In the week since Steve Jobs died, he has been glorified and vilified countless times. The reaction last Wednesday night was immediate and overwhelming, from President Obama to former foe Bill Gates. The Wall Street Journal gave Jobs its full six columns above the fold. The Vatican daily ran Jobs’ obituary on page one—a rare feat for a non-saint, much less a non-Catholic.
A week out, Jobs’ death has begun to recede, and with time, it’s worth reflecting. Many individuals have shaped America and the world, but few of their deaths have received the visceral reaction that Jobs’ did. What is it about Steve Jobs that is so compelling, personal, and lamentable? He was an embodiment of the American Dream, and he died far too young. But Jobs’ death was culturally impactful for other reasons too. Jobs strikes a chord, I believe, because of his brilliant design, technological optimism, and uncommon leadership.
Design, not Invention
President Obama called him one of “the greatest of American innovators.” Others, a “genius.” An “historical figure on the scale of Thomas Edison.” “The crazy one,” a riff on Apple’s legendary ad.
But, Steve Jobs was not an inventor in the spirit of Edison. As a proud member of the iPhone generation, on a campus where the vast majority of computers are Macs, I have no doubt that Steve Jobs’ products have changed our lives and reshaped industries—music, movies, mobile computing. But, Steve Jobs was not an inventor in the traditional sense; he wasn’t an engineer, and he didn’t write software; he didn’t make any stunning discoveries. But, he was a virtuoso designer. Steve said in a 2004 interview:
In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
I echoed that sentiment in a piece I wrote just over a year ago: “Steve Jobs truly cares about only one thing: creating amazing experiences. It’s not about this feature or that feature. It’s about creating something that people want and feel an emotional bond with.” Having individuals who understand users and the centrality of design is unusual, especially in the technology industry—Steve Jobs once bashed Microsoft for having “no taste.” He followed up with “and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way.”
Jobs believed in taste in a big way, the ultimate expression of quality over quantity. He knew he had taste and vision, and he (often dictatorially) imposed them on Apple and its products. There’s only one version of the iPhone you can buy, the iPhone Steve thought was most elegant and most beautiful, the best. It doesn’t have Flash. Its App Store is tightly curated (or even censored). At the end of the day, that’s design. Take it or leave it. But, people took it—and loved it, almost every single time. That was Jobs’ genius.
The End of the Future
Jobs lived the quintessential American Dream: adopted, college drop-out, comeback kid, and successful entrepreneur. That is worth celebrating. But Jobs was unique for another reason. He was one of our greatest and most prominent techno-optimists. He never stopped believing in and delivering on technology’s promise, and his life’s work exuded a constant belief in the future. His death, then, forces us to grapple with a lurking and unsettling uncertainty about America’s economic and technological progress.
Today, only 35% of Americans today believe America’s best days are yet to come. Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal and early Facebook investor, has labeled our era the “End of the Future.” He notes that little technological progress, outside the internet, has been made in the last half century. The dream of clean energy is dead in its tracks; Warren Buffett’s largest investment ever, $44 billion in BNSF Railways is a bet on coal shipping. The Green Revolution is “fading,” we travel no faster than we did 30 years ago, and the War on Cancer started in 1970. What happened to the future?
With Steve, every year like clockwork, there was a new device to delight us and make our lives easier. It was highly visible and unrelenting: every year, battery life increased, storage got bigger, the device slimmer and more beautiful. That Jobs was a good showman certainly mattered, but, more importantly, he believed in the world-changing possibilities of technology to his core.
Even better, he tried to convince us that technology could be human-scale and usable. His vision for the future was a remarkably clear and appealing one; even as things got more technically complicated, they could still be fun, reliable, and easy to use. Over Jobs’ long career, every other realm—politics, finance, or even air travel—appears only to have grown more arcane, unreliable, and frustrating with time.
Apple and the tech industry will very likely continue to flourish. But, Steve Jobs’ death casts profound uncertainty on a long and prolific period of making technology more human, more accessible, and more relevant for the world. He represented constant progress and a future where technology could empower and delight, not confuse and frustrate.
The Last Leader
When you combine Jobs’ clarity of mission, excellence in execution, and willingness to take risks you come up with something seemingly rare today: leadership. The Onion ran an obituary:
Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56…[Obama said:] ‘This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over.’
While satire, The Onion captures real sentiment. With the political system paralyzed at home and abroad and with the economy on the brink of a double-dip recession, Americans distrust their institutions now more than ever. There are few remaining wells of trust, confidence, and experience. Amazingly, Steve Jobs may well have been one of them.
Though the problems confronting us are great, there’s a pervasive feeling that our politicians are failing us. As Matt Bai points out in the New York Times, they poll relentlessly and pander to constituents and special interests, refusing to act in fear of coming elections. They could learn something from Steve Jobs.
Jobs was famous for never consulting market research or focus groups. He was never afraid to take risks in moving his products and headstrong vision forward. Time and time again he angered his users, ditching floppy disks, DVD drives, and Adobe Flash. He unveiled a phone with no keyboard when every smartphone had a keyboard. He released a tablet after Microsoft had failed for a decade with its own tablets. Each time, users came around to Jobs’ concept, understanding and ultimately benefiting from decisions that they disagreed with. You might call that leadership.
He demanded excellence and gave us users things we didn’t even know we wanted. He moved technology forward, often against our wills, but he was confident, stubborn, and often right. He offered his vision, and he led. Across age, party line, and country, we followed.