Today, February 24, 2015 would have been Steve Jobs 60th birthday.
All lives are valuable, few add as much to others as did that of Jobs. I can only guess he is currently hanging off his icloud lecturing St Pete on the shortcomings of the design.
There are thousands better qualified than me to comment on his achievements, but the lessons for those running small businesses are clear:
The value of innovation
Focus, focus and more focus.
Immoveable determination
The inestimable value of being different, bucking convention, and connecting the dots where others see no connection.
The great 1997 “Crazy ones” ad positioned Apple so powerfully in peoples minds that it remains today as perhaps the greatest pieces of positioning communication ever.
Apple under Jobs disrupted markets and created new ones. The music and telephony markets of 2015 bear almost no resemblance to those of 2001. Consumers globally behave differently as a result of Jobs insights.
Few companies or certainly individuals can claim to have had so much impact on the world as Jobs, and paradoxically, as he jealously guarded the proprietary nature of Apples digital ecosystem, he shared his insights and experiences widely, such as in the terrific Stanford commencement address, and captured on his death in these quotes and cartoons .
Seth Godin called Jobs a “ruckusmaker” in his post, but I think he made more than a ruckus, he made a hole in the universe.
Vale Steve Jobs.
