Think Different, in the Same Way

Yesterday started just like any other day: I woke up complaining about having to get up early. I went to work, then to the gym. After working out I ran into my friend David, with whom I walked around the Pike Place Market and ate most of a jar of pickles*. When I got home, I logged onto Twitter.

First tweet:
@danlesac I'm honestly stunned http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/
[Still unsure what's going on, I assume Jobs has retired. I keep reading.]
@seattletimes What do you remember most about Steve Jobs or his impact on the tech world?
@derekwebb devastated by the news of steve jobs' passing
[I'm sorry? Passing???]
@nytimes Developing: Steve Jobs, visionary co-founder and former CEO of Apple, has died at 56. http://nyti.ms/plZYSJ #stevejobs
[These were four of my first five tweets]

Wow. I'm dumbstruck, speechless. Just the evening before I had been joking about how the only thing on Twitter was the election and new iPhone, so iPhone must be running for president. And now, Steve Jobs is dead. I keep reading. Everyone is weighing in - personal friends, President Obama, Bill Gates, Pee Wee Herman - the full gambit. While there are several tweets about his death, I'm struck by the quantity of tweets about his life. This is legacy.

The Steve Jobs cult is in full effect. Let us not forget, by way of example, this article, which compares Steve Jobs to Jesus. Jobs is often compared to men like Edison, which is still not a fair comparison as Jobs is more a leader of a group of engineers developing products, as opposed to the primary developer himself. While Jobs has done a great deal of development, he moved out of that role and achieved the preponderance of his notoriety in a leadership capacity.
Jobs was an interesting character: those who worked most closely with him consistently said that working under Jobs inspired one of the most amazing and groundbreaking creative periods of their lives and they were pushed in ways they have never been before or since, but also that they hope to never have to work with the man again. We've all worked with people who fall into either of these categories, while most people fall in the middle, but I can't even grasp the concept of someone falling so heavily into both. Though erratic and temperamental, Jobs led a team off and on for 35 years that developed things previous generations had never dreamt of. But what he did next was even more amazing, as he convinced us all we wanted these things, using what has been referred to as his Reality Distortion Field**.

Five years ago no one was saying, "Man, I wish I had a cell phone on which I could check my email, shop on Amazon, find a recipe, and play video games." Companies like Blackberry, Motorola, and Palm were already making products with these very features, though they were appealing only to a small segment of the market. And then came the iPhone. Suddenly, these were the very things that I'd always wished I could do while riding the bus, though I had never realized it. And a keyboard? We don't want that - an on-screen keyboard is much better. Yes, now that you tell me I have, I do recall always hating physical keyboards.

Because we all suddenly wanted (or maybe even needed) it, sales of all smartphones jumped, but Apple's iPhone had a huge market share straight out of the gate because that was exactly what we had always wanted without realizing it. Everything else fell into the category of good enough, for now. And when Jobs made you want something, it was contagious: I needed an iPhone, and so did everyone I talked to.

Steve Jobs understood humanity in a way that few of us ever will, and he knew exactly how to appeal to us. He was more than just a CEO: he was a pied piper. He would play his flute as we listened through white earbuds, and we would buy whatever he led us to. We all were thinking different(ly) in the same way, the way of a perfect Keynote speech made in a black turtleneck.





*I don't know whether it's a good or bad thing that this sentence doesn't strike me as a strange part of my day.
**There are some interesting parodies of this, including a Dilbert strip that I cannot find and this episode of The Simpsons (which is unfortunately no longer available on Hulu).

Yesterday started just like any other day: I woke up complaining about having to get up early. I went to work, then to the gym. After working out I ran into my friend David, with whom I walked around the Pike Place Market and ate most of a jar of pickles*. When I got home, I logged onto Twitter.

First tweet:
@danlesac I'm honestly stunned http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/
[Still unsure what's going on, I assume Jobs has retired. I keep reading.]
@seattletimes What do you remember most about Steve Jobs or his impact on the tech world?
@derekwebb devastated by the news of steve jobs' passing
[I'm sorry? Passing???]
@nytimes Developing: Steve Jobs, visionary co-founder and former CEO of Apple, has died at 56. http://nyti.ms/plZYSJ #stevejobs
[These were four of my first five tweets]

Wow. I'm dumbstruck, speechless. Just the evening before I had been joking about how the only thing on Twitter was the election and new iPhone, so iPhone must be running for president. And now, Steve Jobs is dead. I keep reading. Everyone is weighing in - personal friends, President Obama, Bill Gates, Pee Wee Herman - the full gambit. While there are several tweets about his death, I'm struck by the quantity of tweets about his life. This is legacy.

The Steve Jobs cult is in full effect. Let us not forget, by way of example, this article, which compares Steve Jobs to Jesus. Jobs is often compared to men like Edison, which is still not a fair comparison as Jobs is more a leader of a group of engineers developing products, as opposed to the primary developer himself. While Jobs has done a great deal of development, he moved out of that role and achieved the preponderance of his notoriety in a leadership capacity.
Jobs was an interesting character: those who worked most closely with him consistently said that working under Jobs inspired one of the most amazing and groundbreaking creative periods of their lives and they were pushed in ways they have never been before or since, but also that they hope to never have to work with the man again. We've all worked with people who fall into either of these categories, while most people fall in the middle, but I can't even grasp the concept of someone falling so heavily into both. Though erratic and temperamental, Jobs led a team off and on for 35 years that developed things previous generations had never dreamt of. But what he did next was even more amazing, as he convinced us all we wanted these things, using what has been referred to as his Reality Distortion Field**.

Five years ago no one was saying, "Man, I wish I had a cell phone on which I could check my email, shop on Amazon, find a recipe, and play video games." Companies like Blackberry, Motorola, and Palm were already making products with these very features, though they were appealing only to a small segment of the market. And then came the iPhone. Suddenly, these were the very things that I'd always wished I could do while riding the bus, though I had never realized it. And a keyboard? We don't want that - an on-screen keyboard is much better. Yes, now that you tell me I have, I do recall always hating physical keyboards.

Because we all suddenly wanted (or maybe even needed) it, sales of all smartphones jumped, but Apple's iPhone had a huge market share straight out of the gate because that was exactly what we had always wanted without realizing it. Everything else fell into the category of good enough, for now. And when Jobs made you want something, it was contagious: I needed an iPhone, and so did everyone I talked to.

Steve Jobs understood humanity in a way that few of us ever will, and he knew exactly how to appeal to us. He was more than just a CEO: he was a pied piper. He would play his flute as we listened through white earbuds, and we would buy whatever he led us to. We all were thinking different(ly) in the same way, the way of a perfect Keynote speech made in a black turtleneck.





*I don't know whether it's a good or bad thing that this sentence doesn't strike me as a strange part of my day.
**There are some interesting parodies of this, including a Dilbert strip that I cannot find and this episode of The Simpsons (which is unfortunately no longer available on Hulu).

Think Different, in the Same Way