When 20-something tech “journalists” tell you Apple Computer will be just fine without Steve Jobs, don’t believe a word they say. They know nothing. We lived through the period when John Sculley and Gil Amelio ran Apple, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.
Most corporations today are run by committees of lame—sometimes stupid—people. Most MBA-era executives are constantly fearful with little real instinct about how to make anything—much less brilliant products that people want. They always worry about the bottom line.
Steve Jobs was never like them. He is an original thinker with a singular instinct for the next great thing. Apple has never done focus groups. Jobs goes by his gut instincts and is usually right.
In an interview Jobs once said that Microsoft's Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." That statement was not a joke. It’s perhaps a dirty little secret today that psychedelic drugs pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by demonstrating that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. It was not like the government told you.
Steve Jobs could take one look at Microsoft and know exactly what was wrong. “They just have no taste,” he told PBS in 1996. “And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”
A year later, Jobs added to the New York Times that Microsoft’s products suck. “There’s no sex in them anymore.”
After suffering through what passed as personal computers in the early 1980s, I was elated when Jobs announced the Macintosh in 1984. I bought an original Mac and haven’t looked back. It changed my life. It allowed me to make a living without working for a corporation. As Jobs once said, it was the equivalent of “a bicycle for our minds.”
When Jobs left Apple after being axed by John Sculley, the company entered dark times. But what would one expect from a computer company being run by former a Pepsi Cola salesman? It went on this way until Jobs came back and started introducing his “next insanely great things.”
Not only have I been an avid Apple user since the first Mac, I’ve also covered Apple for years as a reporter. I have interviewed all the former presidents of Apple, including Steve Jobs. I have watched Jobs repeatedly enchant audiences with his amazing keynote addresses, and smiled knowingly as Jobs used the music of our kindred spirit Bob Dylan to open and close those sessions.
Jobs was always driven by far more than money. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me,” he once said. “Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.” How many modern CEOs would admit that?
I would like to think that Apple could continue to function as the genius company that it has been. But I know better. It will return to Earth, especially when it’s time to invent that next great thing. Real genius is very, very rare—especially in today’s world. Steve Jobs has it, while others don’t. It’s a sad fact that geniuses like him come very rarely.
Jobs has the moral compass of a man who came of age in the 60s. It’s a proud legacy, and one I understand and admire. Others might learn from it, if they only could.
Myself and Tamara Ball, my assistant, in late 1984, at Television Matrix in Hollwood, CA. That's a vintage Apple Lisa, upgraded to a Macintosh, between us.