With the passing of Steve Jobs, I think it is the time to reflect on who the man was. I only met Steve one time and that was about 30 years ago. I am sure that he did not remember me. At the time he had no cloths on and was in a hot tub with a bunch of friends up in the mountains and Red Wood trees above San Jose. Two of my best friends worked at Apple and had clock numbers under 100. Seems like a million years ago now, so much has changed, but that was my first encounter with Steve Jobs.
As I said, I did not really know him, but observed what he did and how he affected my two friends. The first point I want to make and it may be the most significant is that to really manage technology, you have to really understand technology. You can't just be a manager of skilled people. It is a little like the teacher who can't do anything, but they can teach. To my way of thinking, that is crap and I think Steve Jobs understood this at the gut level. When I was in college at San Jose State, I got an A+ in advanced computer programming. I was the best in the class, but I hated computer programming. Now why was that? To really be good at computer programming and to keep the detailed logic straight and the syntax correct, you could not think of anything else. You had to be a "nerd". I chose not to go any farther in computer programming and vowed never to get a job where I had to manage computer programmers. I knew that to do the kind of job that was required, you had to dedicate your life to the job and that is exactly what Steve Jobs did. He was up to his ears in the personal computer technology as he had to be.
One other thing, is that Steve Jobs recognized the connection between the human mind and graphical representation of data. Originally it was very mentally demanding to keep track of all the rules of computer programming with symbols that only meant something to a computer, not the human mind. I stumbled onto the "windows" concept in about 1960, but did not recognize its significance, but Steve Jobs did. My encounter was with a road map of Oakland, Ca. We were trying to sort mail, before zip codes, by keying in portions of the standard address. Someone realized that if we used a map of Oakland, Ca and put small buttons under the map that taxi cab drivers could punch the location on the map where the mail should go. In one stroke they could push one of 625 different buttons and get it right every time. To do this same decoding with standard address data, you would need at least 12 key strokes and you would still make a lot of errors. Now this is a little off track, but Steve Jobs saw that this was the window that would allow millions of normal people to easily learn how to operate a personal computer. He came up with his won operating system and stuck with it against Microsoft when all other PC builders jumped on the Microsoft band wagon. Steve Jobs was right and this single factor had more to do with the success of Apple than any other decision that he made.
The other point with the trends in technology that are sweeping the world is that ideas and understanding of technology are more important than capital. Apple has not been the success that they have been because of some big sugar daddy with a bundle of money to invest, it was the understanding of technology at the top management level. Look at Obama and all his loans to green start up companies? This may have been how it worked 50 or 75 years ago, but not now. Anyone can play now if they have ideas and understand technology. The top managers of big companies in the past used to be bankers and financial men who did not feel they needed to understand technology, but not now. I worked for Harold Geneene at ITT. He was a smart guy, but his strength was in accounting, not technology. His formula worked in the old days, but not now. Where is ITT today? They were one of the top 10 companies in the world at one time, but now they are not in the top 1000.
The final point to make from Apple and Steve Jobs is about the future. The next big success story will not be another Apple, but it will be based on the same formula as the Steve Jobs story. The top guy and the top several guys or girls will totally understand the technology and where that technology is going. They will know that it is like a child that will grow up and then be replace by an even newer technology. They will know that they will have to run to keep from going backwards. How else could Steve Jobs produce so many break thru products in such a short time? He did it the same way they designed and built the first DC-3 airplane. The guys at the top knew what they were doing and did it right the first time.
Steve Jobs will be missed, but I hope the lessons that he demonstrated will not. We can only hope.
