Steve Jobs as Revolutionary

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on Steve Jobs as a great model for our middle schoolers to use to learn about living life with vision and passion.   But lately, I have been thinking about Steve Jobs as a model for revolutionary change, prompted by two very different events:  reading a blog post by my friend Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, and spending an hour in the Apple Store yesterday.

The post that started me down this road Sunday night was entitled How I imagine change.  You should read the entire thing here, because my interpretation doesn't do it justice, but Maria sees radical change as taking two steps:
Step 1:  Disengage from the old way/system
Step 2:  Build the new way/system

Then yesterday, I ended up in Jobs' living legacy, the Apple Store.  My tale of woe:  last week, when my son was working on some school work on my big Mac computer, the screen got wonky and the program froze.  I advised him to reboot and try again, but the computer wouldn't come up again.  So I scheduled an appointment with the Apple Store self-proclaimed "Genius Bar"--the technical experts who help you resolve issues with your Apple technology (computers, iPhones, iPads, etc.).  Because it is so big and bulky, so it is hard for me to handle, plus the fact that my son and I had classes all day, my husband took it in and returned with the sad news that the hard drive was gone and had to be replaced.  But in only a few hours, the work was done, so I had the computer back that night.  Luckily, I did have a back-up drive, and spent the weekend trying to transfer my backup to the new hard drive using Apple's built-in no-brainer backup software, Time Machine.

Unfortunately, it wasn't working.  So it was back to the Apple Store for another appointment at the Genius Bar.  The guy working on my computer turned out to be Gabriel, which I took to be a good sign--what could be better than having not only a Genius, but an Arch Angel working on your computer?  And work on it he did, while I sat there watching him and eves dropping about the other poor souls coming to the Genius Bar for a fix to their technical problems.  The bottom line ended up being that my backup hard drive had problems as well.  So while Gabriel couldn't do a full restore either, what he could do--that I couldn't--was to transfer my document files off the backup to the new computer hard drive.  I would have to reinstall the software at home.....which is a pain, but not nearly as painful as losing all the lesson plans, documents, photographs, music, movies, and other things that I had created and stored on my previous hard drive.

So once again, after having spent an hour trouble shooting and deciding this was the best solution, we left the computer in Gabriel's capable hands, went home, and returned that evening to find a computer with the operating software reinstalled, all my document files transferred, and all of the Apple iLife and iWorks software loaded on (which, frankly, are the packages I use 90% of the time).  And the fee for the probably two hours that Gabriel spent working on my computer?  Nothing.  I got all that service for free, even though the issue was really an external disc drive that failed that was not Apple hardware.  I have a problem with my Mac, I take it to the Genius Bar, and it gets fixed, usually that day, for no charge (other than fees for equipment, like buying the replacement hard drive).

So if you look at that transaction from the typical business viewpoint, it makes no sense.  Here this highly skilled technician spends two hours of time dealing with a problem that wasn't even Apple hardware for no money.  Who can make a business model like that work?

Only a revolutionary....the kind of multi-millionaire corporate CEO who would say, "Why join the Navy ...if you can be a pirate?" (and that was even before Johnny Depp had made pirates cool again).

Because as I understand the man, Steve Jobs (and the company he founded) was never about the money, and was never even about the product.  Steve Jobs and Apple Computer were about empowering people to create things they never imagined they could do by using technology (Pixar is also all about that, but the focus was on giving great artists great tools to create great movies).  Steve Jobs and Apple Computer were about transformation, not market share.  Steve Jobs and Apple Computer were about revolution.

And look how Jobs followed Maria's two steps.  When Apple came on the market, the big competition was which operating system--Microsoft's DOS or Intel's CP/M--was going to be chosen by IBM for their personal computers and, by extension, dominate the market.  But Jobs and Apple didn't try to get into that game.  Instead, they just did their own thing, building a computer that seemed to eschew any pretense of corporate acceptability--what business executive at the time was going to put in an order for a computer that was called an Apple?  As Jean Louis Gassee, who replaced Jobs as head of the Macintosh development team when Jobs left the company, said about the famous original Apple logo (an Apple with a bite missing and filled with stripes of different colors):

One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.

Lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy....you almost couldn't pick better words to describe a revolutionary. Or here are some quotes from Jobs in the early years, in which he makes clear that he wasn't going to play the game by IBM or Microsoft or typical business rules--he was making up his own rules as he went along. Plus, his game was so much bigger than just money:

We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream. (1984) 

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me. (1993) 

I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money. (1996) 

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. (1991)

So after turning his back on what the rest of the computer industry was doing, Jobs had to come through with Step 2:  he had to deliver the goods.    There was a long-time saying at Apple Computer that was attributed to Jobs (although I haven't been able to find an official citation), which was "Real artists ship." And there is no doubt that Apple Computer has shipped some of the finest consumer technology products of the 20th and 21st Century.

