Apple: A year without Steve

A year has passed since the death of the founding father of one of the world's most successful computer corporation, Apple. The promotion of the name of Steve Jobs carries a certain advertising point for the corporation. The company's products are strongly associated with the personality of the legendary entrepreneur. The corporation profits from the cult of Steve Jobs, and it is only a matter of time whether Apple loses the market segment where it firmly stays at the moment.

Not that long ago, many experts said that the sales of iPhone 5 should increase the U.S. GDP by as much as 0.5%. There is a question of national importance. Monuments to Mr. Jobs appear here and there, including Ukraine. It is worthy of note that Jobs's partner, Stephan Wozniak, who is also known as Steve Wozniak, comes from the family of a Ukrainian immigrant.

After all, the first successes of the young IT firm were connected with the abilities of Jobs's partner, Steve Wozniak. Tablet computers and smartphones were designed and produced long before Apple launched its products. The iPod, which brought really big money to Apple (the player forms a half of the annual revenue of the company), was made just because the author of the license simply did not have the money to prolong his rights.

Here is a description of a public dialogue of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that can be found in a very thick book, a biography edited by Walter Isaacson, that quickly came out after the death of Steve Jobs:

"They met in Jobs's conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn't disappoint his troops. "You're ripping us off!" he shouted. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!" Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

Indeed, these two guys deserve each other.

The appearance of the iPad is directly connected with an engineer from Microsoft, who tormented Jobs with his idea of a tablet computer.

"This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as your have a stylus, you're dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, "Fuck it, let's show him what a tablet can really be." 

And so he did. What you can not take away from Jobs is his feeling for what people need and his understanding of consumer psychology. It is because of his pathological perfectionism, which often made Jobs unbearable for others, that helped him grasp the basic trend: people do not need complicated gadgets. Everything should be nice and easy.

Obsession with one's own ideas is also a symptom of certain clinical pictures in psychiatry. Jobs was a great utilitarian, who, however, managed to create phenomenal products by combining other people's patented ideas. Millions of those using his products all over the world can only thank him for that.  

As for Apple, after the death of Steve Jobs the company is left to deal with the favorite business of the whole Western high-tech sector: to stop progressive upstarts and catch them with patent lawsuits.

Vitaly Salnik.