Steve Jobs - Tribute from afar

FE Team | Published: October 08, 2011 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Habibullah N Karim The death of the dirigiste Apple Inc. supremo on the 5th of this month marks the end of an uproarious journey of a quintessential tech visionary. Steve Jobs was an icon of entrepreneurship, innovation and showmanship to a whole generation of technophiles that grew up adoring his mantra "Think different". He was a living legend - the one and only of our generation in the technology world. He was not an infallible man and had his share of indiscretions. But he offered this world products of 'disruptive' power not once but over a dozen times. Most tech visionaries would be lucky to disrupt the order of things once in their lifetime. Steve Jobs did it with Apple II, Macintosh, Pixar, NeXT, iMac, iPod, iTunes, MacBook Air, iPhone, iOS, AppStore, iPad, and iCloud. Every physical or service product he envisioned and brought out into this world defined the highest levels of ease-of-use, elegance and workmanship for the respective category of the product and brought a sea-change in the industry. His creations are coveted by the young and the old, the rich and the not-so-rich, westerners and non-westerners, the corporations and the consumers, students and professionals - in short his products are ubiquitous. The story of Steve Jobs starting Apple Computers with his friend Steve Wozniak in the garage of his parents' home is as legendary and inspirational as that of William Hewlett and David Packard starting HP in a garage in an earlier generation. However, the company that Steve Jobs co-founded with his school friend threw him out in a board-room joust in 1985 even after raking in millions for the visionary products he created. Out on the street he quickly licked his wounds and went about his innovative and creative zeal by buying and morphing the computer graphics division of LucasArt of Star Wars fame into a highly valued and profitable animation studio named Pixar that has produced blockbuster animated movies such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and others. He also founded NeXT, a high-end graphics workstation manufacturer, that, as fate would have it, played a key role in his return to Apple after a hiatus of 12 years. By that time Apple was losing money and was on the verge of bankruptcy. The gut of the NeXT computers was the Unix-based NeXTSTEP operating system. iMac and later Apple computers run on a transmogrified version of NeXTSTEP. After his return to Apple, a mature Steve Jobs not only turned the company around, he parlayed Apple into the top of the tech industry and in the process made it the most valuable company in the world. In Bangladesh, Apple products have had a strong presence in the graphics and pre-process design industries for more than two decades. In fact, the pre-press design sector was revolutionised in the mid-80s by the introduction of graphical-user-interface based Macintosh PC and its accompanying high-quality graphical objects printer - the LaserWriter. 1985 onwards the availability of graphical Bangla fonts on the Mac and the Laserwriter literally gave birth to the desktop publishing industry that today employs thousands of electronic composers and designers all over the country. Unfortunately, Apple's two iconic products - the iPhone and the iPad are not yet directly sold in Bangladesh. That, however, has not deterred Steve Jobs aficionados from acquiring iPads and the so-called 'jail-broken' iPhones from overseas in countries where they are available. Under Steve Jobs, Apple products have become consumer and high-fashion must-haves at the same time. They have shaped our taste for high-tech gadgets, nuanced our socio-cultural behavior and taught us to never settle for the less-than-perfect. How has Steve Jobs achieved all this before he succumbed to the physical devastation of pancreatic cancer at the relatively young age of 56? In his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, he laid it out himself - "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered.the pride, all the fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. .There is no reason not to follow your heart." Let that be the legacy of Steve Jobs - the man, the visionary and the consummate tech artist - for generations to come. The author is the CEO of Technohaven Company Ltd. and can be reached at hnkarim@gmail.com.