Let’s talk about Steve Jobs. I know, I know. It's been a year since his death. What is there possibly left to say about him, and why are so many people still saying it?
There will be scores of stories about Steve Jobs published today. That may seem tiresome and overwhelming, if not totally unnecessary. Perhaps you are sick of hearing about him or never really liked Apple products and don’t get what all the fuss is about. Or maybe you just think that for all this genius, he was a horrible human being. Me too. I feel you. But we’re both living in his shadow and will for the rest of our days. So settle in, because all of us are going to be talking about Steve Jobs for decades to come.
Jobs has joined the pantheon of greats who advanced science and industry and society itself -- a modern-day Tesla but appreciated in his own lifetime. He’s our Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, one of those rarefied individuals who had not only a vision but the will and force of personality to execute it through America’s greatest cultural triumph: the public corporation.
And with his corporations, Steve Jobs didn’t simply shake up industries; he fundamentally traumatized them. He started with computing, then movies, then music and finally telecom. Even if you find him morally repugnant or prefer his competitors’ products, you would have to be a fool to argue against his influence and stature.
Apple ushered in the era of personal computing, taking it from a hobbyist pursuit to its own industry. You are far more likely to be reading this on a Windows machine (and of course, Xerox really did the fundamental research), but it was Jobs whose vision again transformed the computing industry by introducing the graphical interface to the masses. During his exile from Apple, he revolutionized digital animation at Pixar. Once back, he gave us the iPod and iTunes, which transformed both how we listen to music and how we buy it. And while you may prefer Android, it was the iPhone that kickstarted the smartphone boom. In doing all this, Jobs built his companies, his products, himself into colossus.
Even when we don't discuss Jobs directly, he is still in our conversations. If you talk about mobile anything, you're talking about Steve Jobs. Ditto Chinese manufacturing, digital animation, user interfaces, apps, hardware design -- even the stock market itself, which is now firmly dominated by Apple, the metric against which all other companies are measured. There's not an important mainstream technology product or service out there right now that isn't a result of or response to Steve Jobs. It's not so much that we want to keep talking about him; it's that there's no avoiding it.
Jobs, like the titans of industry before him, realized that when we think about how the world works, we are actually thinking about the way people have made it to work. And that means that if you don't like the way the world works, you are free to change it. Which is exactly what he did.
So we’ll talk about Jobs in a way that we don’t artists or authors or scientists or astronauts or, really, anyone other than maybe some U.S. presidents. He is an icon of creative capitalism, and those are the people our culture truly lionizes. His stature is such that there will continue to be hundreds of thousands of words written about him long after even the youngest among us is rotting in the dirt. Don’t believe me? Just check out how many words we still sling at Thomas Edison. Or see The Men Who Built America, a new drama, debuting this month on the History Channel, about America's industrial titans, like Ford, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt.
There are two reasons for this. First, people are profoundly interested in so-called great men, especially those tycoons who fall into the creative class. And secondly, as a result, because there’s a lot of money in it.
We are actually in the early cycles of Talking About Steve. The next phase is analyzing how things have changed since he died. We’ll trot out his corpse and ask it if it would have released iOS 6 or approved of the iPad Mini, or why Messages keeps sending chats to my phone when I want them on my desktop. That’s already happening, but it is going to accelerate as we get further and further away from his leadership, and with every misstep that Apple makes. It is a lazy and inevitable argument that’s going to be made again and again.
The contrarian takes won't stop, either -- the Steve Jobs-wasn’t-so-great stories, every word of which, and every ad sold on every page carrying that message, will reinforce the fact that, yes, he was. Otherwise, why are you still jabbering on about him?
New texts will come to light that reveal even more about him. Those who knew him best will be compelled to write about him. Future generations will examine what influence he had and what he meant to our culture in ways that we cannot see yet. Perhaps in a drama about the people who built post-industrial America, viewed on some unimaginable interface that is as much a descendant of Jobs' iPad as the iPad itself is of Edison's electric lightbulb or Tesla's radio. Ultimately, his legacy will be evaluated and re-evaluated and hashed out some more.
And all this because we just want to understand him. Because we are not him. We almost certainly, most of us, are not great men or women. We want to know how he rose to that rank and what we can take away that may help us do the same. And the select few who are bound for greatness will likely be no less fascinated and will want to look to him as a model or a cautionary tale. Everybody can take something from Steve.
What we talk about when we talk about Steve Jobs is ourselves. Our relation to him, or to who we want him to be. We talk about him in a way that helps us understand both him and ourselves, to make sense of how he could be way up there while we’re stuck down here, tapping away on one of his machines, praising its design, bitching about its Maps. And if you think you’ve heard or read it all, just wait. Just wait.
