What Steve Jobs Really Gave Us: Joy

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Date: Thursday October 6, 2011 08:07:24 am
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    What Steve Jobs Really Gave Us: Joy

    Steve Jobs, throughout all his brilliant years, had at bottom just one product: joy. That is why he stood above all corporate leaders of our time and probably of any time. He was not an ordinary businessman but an artist of the human experience. When computers were the province of corporate programmers and youthful tinkerers he saw their possibilities for illuminating the lives of all of us, seizing on the first gropings by Xerox researchers who developed a primitive mouse and graphical interface, and perceiving in a flash there the chance for an epochal extension of the capabilities of everyone. His vision of opening possibilities just kept widening over the years. It fundamentally changed our relationship with music, that most useless and invaluable of our arts. It altered the way we communicate, turning our telephones into magical vessels of seemingly infinite versatility. It gave us a simple but elegantly beautiful slate of plastic and glass that altered how we entertain and inform ourselves day and night. And right at his end his company was still performing marvels, introducing a beautifully elegant path into the liberating potential of cloud computing, and a first realization of true spoken interaction with our now indispensable devices.

     

     

    He did not try to save the world or feed the hungry, except, possibly, by directly and indirectly creating jobs. He was not a very nice person, by all accounts.Bill Gates is probably much more pleasant to know. But we easily forget that until Gates stepped aside from his business to, yes, save the world, he was widely despised as someone who gave us products that vexed us and made our lives harder in as many ways as they helped us, who often seemed to be in it for corporate enrichment and domination above all. I’m not aware that anyone ever felt that way about Steve Jobs, and that is because Jobs was about joy, about touching our personal experience and about beauty and elegance and little things that can give life great satisfaction. I am writing this on a laptop of his, a MacBook Air, that is a tactile and visual delight as well as a marvel of engineering and crystalline programming. Go to one of his stores and watch the buzz of the crowds in what he built as a place for freedom and discovery and fresh experience as much as for selling.

    There has never been another corporate leader who was so completely about joy. Henry Ford may have been, in his earliest years, when he rode his excitement and clarity of vision about the automobile to give America the Model T and a new universe, but then Ford ran out of ideas and ossified and lost all his creativity. Walt Disney may have been, but in a much more limited sphere. Among political leaders—and surely high-level political leadership is the hardest kind of leadership of all—the closest thing to Jobs I can think of is Franklin Roosevelt, not just because of how he loved the challenges and possibilities of being president, and gloried in the rough and tumble of politics, but mainly because through it all he fearlessly kept his eye on the practical possibilities for making people happier and better off, far above any devotion to ideology or party line or personal or political gain. He knew how to look above where most others looked.

    Steve Jobs was of course very far from perfect. Everyone who ever lived was far from perfect. He appears to have been especially lacking, for instance, in his concern about working conditions at some companies Apple contracted with. He could be unnecessarily brutal with people who disappointed him. But those things do not diminish all that he gave us. We were so lucky to have him, for he was our great artist among innovators and corporate chiefs.

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