This collection of Breakingviews articles on Steve Jobs,
Apple and its industry is best introduced by the view we published following
news of his death on Oct. 5, 2011. The articles included here have been
selected to offer insight into the Apple story, the competitive impact of Jobs’
creative genius and the company’s most likely bright future. Richard Beales,
Assistant Editor October 2011 JOBS’ WORTH By Robert Cyran and Richard
Beales Steve Jobs has died at 56. He was no ordinary chief
executive, and he leaves no ordinary company. The force behind the iPod, iPhone
and iPad not only co‐founded and then rescued Apple, building it into the
most valuable tech company on the planet, worth some $350 billion. He also
changed the way people live. It’s a rare entrepreneur who leaves that legacy –
and a company that can thrive without him.
Jobs dropped out of college. And he was forced out of Apple
less than a decade after starting it with Steve Wozniak, having lost his fight
to promote new Macintosh computers instead of more profitable, less capable
machines. But these moments of change proved central to his later success. In a
2005 Stanford commencement address, Jobs talked of how, for example,
calligraphy classes he took after dropping out of college influenced the design
of the Macintosh, arguably Apple’s first world‐changing device. He was
always ready to move on. He called being fired from Apple “the best thing that
could have ever happened to me.” It’s easy to forget that Jobs built Pixar, the
astonishingly successful computer animation company, while in exile from Apple.
Even before Pixar, he founded Next Computer, making devices with an operating
system far ahead of its time. This played a role in Apple’s success after 1996
when it bought Next, bringing Jobs back into the fold.
Along with the vision, drive and perfectionism that led to a
string of successful products, Jobs did bring a less desirable cult of secrecy
to Apple after his return. In one sense, it served the company well – when the
iPhone landed and showed the world the real potential of smartphones, it
shocked the industry. It was, as an observer put it at the time, “like it
dropped out of a wormhole from the future.” But in handling the boss’s health
problems in recent years, Apple’s tight‐lipped nature caused investors to
get less information than they deserved. Even so, the company’s
greatest success, the iPhone, was developed after Jobs had survived the initial
onslaught of cancer. And Apple just this year became the most valuable company
in America for a time, and its market value now only just lags Exxon Mobil’s.
By some measures, Jobs’ creation ought to be worth much more. The success of
its latest category‐creating product, the iPad, means its growth potential
remains powerful. And the company has an impressive array of talent even
without him. “Don’t be trapped by dogma,” Jobs told that graduating
Stanford class. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own
inner voice.” Apple is a legacy in itself, but it’s the devices born of that
philosophy that arguably matter most. Like all great inventors, Jobs created
things that people didn’t even know they wanted – until millions of them just
had to have them.
Published Oct. 6, 2011
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