But the revolutionary genius of Jobs and/or Apple was realizing that simply building amazing products also wasn't enough.  To transform people's experience with, and willingness to use computer-based products, particularly among the baby boomer generation of which Jobs was a part, you needed to build support structures to help people adapt to an entirely new way of doing things.    For example, this was Jobs' explanation about why the iPod basically wiped out all competition from other MP3 music players:

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless. (2006)

In short, the iPod took over the market not just because it was a beautiful and functional machine, but because Apple created the entire iTunes music delivery system that simplified the process to the point that even grandparents could find and download the music they wanted.

And that is the beauty of the Apple Stores, with their Genius Bar to fix your technical problems, their free classes to educate you about the products' capabilities, and their One to One service, where for $100 a year, someone will sit down with you once a week and work with you individually on whatever project you need help with.   The stores and their services are Apple's promise to their clients that when you buy their products, they won't abandon you.  You take the leap of faith to go with the non-dominant computer, and they will be your partners in making it work for you.  Your hardware isn't working; we'll fix it.  You don't know how to use the software; we'll teach you.  You can't figure out how to get the music from Garageband to match up with the right pictures in iMovie; we'll work it out with you.

In short, Apple has built not only the computers and other devices they sell, but the infrastructure necessary to help the non-computer generation get control over the computer's more creative capabilities than simply using it as a fancy typewriter.  And that is how you create a technological revolution.

So, once again, Jobs has a lot to teach us about how to make fundamental changes in society.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Apple will continue to keep its revolutionary outlook going now that its pirate captain has sailed on to other waters.

My Story on Steve Jobs

I'm still on the Steve Jobs theme, because I'm afraid our world has just lost one of its creative lights.  I've been telling bits of this story to different people all day, so I thought maybe I would just tell it all at once and put it out there for everyone to access.

Also, when I say it is MY story on Steve Jobs, that means that it is my interpretation of his life path.  I don't have any particular or personal insight into the man, having never met him--although I did at least get to see him speak at a conference once.  Rather, this is my telling of the story of Steve Job's trajectory, filtered through what I know and where I was as I, too, was encountering the new world of computers and networking and digital arts, etc.  I do not claim it to be true.  But I offer it up as one tale of a man who can teach us a lot through the way he lived, regardless of whether his technologies had ever worked out or not.

His life did not start off especially auspiciously.  He was born out of wedlock, and given up for adoption by a middle class couple living in California.  Like the other man who most shaped the computer environment through the end of the 20th century, Bill Gates, Jobs dropped out of college; in contrast to Gates, his reasons were largely financial (Gates came from a fairly well-off family).  But he kept going to classes unofficially and for no credit (including his famous story of serendipitously attending a calligraphy class that, a decade or so later, helped him understand the need for beautiful computer fonts), and eventually started a computer business in his garage with his high school chum, Steve Wozniak, the computer geek who could bring to life Jobs' vision for a computer that would transform lives of the common people.

Jobs and Wozniak, drawing from experimental concepts from computer innovators of the time, developed a computer that people could use without knowing code, that people could point to things in order to make things happen, that included color, that included nice fonts, and that looked "cool," rather than just utilitarian boxes.  The market rewarded their vision, and Apple Computer rocketed to a major player in the computer industry.

However, after the first few years of success, things were hard for the visionary Jobs.  He was always dissatisfied with what we had now and was always questing for the next best thing, sure that we could always do better, faster, cooler, and more beautiful.  But multi-million publicly-traded corporations are not built on constant reinvention.  The young Apple Computer Corporation was not able to deal with its co-founder's insistence on abandoning what they had in order to create what he saw was the great next advance.  Eventually, the board brought in a manager from Pepsi-Cola to stabilize the company and built up a traditional corporate structure, and less than a decade after it had started, both Jobs and Wozniak left the company they had founded.

So Jobs moved on and created NeXT Computers, which built the kind of ultimate computers that he had advocated, and had been rejected, at Apple.  And sure enough, he created a computer that was a thing of beauty and power.  The only problem was, all that fabulous performance ending up costing close to the cost of a cheap car....two, three, maybe ten times the cost of the "personal computer" of that time.  So who would buy a computer like that?  Mostly, it was Hollywood--digital artists who could see the potential of the way Jobs was heading, and who needed that amount of graphic power (it was always about the graphics and the visual for Jobs) and could easily justify the expense.  NeXT became a niche computer, but the niche it filled fit nicely with a man with such visual, marketing, and even storytelling expertise as Jobs.

It was the NeXT/Hollywood connection that supported Job's next big leap.  He bought a cast-off unit from George Lucas (another visionary who transformed the movie industry, but either couldn't see or didn't have the time to follow where computer animation would go), and turned it into Pixar Animated Studios, the most commercially and critically successful computer animation studio of modern times.   He funded the operation through several lean years until the launch of Toy Story, and then ran the company until finally it was acquired by Disney, making him the largest stockholder of the company (and multi-billionaire), but also, in my opinion, saving the company's soul after years of substandard programming by managers whose decisions were driven by cost, rather than by art.

