By now everyone and their grandmother is aware of the fact that Steve Jobs passed away a few days ago. The entire internet has been mourning the loss of a visionary, a true genius of our time, and literally everyone from school kids, to greatest minds of the world today, to President of the United States of America, has personally felt the loss and grieved over his early death.
However, living in a third world country such as Pakistan, one may be under the impression that Steve Jobs and all his contributions to the mankind & technology are absolutely irrelevant & simply inapplicable to them. That's somewhat true; Steve Jobs, Apple, and all the technological innovations he made probably don’t matter much to a layman who is trying his best to get home alive from work, while trying to make both ends meet in a rapidly inflating economy. He is just a regular bystander in today’s technological world evolving at warp speed.
But while all his contributions to the computing world may not apply directly to you, or any other Nokia-totting folks found in abundance around these parts, its important to keep things in perspective and understand what makes a revolutionary thing, revolutionary!
You don’t have to own an Apple product to appreciate Steve's importance in our daily lives. Its not the products his company made that signify his contributions, its the overall game-changing effect and ripples in the pattern of innovation in technology he brought that make him so important.
Going back to 1983, he introduced the first mainstream computer with a graphical user interface, and popularized the use of a mouse. In the 90s he was elemental in creation of the first animated feature film ever, Toy Story at Pixar Studios, again breaking the pattern and stretching the boundaries of human imagination and capabilities. Come 2001, and the iPod changes the way we listen to music, or even look at portable media players. Followed up by the iTunes Store, he essentially heralded the era of legitimate Digital MP3 sales, and a major catalyst in the fall of P2P music piracy, and Napster!
And then, in 2007, we see the iPhone. Its irrelevant whether it was a hit product that has made billions upon billions for Apple so far, or that it was the most amazing innovation of the company till that time. No, it was that it changed the way we conceive smartphones, or phones as a whole. Before that, a smartphone was either a phone with email capability and a camera, or with a dull collection of Business tools and corporate software. But iPhone, it stretched and expanded the boundaries of what we thought a phone could do, how it could be used, and how it should be used. It essentially redefined the term smartphone, and laid the cornerstone in the evolution of mobile computing.
And the last golden egg, and final nail in desktop computers' coffin, was the iPad. Now tablets had been around for almost a decade before iPad came along, but none of them were even remotely successful. Making a tablet, and making one the right way, with the right capabilities, the right form factor, the right packaging & marketing, that made all the difference in the world. And so much so, that in the last fiscal year, Apple sold more iPads than their entire computer line put together!
So Steve Jobs matters, because he laid down the foundation of the future! He is personally responsible for revolutionizing three major industries: Mobile, Computers, and Music. And when that future, slowly but surely, trickles down to these parts of the world, we would look back and say, "Yes, Steve Jobs changed the world!" The future belongs to technology, inventions, and those magical electronic devices. They will make possible everything that we will ever do in our everyday lives. And today, in a rare moment in history, one can point and say that this man made it all possible. We can identify the architect of the future!
Steve Jobs will be remembered among revolutionaries such as Da Vinci, Edison, Ford, Bell, Einstein, Newton, and Iqbal! You don’t have to be tech-savvy to be affected by his work, you just have to exist to be thankful to Steve Jobs. And in his very own words, also possibly the most apt definition of him, a toast:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
