Steve Jobs: the man who changed the way we live

ANALYSIS

"Picasso had a saying, he said 'good artists copy, great artists steal' and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Apple founder Steve Jobs, 1994.

It's a strange statement from a man who would later go on to pioneer so many innovations that his competitors were forced to steal from him or risk being deserted by their customers.

Sure, he may have nicked the idea for the graphical user interface - the icons, windows and cursor controlled by a mouse that defines desktop computing today - from his trip to Xerox's research centre in the 80s. But ever since Jobs's return to Apple in 1997, after being ousted by the board and spending a decade in the wilderness, it has appeared as though Jobs has possessed a crystal ball.

Much has been said about Jobs's success in turning Apple around from the brink of bankruptcy in 1997 but focusing on the business aspect ignores Jobs's true skill - being able to predict what consumers want years before we've even thought about it, and then convince us to line up overnight to buy one, sight unseen.

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them," Jobs told BusinessWeek in 1998.

A tech oracle, Jobs made most of the important decisions around Apple's products and strategy, and his grand vision filtered from his desk to the rest of the organisation like no other company.

Jobs's influence over our lives goes far beyond those who use his products. His unrelenting focus on good product design, carried out in concert with his design guru Jonathan Ive, has set the benchmark for the rest of the industry and beyond.

The aesthetic styling of computers was an afterthought before the colourful iMac's release in 1998. Jobs brought computers into a post-beige world and competitors have still not managed to make laptops and desktops that look and feel as good as Macs, which also have another core advantage: being virtually free from malware.

The iPhone kickstarted a mobile revolution that saw phones become everything from our personal navigator to the guardian of our social life. The app store opened up a whole new universe of functionality from games to newsreaders in a way that eclipsed other platforms like Windows Mobile, which had long forced us to download mobile software to PCs and then tediously transfer it to our phones by cable.

The day the iPhone was launched in 2007, interacting with portable devices using a cumbersome directional pad or jabbing at the screen with a stylus immediately felt like an anachronism. Virtually every smartphone on the market today can be viewed as a rip-off of the iPhone, from the touch-based gesture controls to the layout of the interface to how we obtain and consume apps.

Similarly, there were tablet computers long before the iPad, but it took a visionary like Jobs to get it right. And competitors have followed with an army of copycats that look almost identical but somehow lack Jobs's secret sauce.

Before 2001, when the iPod was launched, most of us were still fumbling with portable CD players that skipped when you moved too studdenly and cumbersome collections of scratched up CDs.

Now Apple's iconic white earbuds are ubiquitous and we've got many thousands of tracks stored on iPods, some models of which are almost as small as a postage stamp.

The iTunes Music Store followed the iPod in 2003 and for the first time, we were able to buy digital music with a few button clicks and instantly transfer it over to our portable devices - changing the music industry forever.

As long-time Australian Apple watcher Matthew Powell told me this morning, Jobs's most important quality is that he understood from very early on that most people are not interested in technology for its own sake. People don't want to "compute" with computers, they want to use computers to improve the way they do the stuff they like such as listening to music, reading the news or watching movies.

"From the very earliest days of Apple, and particularly with the Lisa and Macintosh projects, Jobs concerned himself with making computers work the way people expected them to rather than making people learn how the computer wanted them to work," Powell said.

In implementing his philosophy, Jobs refused to be dictated to by the tech industry and commentators. His decisions to kill technologies like the floppy drive and leave out features from the iPhone such as Adobe Flash and removable batteries were widely derided but he stuck to his guns and most of the time was eventually proven right.

Even as he steps back from the coal face of the company, Jobs has set in train changes that could further turn the industry on its head.

His launch of the Mac App Store - the desktop version of the one found on the iPhone and iPad - is paving the way for a future where all our software is delivered electronically as opposed to being packaged in boxes on CDs.

Indeed, Jobs is so confident in his vision that his latest products, such as the MacBook Air, don't have an optical disc drive at all.

As Jobs told Fortune in 2000: "This is what customers pay us for – to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it."

To say the least, Jobs leaves big shoes to fill.

Apple's new CEO Tim Cook has become the most powerful gay man in America. The exacting processes guru was integral in turning Apple's billion-dollar loss in the 90s into a $US600 million profit in a year.

But from what we've seen so far, he's no visionary, and even though analysts - and Jobs himself - are confident that Apple's most innovative days are ahead of it (indeed, Jobs will still lurk in the background at Apple as long as he's able) the long term view is murky.

"What will be interesting is how Apple copes in 5-10-20 years time," said Anthony Agius, who founded the biggest Australian Apple fan community, MacTalk.

"Who is going to be the dictator now? Tim Cook isn't that sort of CEO."

This reporter is on Twitter: @ashermoses