The genius of Steve Jobs
Written by BGrant Monday, 25 January 2010 00:07
The real genius of Steve Jobs is making products that appeal to the general populace as well as the tech-savvy. The true success of iPod and iPhone is that people have embraced these products for ease of use and reliability. They may not have the highest specifications or the most features, but they have what counts: the best user experience.
You can point to the iTunes Store and the App Store, but neither of these products began their lives with these amenities, no matter how indispensable they seem now. To this day, there are iPhone owners who've never plugged into a computer. They're happy enough to get a new OS when they upgrade at the end of their two-year contract.
Apple's "newest creation" may be the device for all media, music, movies, television, books, magazines, newspapers, text books, journals and more. It may not start out with all that content, but Apple needs only to point the way, sign up a few media partners and given time, such a device could change the world — again.
If it can do enough internet communication and basic computing, it may even snare a market that never existed before: people who don't want a computer, but need to do some of the things for which we just happen to use computers these days. Skype video calls would need to be on that list. Just saying.
So what is the real genius of Steve Jobs? There were MP3 players in the market before the iPod. There were smartphones in the market before iPhone. Aside from impeccable taste and design genius that reduces a function set to the minimum, with maximum effectiveness — which in their own right are rare qualities and major factors in Apple's successes — Steve Jobs is a good listener. He watches everyone else's mistakes and learns from them. He listens to how the public responds to a product and associated services. Steve Jobs distils all these into the 'Apple experience'.
The music industry thrashed about dealing with online copying of its product. Apple listened to the users and learned from the music industry's mistakes and offered a way out of the wilderness — a way to make music profitable online — by offering music lovers a simple service at reasonable value. US99¢ a song is a convenience charge. Sure you can get it for free if you look hard enough, but Apple can give it to you in one convenient place. It's great that some of that money goes back to the music distributors and hopefully ultimately the artists, but really the price is for the one-stop shopping convenience.
Similarly, App and game developers can sell their products at low prices because of the huge market the App Store presents them: every iPod Touch and iPhone sold, over 100 million of these owners with credit cards already in the iTunes Store and purchase only one click away.
So to the "newest creation". Steve Jobs and Apple have been watching a rudimentary ebook market develop. Newspaper publishers despair at the loss of classified ad revenues and declining sales due to information availability on the internet. Magazines are dropping like flies for similar reasons. Jobs and Apple have been listening to how we have responded to these changes and the products offered, both hardware and software.
Television, cable networks and movie-makers are also losing market to internet availability of their content. Each of these creative industries has attempted to meet the internet challenge and failed in some way. Apple's opportunity is to offer all these content producers a proven model for selling their products in the digital/internet age — potentially saving their industries from their own short-sightedness and lack of technical savvy.
Steve Jobs and Apple have the smarts to simplify all these complex problems into one beautiful user experience that will not only capture the imagination of the tech-savvy, but general consumers of these media, in a way that nobody even thought possible before.
And that's Steve Jobs's legacy: to refine the technical issues of a device to meet the general need and all the business issues of the creative industries adapting to the digital/internet environment and distil this down to the Apple user experience. Even Mr Jobs will admit, he couldn't do it without the Apple team around him and it appears Apple fans have much to which they can look forward, in the next few years, from the "latest creation".
Bring on 27th of January!
