Steve Jobs: the crazy one

Apple co-founder, chairman, former CEO and messiah, Steven Paul Jobs, is dead. He died at the age of 56 after a long bout with pancreatic cancer and its complications.

As the co-founder of Apple, Jobs was the guy who brought computing to the masses with the Apple II. Then with the Macintosh he was the guy who made computing “user-friendly”.

Then Apple fired him. 

His time in the “wilderness” after Apple was, in a lot of ways, similar to his pilgrimage to India after dropping out of college. He went in search of something, and came back changed. 

After Apple he founded NeXT Computer, which made great technology that hardly anyone ever saw. He also took over the computer graphics arm of Lucasfilm and renamed it Pixar. 

In both of these companies he learned that success came not from doing everything his way, but by surrounding himself with brilliant and creative people.

He came back from India Buddhist and vegetarian. He came back from NeXT disciplined and open-minded.

In 1996, when Apple was on its last legs, it came to Jobs with $US400 million and acquired NeXT. Within a few months though, Jobs was acting CEO of Apple and key NeXT executive held virtually every senior post. it was the most upside-down takeover imaginable. 

(Years later, following a string of box-office failures, Disney acquired Pixar to replace its faltering animation division. Pixar’s hits like Toy Story and Finding Nemo stood in stark contrast to the forgettable films that Disney released without Pixar’s help. Jobs became Disney’s single largest shareholder, and key Pixar executives took on the most senior roles at Disney — it seems Jobs specialised in upside-down takeovers.)

Under Jobs’s leadership Apple returned to profitability. More importantly, after resting on its laurels while the rest of the industry caught up and overtook it, Apple returned to innovation. The iMac, iTunes, the iPod and eventually the iPhone and iPad completely transformed the computing landscape. They changed the way people interact with music, with TV shows, with information and with each other.

Apple was an also-ran in the personal computer industry, and now it is a leader. Apple was not even in the music industry, now it is the dominant retailer and manufacturer of portable music players. Apple was not in the phone market, and now commands 5% share overall and a commanding lead in the smartphone segment. In tablets, three out of every four sold are iPads.

Thanks to Jobs and the team he assembled, Apple became the single biggest publicly-listed company in the world, valued at nearly $US400 billion — not a bad return on that 1996 investment.

Jobs was eccentric, brilliant, visionary and mercurial. He could alienate people and he could inspire people. He claimed that he wore the same thing every day (the trademark black turtleneck and jeans) because it meant he didn’t waste any time thinking about what to wear. He disdained focus groups, saying “sometimes people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. He was unafraid to make mistakes, and took Apple’s failures (such as the PowerMac G4 Cube) in stride along with its successes.

He was also a brilliant showman, and his addresses to the Macworld Expo and Worldwide Developer Conference audiences were watched by millions of people. He was famous for the so-called “Reality Distortion Field” — the persuasive effect that could make even fairly ordinary announcements seem magical when Jobs made them.

The rapturous applause that greeted his 2002 announcement that the free iTools service was to be replaced by the $US99 MobileMe was evidence of this — why would people clap when they were being told they’d have to pay for something that used to be free? Such was Jobs. 

The term “genius” is badly overused these days — not least by the Apple Stores — but it surely applies to Steve Jobs. In his way, he changed the world.

Take a tour of some of the man's more memorable moments on film.