A Revolution and it’s Revolutionary: Apple and Steve Jobs
Whenever the term revolution pops up in our think tanks, the revolutionary with whom a mutualism is shared, follows up and they are always reminisced together.
One such revolutionist was Steve Jobs, the big dad of the gadget world who shook the silicon valley with the ultimate wave of change:Apple Inc and it’s sisters: Pixar and neXT. Each chapter of his life was analogous to looking through the eyes of a true blue revolutionary whose army of passionate followers with cult like devotion ,continues to grow even after his untimely demise and this is a collection of bytes from his story of a Digital Revolution.
“The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do”
Being an iconoclast, Jobs’s path was unpredictable.
But the journey was his reward.He was given up for adoption at birth, battled cancer for nearly a decade and ousted from the company he created.But what made him different from all the other college-dropouts-turned-CEOs was his tryst with reality distortion .Simply put,Jobs was like a rigid revolutionary who refused to let his idea die down due to dogma.He had his own version of reality which had the landmark of optimism in every nook and cranny, to the point of refusing cancer surgery for 9 months! For most of us, trips to the backyard were hardly an idea of a great outing but Jobs started the apple revolution with his creative nemesis Wozniak at his home garage and apple-2 and dubbed it “bicycle for the mind”,for it was single handedly built by two garage geeks.
“You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.”
Like Jekyll and Hyde, the technology tycoon had two faces to his personality.
While he treated all his cutting edge products like his new born babies, having sleepless fortnights for them, Jobs never got over his childhood scar of being put up for adoption so he got symbolised as a robot devoid of emotions for abandoning his own daughter . Labelled as having a ‘no holds barred’ OCD in demanding perfection in the minutest of the things, he drove away everyone who could not share this level of passion with him, often forgetting his co-workers were human beings programmed to be error prone.(Even Google was at the receiving end of his astute eye when he called up the head honcho to change the yellow gradient in it’s logo!) He experimented with psychedelics but was a zen Buddhist. Exorbitant costs were incurred due to his artistic sensibilities in each investment he made in his brainchild products but he lived in a home without furniture including bed, refusing to be the richest man in the living cemetery of Palo Alto.
“It is ironic that we often praise the successful risk takers but condemn the idea of taking risks. Now that is revolutionary indeed”
One can never forget the keynote event of 2001 where Jobs promised to “make history today”
And he very well did. By launching three different products -a media player, a telephone and a mobile with Internet device-before giving away the plot twist that this wasn’t three products but one. The iPhone revolutionised the modern phone with its sleek touch interface and a perfect integration of design cum usage with the lucrative virtual business of App Store open to all developers’ delight round the coding arena. Then there was no looking behind, with the portable music hard-drive, iPod becoming the de facto for all digital music fanatics and iTunes with quicktime, being branded as the holy grail for artistes.Not to forget iPad which released a trailer mirroring the future of computing in the form of tablets never seen before.
The critics were left scratching their heads at the back ,thinking whether to applaud this game changer or lament over their sadistic approach to Apple as a scruffy kid’s toy, just moments ago.
“The misfits. The rebels.The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently aren’t fond of rules.”
Instilling a sense of life in the seemingly soulless metal pieces, like dogs were to pet lovers, Apple’s hallmark gadgets were every besotted fan’s loyal companion.
Being the troublemaker genius he was, Jobs as a teenager sold a ‘blue box’ device which used eccentric tones that made the U.S. phone system hackable while illegally allowing users to make unlimited free international calls.As an adult he launched his secret project, much to the dismay of the money hungry board of directors, the first consumer computer Macintosh. It was GUI equipped only because he wanted to bridge the gap between the users and the hot-shot tech world. This made the former’s whims and fancies into a reality rather than letting it stuck in the corporate monotony and military experimentation labs. Soon after the unexpected success, he was fired from Apple. But ever the avid seeker of creativity and curiosity,(apart from trying to eat rat poison to know it’s side effects) Steve entered into the most innovative periods of his life, starting from the scratch as a beginner.
The changer who refused to settle at any checkpoint in his legendary life knew that had it not been for his dysfunctional character of putting the non living things at a higher pedestal, every kid’s beloved animation movies Toy Story,Cars and Planes would never have come to life with Pixar and thrown them in a parallel dimension of imagination where the mute can emote and speak too.
That is why today, even the neighbours’ kids know now which 3 apples changed the world:
One seduced Eve,
The second landed on Newton’s head
And third, was in the hands of Steve Jobs.
