Steve Jobs … The True Spirit Of Apple

"You and I have memories
Longer than the road that stretches out ahead..."
Lennon/McCartney

Can you believe that come this October it will have been 5 years since Apple creator/founder/chief inspiration officer Steve Jobs passed away?
Damn…time flies whether you are having fun or not.
Steve Jobs' death was a big deal for countless millions of people around the world. The outpouring of genuine grief and affection for someone that all but a relatively small handful of people really knew was astonishing, when you consider that he was just a businessman.
Just A Businessman,…Yeah Right.
Actually he was a lot more than that. He was the living, breathing embodiment of every Apple product that he envisioned and brought to life.
I really don’t think that aside from some musicians and tyrants, very few people in history have been that directly linked to their products to that level of visibility around the world and for as long a time as Steve Jobs was to Apple.

That’s quite an accolade, especially when you consider the ups and downs he went through and the stops he made along the way.
Last night we watched a doc called Steve Jobs…One Last Thing. It was the story of Mr Jobs and Apple as told through the recollections of the handful of the people who were close to him including: Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and believe it or not, Ross Perot.
The story it told was one that happens over and over again in America to many high achievers.
The Real Cost Of The American Dream
When you start out, everybody’s rooting for you. You’re changing the world. You’re creating a new way to do things, and you are enough of a showman to get people to understand the new things and fall in love with them. And they think of you as the guy who introduced them to their new true love.
Your business grows because you’re working with your friends and you’re hand picking the key people that are going to help you get where you want to go.
And it works because you have the ideas, you turn them into products that pretty much sell themselves and you create one of the world’s most powerful, respects and most importantly ‘loved’ brands.
Then something happens. You get too big and have to start trying to clone yourself. But that never really works well. But sometimes, and in the case of Steve Jobs and his clone, John Sculley the clone rises up and separates you from the very thing you invented. The very thing the whole world knows you invented.
So you go away. Maybe you retire. Maybe you take a cruise. Or maybe, you take your money and sink it into something else. Because, well you’re very good at putting stuff on the map.
And so you do just that with a small animation company called Pixar. And it makes you even richer, and it makes you famous in a whole other line of work. And it makes people fall in love with a whole bunch of other things.
Meanwhile, your original company finds out the hard way that without their engine they have no forward motion.
And so back you come. Bigger and better and more determined than ever. With ideas that nobody has ever seen before and new products that people like me and a couple billion others can easily fall in love with. And see you as the matchmaker.

I’m an Apple Guy
Since 1984 when I scrapped my Sanyo 555 PC with 19 steps to get the operating system on line, and bought a Mac SE 20, I have owned, virtually every major Apple product ever made. And I have loved every one of them, and because of the powerful association that Steve Job forged with his products, I loved Steve too, in an immensely grateful kind of way.
Every dollar I have made for the last 32 years, I have made sitting in front of an Apple product.
Oh sure, I could have said the same thing if I had stayed on the PC side. But I like my technology simple, elegant, easy to use and figure out. Basically a no brainer. Because I’m not a high tech kind of guy.
That was Steve’s vision, and that’s what he built into every product he dreamed up and sold. Every single one. And that’s why he was able to reach so many people or effectively and get them to fall in love with him brand and the products it represented.

So on that sad October day 5 years ago I fired up my Imac and surfed around and what I saw was the astonishing outpouring of affection that people had for him, despite the fact that few of them actually knew very little about him other than that he was Apple.
He was Apple. And man, it really doesn’t get better than that.
BTW...Comments welcome. It is social media after all.

I'm Jim Murray and my company is called Onwords & Upwords.
I am a communications professional, primarily a strategist & writer.

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