I never met Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was many things to many people. To me he was one of a handful of people who have had a profound effect on my life.
My thoughts and reflections on the influence of Steve Jobs on me.
I woke this morning to the sad news that Steve Jobs had died last night. Naturally I learnt the news on an iPhone using information posted over the Internet (invented on a Next). I first started using Apple products in 1988 in a small PR company and my life changed from that point. One day 3 SE20's with duel disk drives were brought in, with no hard drives. A box when unwrapped was found to contain QuarkXPress 2.1 and I rapidly moved away from traditional paste-up layout to computer publishing. I could see the writing on the wall for the design industry and learnt as much as I could about Macs. I will point out at this point that I did computer studies for O level and got an terrible mark - it was at the time all punched tape and applied math which I was not good at. I wanted to use computers rather than make them and Steve Jobs realised that the key to selling a lot of hardware was to make them easy to use. Later that year the company got smaller and I was made redundant. My Gran bankrolled me a new SE30 and I was freelancing! Later I moved up to London to work because that was where it was all happening apparently. I got some work with an oil industry newspaper creating the pages in Pagemaker on a Mac Plus.
Then I got a job offer at a bank that I couldn't refuse. I think I was the first one in a world leading bank to use a Mac (an LC - colour at last!!!) and I was creating artwork for point of sale and mailing materials. I was able to expand the team over the next few years and eventually brought a total of 17 Macs into the company. I remember them all as I had to write water tight business cases for each one and fight IT and purchasing who were very sucky teeth anti Mac but I was armed with a white paper showing how artworkers on Macs, at the time, produced up to 30% more output than PCs running the same software simply because of the user interface. However they were dark days and Steve Jobs had been pushed out of Apple it's fortunes declined and its boxes became grey. That actually did the world a lot of good because he was able to try out new ideas with Next and Pixar.
Then something astonishing happened - Steve Jobs went back to Apple and turned the company around and started producing products that have pushed the world into a far better place. Turning yet another grey box computer into a thing of beauty and desirability. At home I still have my SE30, a Performa 5200, a Dalmatian iMac, an iMac G5 and current work beast that is the 27" iMac G5. My home is full of Apple gadgets that make my life much happier and that's a great thing. We have had a Newton, one of the very first iPods in the UK and plenty of the new models, but it's the iPhone that really took Apple and Steve Jobs to global levels and changed the playing field for everyone. Androids are outselling iPhones 2:1 as I write this but without the iPhone there would be no smart phones yet - not really - not the mass market we have today. After all the Nokia Communicator, very advanced for its time, wasn't a big hit. And that's the point. Steve Jobs knew how to make products that sell - make it as easy as possible to do something difficult and make it look wow. The whole world is benefiting from this lesson and UX is in a place that it would never have been without Steve Jobs. He had vision and a great team to help him realise that.
I never met Steve Jobs, but if I had I would have said - thank you.
Next short: ExpressionEngine custom log-in page
Previous short: Preventing deep linking
