of that to him soon after he announced his retirement from Apple. 

To many, Apple products have an aura of being cool or hip or just plain great. For me, they have always been classic designs of what worked best. 50 years from now, people are going to look at the iMac or the iPhone and say 'that's a classic design'. And like a Marcel Brauer chair or the Helvetica type face, these things stand up to the test of time. 

Now that Steve has gone, you can't look anywhere without someone calling Steve a Genius or an Innovator, or even a greater mind than Einstein. While I am a fanboy, I can distance myself to say that he was definitely a great businessman, I can't say his was a greater thinking than Einstein. I would place him in the ranks of Ford, Libby, or even Thomas Jefferson for innovation and entrepreneurism. Steve was a genius because he surrounded himself with geniuses in their fields. His key was that he saw something that every entrepeneur sees but no one else does, an opportunity.

Let's face it. Apple NEVER invented the personal computer. They never invented the MP3 Player. They weren't the first to make an ALL-In One computer. What they did do, though, was to make them better and easier to use than anyone else ever thought possible. The first home computers were massive, expensive monsters that used audio tape for memory and a text-based display that only an engineer could love. The Apple I changed that by making them cheap and graphic. The first MP3 players didn't even have a display and held less than 100 songs. The iPod changed that by making them small in size, huge in capacity, and put a display on them that had a menu that made sense to use. And the first All-In-One computers were as big as a table, had flaky memory media and were STILL text-based. The Lisa, than then the much more sucessful Mac Plus were small, light, portable, used a sturdy floppy disk and were GRAPHIC. But they also used a mouse. The mouse was the key to giving the user a real link to the computer experiance. And that's what made the difference.

Apple's designs make a link with the user that 99% of the designers of electronics couldn't even approach. Why is that? Because like a lot of designers, they think in terms of form follows function. Apple believes that function not only follows form, but that form can be capable of dictating a new function. The first iPod worked better than anything out there because it used a huge circular dial with 4 buttons around the edge and one in the center. Even for someone who spoke no english or didn't read the manual, virtually anyone could use it within seconds.

Will all this innovation and entrepenurism fade? Will Apple succumb to the inertia that most companies face? Only time will tell, but the people who Steve put in charge of Apple are some of the best at what they do. Jon Ives is one of the greatest industrial designers since Lowe. Ron Johnson, President of Apple Retail, has created a retail space that generates so much money per square foot that major retailers like Macy's, Nordstrom's and Sak's are reevaluating their sales strategies. And Tim Cook, President and CEO of Apple Inc, has worked his way through the company and knows just how to get the most out of his staff in Cupertino. The game is theirs to lose. 

Steve P. Jobs
RIP 1955-2011