Steve Jobs the patron saint of perfection

The most surprising about Steve jobs and Apple Renaissance he engineered for the past 15 years is so incredible, so. Most digital innovations that changed our lives have been a logical consequence of the increasing power and reduce the price of semiconductors. Someone will invent personal computers, cellular phones, the Internet, even search engines.

But there was nothing the slightest bit bound about the company, whose digital products are considered so distinctive they attract dominant market shares despite high prices. Most recently, in 2002, personal computers were seen as a commodity business is dominated by the large volume and low cost — Hewlett Packard paid $ 25 billion purchase of Compaq and Dell last store to be # 1 on the market. Last week, HP is still the leader, said he was considering abandoning the PC as a whole, at least in part the concession that Apple is taking an increasing share of the market and most of the profits.

I'm not a Mac user since I sold my first generation model — with 128 K of memory and one floppy drive. But recently I walked into the Apple store and fondled the latest MacBook Air. I was blown away as the use of multi-touch gestures and a few other innovations transformed the experience of this very mature product categories. Once again.

A succession of new products from iPod iPhone to iPad became the business of local lore of our era. Principal Steve jobs is expected, at least more willingly than the State of the Union address. Even aspects of business computer that feel most competitors — delivery of product, production process and even retail store — steel parts of disruptive innovation at Apple.

Growing snowball innovation, advertising, customer loyalty and scale that can be seen with the striking force in the iPad created jobs. Here was a product category, which was completely new (except some regrettable blunders Microsoft). But instantly became a hit — not only among the gadget geeks, but with tens of millions of people who saw something that immediately appeared useful and tempting. They hope that Apple can deliver something that will just work without failures and frustrations that accompany reliably first generation products from smaller companies.

For this success was not an engineer, as the "troika" that until recently led by Google, nor a professional manager, as a succession of leaders on HP or even entrepreneur like Michael Dell.  Steve Jobs was impresario in the tradition, more than anything from classical Hollywood studio boss, (which he also was in my spare time). It is fitting that jobs is currently the largest shareholder of the company, created by one of the 20-th century an all time great perfection: Walt Disney.

This approach does not make apple pleasant company to resolve or to work at all on Apple worked with concern, that they must not requirements of jobs or suffer his wrath. To the public and even Apple's major partners of the company was about as responsive as Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory; Nobody ever went and never came out. And Yes to work at Apple have taken a lot of Oompa Loompa. The company possessed the secrets to such extremes that the employees were divided into small groups and ordered not to talk to each other, let alone anyone outside the company.

My one meeting with jobs is true to form. In 2004, I have just started covering consumer electronics and I wrote about the battle between the iTunes and initiatives while Microsoft "plays for sure," in order to create an open standard for music formats. This was before Apple's reputation, and enabled it arrogance – blew past all previous records. However, when I asked jobs at the end of a press conference to discuss strategy Apple in the market for music, he wrecked me saying "we did not want to talk about it".

We all know a lot of people that well. We know many people who are smart. We've seen a lot of corporate leaders who have the rare combination of skills to surf the waves generated by Moore's law. But it's hard to think of anyone other than Steve jobs, who, through willpower, self-confidence, vision, and perfectionism can upend powerful force technology to make so many products that are nice to so many people, precisely because they are unlikely.

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