The first time that I heard the name Steve Jobs in any recognizeable fashion was when I was working at Verizon as a tech support agent. I knew of Steve Jobs vaguely as the co-creator of Apple and somewhat of a tech pioneer prior to this. The joke going around work was that Jobs was a major ahole to work for and that someone working at Apple had been found using a microsoft product and had been fired on the spot. Looking back I think one could repeat this joke on about every tech icon there is and get the same results ie gates, larry ellison, etc. Some people at work went so far as to call him skeletor. Up until that point I had never owned an apple product and was only dimly aware of what alot of people now refer to as the ipod economy.
At the time, I was also finishing up my bachelors degree in Information Systems and I think alot of peoples attitude at the time towards Apple products was essentially negative. Ie only people that do websites or make movies/music or image processing use Apple products...for everything else, there was Microsoft and Unix/Linux for system administration and servers. There was also the yuppie/snob stereotype that was associated with Apple as well.
Fast forward five years and we can see that Jobs vision of having Apple basically dominate the tech landscape has essentially happened. I think the genius of apple is the simplicity of its design. In terms of programming and computer engineering, simplicity is ironically very difficult to achieve. Computers only see the world in 1s and 0s and have essentially a black and white logic. When one creates a new program, there are very tight rules that one creates with. The human experience is the opposite of this essentially, the entire world is our playground and our language and experiences are as different as we are. The reason that simplicity is so hard to achieve is that we as humans have different expectations as to how our technology "reacts" to our inputs. The balance\challenge then is in creating technology that a majority of the population responds well to. The genius of Steve Jobs is that he created a software that is very intuitive and well planned and essentially "responds well" to anyone who uses iOS. As anyone who has ever owned an apple product knows, it is also incredibly easy to pick up an iphone/ipod and to learn how to use it.
When Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week, we not only lost a tech pioneer, but (perhaps more importantly) we lost someone who knows how to bridge the gap between human life and technology. He knew how to take our desires for technology and transform them into reality. We now live in a world in which technology is more ingrained in our lifes than at any point in history, and Jobs had an immense hand in that.
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