Steve Jobs, Rest in Peace

Steve Jobs passed away tonight.  I wrote a long blog about it, but then I decided nothing I wrote seemed adequate, so I scrapped it.  Over the next few days there will be thousands of articles written trying to capture his genius and summarize his amazing work.  None of them will succeed, because it will take a book of hundreds of pages to even get close.

So my thoughts will be short, because it feels disrespectful to attempt and then inevitably fail to pay adequate tribute to Steve Jobs in my blog.

There is no one else in business that I admire more, and there is no company I admire more than Apple. In 1996, Apple was literally a week or two away from bankruptcy and was losing hundreds of millions a year.   Then they re-hired Steve Jobs after the board forced him out in 1985.  15 years later in 2011, Apple has the biggest market cap of any company in the world, surpassing Exxon-Mobil.  That is a jaw-dropping, mind-numbing, unbelievable achievement.  And Jobs did it through invention, innovation, and a laser-like focus on raising the bar for how technology can improve human life.

He understood people better than anyone, and he changed the way people live, how they read, how they listen to music, how they work with computers, and how they interact with technology in general.  Ideas that originated in Apple products are present in some form in pretty much every computer or device out there today.  Nearly every single major Apple product was a total game changer, going back to the early '80's.

Steve succeeded where others failed (and still fail even with his blueprint) because he knew people and he never compromised on the quality of Apple products.  Apple products succeed where others fail.  It literally was a relentless pursuit of perfection.

I feel very fortunate to have been in attendance at his famous Stanford University commencement speech (was my sister's graduation).   Well worth a watch if you haven't seen it.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Its particularly tragic that Steve was only 56.  There's not another mind like his out there, and it hurts to think what he could have done with another 20 or 30 years.  Rest in peace Steve, you will be missed.