When Technology marries art

Love him or hate him, you simply can’t ignore him. Steve Jobs was one of the great leaders of our era. Although, this post might come across as a bit of a delay in terms of tributes to the great man, I thought it best to simply put down what I feel about Apple.

Jobs was called many things except a philanthropist of our times. No donations were made in his name but very few know that he funded various universities across the world to help build technology and innovative ideas.  He would straight away admit that he’d copied an idea. In his own way, the man was right. I read somewhere that an average human brain processes around 80,000 ideas every single day! Considering the billions around us, won’t those ideas overlap? So learn to excuse him for that bit. He was a marketing genius and knew exactly what he wanted to do. The most profound statement I can think of is when he effortlessly demonstrated iPhone 4 users to hold their devices using their left hand rather than the right. I simply cannot think of anyone who could be so convincing about such a serious issue.

Technology is not something which would excite everyone. If not for Jobs, I guess we would in all probability  have ugly boxes floating about. I’m not saying he re-invented the wheel, but the way he blended art and science was something not many dared or carried off. For the past few years I’ve been following the technology industry a fair bit. It’s when you do such reading do you realize how great a man he was. Right from the digitization of music upto setting the template for the smartphone and tablet industries, Jobs did it all. His vision of an eco system for Apple products still baffles me. Huge corporations right now are following suit, flexing their financial power to come up their own now, but Apple has already mastered it. If you count the number of great products made by a company, I’m sure Apple would top the list easily. The Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, all game changers in their own right. He would brutally say that the consumer does not know what he/she wanted and I sort of agree with him. I mean, we are a picky lot. We want the flexibility of Linux, with the stability of Mac and user base of Microsoft! Impossible to please us lot. So what he did was mainly design products and instruct the world on how to use them.  There are certain limitations in the sense that those who know technology will look at it as a limitation, but for the majority, it comes across as ‘easy-to-use’. Before you draw conclusions, please note that Apple products are durable, stylish and their eco-system is enough to keep the geeks happy too. No other company packs in the affordability and aspirational tags like Apple. Put it plainly, a B&O gadget may be very exclusive, but is stratospherically expensive and reserved for the richest of the rich. Not so in the case of Apple. They are affordable enough to create that aspiration, have a large user base, yet exclusive; beat that! They say that irrespective of the marketing investment, you should have a good product in to back it up; exactly Mr. Jobs had. Call him what you want, you simply cannot resist that Apple product in the showroom!