Tech Korner: The Legacy of Steve Jobs

The CEO of the most secretive company in the United States stepped down at the end of August.  The company?  Apple, Inc.  Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple Inc to take the position of Chairman of the Board.  There has been much speculation as to why Jobs would make this kind of move, but what cannot be ignored is his legacy.

Jobs felt out of place in school starting at a young age.  He found himself tinkering with electronics and bored with school.  He enrolled in college, but soon realized his overwhelming interest in electronics and dropped out after only one semester.  He started Apple Computer in 1975 with a school friend, Steve Wozniak.  He quickly saw the business potential of Wozniak’s hand-made circuit board.  After perfecting the device, it was the first personal computer to be mass produced.  It was called the Apple II.  After the success of the Apple II, Apple began to grow more and more.  After a failure of the “Lisa” business computer, Jobs was taken off the Lisa team.  He took a few employees with him to an outlying building on the Apple campus and started the Macintosh project.  A black pirate flag flew over that building. Jobs is famous for saying “Why join the Navy when you can be a pirate?”  

The Macintosh was the start of it all, but around this time Jobs was ousted from his position at Apple.  Instead of moping around with nothing to do, Jobs set out to form Pixar Animation and NeXT Computer.  At NeXT, Jobs created what became Mac OS X, which is still in use today.  Apple later bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back to the company that he started.  The innovation of Jobs soon took the company into prosperity with the introduction of the iMac and iPod.  Jobs has continued creating innovative products with amazing design.

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them,” Jobs said.

Jobs also considers the user-friendly design to be an important component.  “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like,” he says. “Design is how it works.”  

Apple embodies this idea in all of their products.  It is part of what makes them so successful.  Jobs’s goal is to make products that will cause the “Click. Boom. Amazing!” effect.  With Jobs’s drive for excellence, Apple has been able to innovate and create products that no one thought possible and set the bar high, making the competition struggle to keep up.

Even with Jobs playing a smaller role in the company, Apple will continue to innovate and create amazing products with people like Jonny Ive in design and Tim Cook in the CEO position.

Jobs set out to “put a ding in the universe” and succeeded many times over.