Like many of you, I was deeply saddened at the passing of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs last week. Jobs was a true creative genius who completely changed the face of personal computing more so than any other individual on the planet.
Being a lifelong user of Apple products, I watched the brand go from a total also-ran to the most valuable company in America. When my parents first bought a Performa 430 in 1993, Steve Jobs was still working at a small company called NeXT (after being fired from Apple!). Few of my friends growing up had Macs, and for good reason. A lack of software compatibility was a big issue. Who could have predicted that Apple would become what it is today?
At Brandeis circa last spring, I'd guess that 60% of the student body owned a MacBook. Even among those students with Windows PCs, almost all owned either an iPhone, iPod, or iPad. I'm sure the trend is similar at most other schools. What do all these products have in common? They are the brainchildren of the one and only Steve Jobs, who, as we all know, returned to Apple in 1996 when the company bought out NeXT.
With Jobs gone, it is difficult to say what will become of Apple. Although he was a larger-than-life figure, he wasn't a one-man company. Apple employs thousands of brilliant designers, engineers, marketers, etc. I'm confident that they will continue to release revolutionary consumer tech products and maintain the best OS in personal computing today. But one thing is certain: the Apple Keynote events will never be quite the same without Jobs' signature "One more thing..."
If you haven't seen it already, check out Jobs' address at the 2005 Stanford commencement. There's a lot of great advice in there from a man who lived an unquestionably fascinating life.
