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It was poignant and unsettling to watch Steve Jobs deliver his farewell. This could not possibly be the man we've watched for decades; eyes twinkling while his mind traveled at the speed of light. In resigning as Apple's CEO, Jobs endowed a golden sunset on a dazzling run. I hear the dreamy summer echoes from the lake, remembering an admonition once offered by my grandfather in his inimitable Will Rogers way, "Things that can't go on forever...don't."
Words cannot possibly articulate the merit of people like Steve Jobs. He was never a polemicist; instead a master chemist merging minds and competencies into galactic innovation. It seems best to leave those epic innovations to his biographers in the right time and context. Instead, much worth study is the uncanny synchronicity and to some degree accidental coalescence of Jobs and a small coterie of genius; all sharing a common irony. In January, 1975 the New Year lumbered to life in an angry winter and though no one knew it, history was being re-vectored. It would be remembered as the dawn of the age of the personal computer. In fact this moment in time shared historical ground with previous birthing across the ages...the era of Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller as an example.
To the veterans of mainframe history, inevitably the question must have been asked, "Why waste time on these toys when the real 'computer' business belongs to IBM's massive configurations?" If you were more than a few years out of college at the time, you belonged to the old paradigm and were in no position to forgo a lucrative job to mess around with a $350 computer kit. But in Outliers Malcolm Gladwell was quick to point out there were several bright minds about to have a head-on collision with law of destiny. They also shared uncanny commonality. Steve Jobs was born in February, 1955. Bill Gates was born in October, 1955. Paul Allen in January 1953, Steve Balmer, March, 1956, and Eric Schmidt, April 1955. This meant each wunderkind was somewhere between 20 and 22 when 1975 shouldered its way into history; they were too young to be imprisoned in an old mainframe.
Jobs came of age treading the ground of the very business he would ultimately dominate. If you read his biography you get a sense for his extraordinary childhood experiences. Jobs attended evening talks by Hewlett-Packard scientists. They were about the latest advances in electronics and Steve Jobs, exercising a trademark of his inimitable style, buttonholed HP engineers and drew on their expertise. Once Jobs even called HP founder Bill Hewlett to request some spare parts. Not only did he score the parts, he landed a summer job working on the assembly line building computers, only to become so immersed he tried to build his own.
But Steve Jobs might have remained the eccentric boy genius, standing just outside the footlights while other more "packaged" young executives stood on the personal computer stage. Instead, history will record Jobs was as good at people collecting as he was with technical innovation.
He found them all, put them in the right role, and while infused with a massive dose of unselfishness made them all brighter, better, and infinitely well-off. I'm not sure we even understand people of Jobs' ilk, given the world's current-state.
Icons will come and they will go...but there will never be another Steve Jobs, not in this epoch.
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