No, no, not the literal jobs like the up-to-17% unemployment rate. I mean the Savior-of-Apple Jobs, el Steve-O, The Turtlenecked One, Mr. One-More-Thing. What would our world be like if (gasp) he had never gone back to Apple at all?
Mike Arrington posits that very question today, and while he mostly comes up with “no iPhone, and no Android,” I think the answer is actually more profound than that. Jobs is responsible for HP’s “The Computer is Personal Again” campaign, for taking mp3 players from the realm of “cute little gadgets that techies and some runners used” to ubiquitous device that no self-respecting person between ages 12 and 40 would be without.
Mostly, Jobs is responsible for returning Apple to mass-market products still driven by exceedingly high quality standards. He riskily bucked the uber-customization trend: he had better taste than you, and there wre limited options (candy-colored iMacs notwithstanding). He was a dictator, yes, but a benevolent one.
Jobs’ hyper-controlled and often-criticized ad campaigns transformed marketing strategies not only for the computer and technology industries but across advertising clients. Everything he touched seemed to turn into a cultural touchstone, without most of the population knowing exactly why they knew what an iMac or an iPod was (remember how revolutionary the original candy bubbles and white bricks were?).
I am, admittedly, an Apple fangirl, but I’m not blind to the many many shortcomings the company has had in product development and brand management over the years. And Jobs is hardly the Golden Messiah he is frequently (even in this post) trumped up to be – how much more profitable could iMacs have been if Jobs had never insisted on the hockeypuck mouse?
But missteps and egotrips aside, it’s hard to argue that the man has a certain Midas touch. More importantly, he proved that consumer-driven can also be performance-driven, and beauty-driven, and simplicity-driven, and – the king of them all – highly lucrative.
Posted by WestsideNYC on November 28, 2009 at 3:04 am
A World without Steve Jobs? Back in 1997, his presence would have still been irrelevant if Microsoft hadn’t saved Apple’s hide by agreeing to continue releasing the Mac version of MS Office and of providing Apple with that necessary extra funding. If that rumor regarding Gassee and BeOS was true, I am really sorry that he overplayed his hand. BeOS was an excellent operating system. Perhaps with Gassee at the helm of Apple, the Intel versions of the Mac would been released sooner and that certainly could have been a big hit. Still, there is no way of telling whether or not Apple would have been at the forefront of the digital music revolution. This is all speculation, anyway, any which way we go.