By Martin Hutchinson Steve Jobs leaves behind a company with
a huge $350 billion market capitalization, but it is actually much bigger than
that. Apple, which Jobs co‐founded and ran through most of
its history, has changed the world several times. The company’s first great
development was the Apple II, which made personal computers easy to use. It
worked especially well with Dan Bricklin’s VisiCalc software, the first
successful spreadsheet program. Now automatic recalculation and easy
adjustments are taken for granted, but then they were revolutionary for anyone
who worked with numbers. Apple lost the PC marketing wars to IBM and Microsoft,
but remained the trend‐setter.
The 1984 Macintosh’s point‐and‐click technology (partly derived
from Xerox’s 1970s
Palo Alto Research Center) reduced the need to remember innumerable tricky‐to‐use
DOS commands and brought out the visual and tactile potential of computers. The
rivals only fully caught up a decade later with Windows 95. The revolutions
continued when Jobs returned to Apple after 12 years away (revolutionizing
animation at Pixar while he was gone).
The iPod set a new standard for storing and playing music
digitally, but Apple’s greatest effect on the world came with the iPhone. The
leap of imagination – the combination of mobile phone and computing capability,
mixed in with cool design, and fun to use – still seems awesome. The cultural
effect cannot be measured. It leveled the world: even the most remote tribesman
with a smartphone is connected to the Internet cloud as if he were in a New
York office.
Apple is losing share in smartphones, but still deserves
most of the credit for their development. Jobs’ genius for design and
understanding of the needs of non‐technical users has helped make
the tech sector a consumer business – and thereby revolutionized the economy
and the lives of almost everyone. The latest effort is the iPad. Frank J.
Fleming, a fan, called it “the only thing that’s met my childhood expectations
of what 2011 would be like.” It is hard to argue. An earlier apple is said to
have spurred Isaac Newton to discover gravity. This Apple may be just as
important.
0 comments:
Post a Comment