Before all that, however, back in Apple Land....former PepsiCo leader John Sculley had managed to stabilize the company as requested.  It was so stable, however, that it was sinking like a rock.  Apple had always been, and to this day continues to be, a bit player in the grand scheme of computer sales.  However, it had acquired an ardent fan base in the early days.  But bit player, with nothing new or exciting to entice people not to abandon it for the dominant players of IBM and Microsoft and such...well, it wasn't a winning market strategy.  Which is not to say that Sculley was unsuccessful.  He did a great job of building up the structures and strategies and corporate skeleton that Apple needed to survive in a business environment.  But the company realized that they could not survive without an exciting alternative to the IBM/Microsoft/corporate dominate computers.  They realized they needed the Jobs magic again.

In the interim, Jobs had also grown up a little, corporate-wise, at least.  He had learned that he couldn't always abandon last year's work to pursue this year's possibilities.  More importantly, perhaps, he realized that you couldn't necessarily create next year's vision without going through this year's reality.

Whatever, Apple bought out NeXT, Jobs was back in charge, and Apple started going gangbusters again (with an organization that could support the vision).  The NeXT software became the new Mac OS X software.   They created MacBooks, iMacs, and all the incredible software bundled with their computers for free.  Then they branched out to iPod, iPhones, iPads.  Jobs' vision about the potential of digital technology outreached computers themselves, and extended to the music industry, the movie industry, and the book industry.  Apple was leading the charge to reinvent almost all of the popular media that we use today.

So, then, Steve Jobs' life is a great lesson to teach our middle schoolers, outside of his technology.   When he had his big falling out with the company he created, he had enough money to go off and do nothing for the rest of his life but complain about how stupid Apple had been to (to be honest) kick him out.  But all our lives would probably have been the poorer for it.  Instead, he kept pursuing his vision for using computers to transform the lives, not just of the rich, corporate, or knowledgable, but of everyone.  He was brilliant enough to see the potential in Pixar, and humble enough to learn about his own mistakes that enabled him to return to Apple.  He could overcome his ego and his competitiveness enough to build a relationship with Microsoft that enabled Macintosh computers to read Microsoft documents (which, again to be honest, probably is what saved Apple from going belly up in the 1990's). In short, I think he learned the thin line between confidence and arrogance, and I think we are all the better for it.

The other lesson we can learn from Steve Jobs is the need for passion, or in the more personal vernacular, love.  His graduation address at Stanford has been making the rounds, and I've included it below.  In it, he talks about how there is nothing more important than living a life of love.  And he is not only talking about relationships; he is referring to finding the love behind how we spend out lives every day.  He says that he started each day looking at the mirror and asking himself that if this were his last day on Earth, would he want to spend it doing what he was going to do that day?  He responds that if he found himself answering "no" for too many days in a row, then he found a way to change his life.

So there is much to learn from Steve Jobs.  He teaches us about sticking to a vision, even when it is a lonely road.  He teaches us about going through a public "defeat" and coming through it stronger and wiser.  He teaches us about when one door is closed, find a new opening.  And he teaches us about, when it comes down to it, it's all about love, even if it seems to be about computers.

Oh, and he just happened to foster the development of the some of the best digital tools of our times.    But, like I said, that was a by-product of a life well spent.

Hear his deliver his life philosophy below:

Thank you, Steve Jobs

I was really sorry to hear the news from one my friends today that Steve Jobs had died.  The term "visionary" gets thrown around a lot these days, but if there was anyone who deserved that term, it was Jobs.  You may not be a dedicated Apple computer user, like our family is.  But did you realize that the whole point-at-a-picture-and-click-to-make-your-computer-respond interface that prevails in today's personal computers came from Job's vision?  I remember the first time such a way to interact with your computer first showed up, in the long defunct Lisa Computer (from Apple).  Lisa didn't last, but it was such a harbinger of the future--a vision, yes, of a computer that could be used by those who hadn't learned computer code, which was the only way to run computer before Apple Computer redefined computers.  Windows was merely a copy, a catch-up, to Apple's game-changing software interface.  So pretty much all of us who aren't code-crunchers owe a debt to Steve Jobs.

Of course, that wasn't his only gift to us.  How many of us own iPods, or other MP3 players that were inspired or influenced by Apple's foray into the digital music business?  And, indeed, the iPod technology has arguably changed the entire music business as much as anything since the earliest recording technologies.  Eventually, that morphed into the iPhone--where you could stay connected to email and WWW and such using your phone--and then to the iPad, a design for the digital book, plus much more.  Again, that entire line was driven by Job's vision for a digital technology that could transform our lives.

Even the youngest among us has been touched by Job's genius.  Is there any children's movie makers today who have had such an unbroken line of hits as Pixar, which Jobs bought from George Lucas and turned into an digital movie company that has enjoyed an unparalleled success, both critically and commercially.

There is so much that we could all learn about the leadership path of Jobs over the years, and perhaps I will write something more about that in a later post.  But right now, I just want to express my gratitude to the man who had done so much to make computers so easy for us to use.  Particularly as a homeschooler, I don't know how I could teach without the easy operation of computer technology that he helped to facilitate.