Caffeine Coder

I’m a geek with a life long passion for technology in all its various forms. I’ve grown up with it ad have marvelled at the transformations it has brought to the world around me.  I’ve owned an iPhone and while I don’t personally like apple’s closed eco system I do have a respect for what they have achieved over the years.

Recently I got hold of the Steve Jobs biography on Audible and have thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a no holds barred warts and all account of Steve Jobs. It highlights his lack of interpersonal skills and brings to light his mastery at driving people to make great things.  His methods are not any that I would choose to use but it is his vision and drive to produce great products that I admire.

Steve Jobs was not a technically brilliant person, as he admitted on many occasions, but he had a passion for producing great products and a real drive to merge the world of art and computing. What has always struck me about Apple products is how good-looking they are; grey, beige, square are words you’d never use to describe an Apple product. Likewise noisy, cumbersome, or difficult to use would generally not be terms used to describe the experience. Unless you have used iTunes on Windows to manage your music collection!

What Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive have achieved at Apple is truly remarkable in the technological world. Art driving technology, driving a transformation in the way we interact with that technology, driving a transformation in how we think. A lot of what we see in the technology we use every day is the stuff of dreams visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were talking about as I grew up. That this great technology has also turned out as great looking technology isn’t an accident but a direct product of Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive pushing the boundaries and forcing technology to fit the artistic vision.

In the book Steve describes how he flipped the thinking at Apple by forcing the engineers to fit the internal components inside a shell designed to fit the end-user and not working within the constraints of the technology. At times this leads to setting up factories to build the technology needed to do the job. This in itself is remarkable and reminds me of the way most innovation is actually born. Innovation requires pressure and risk to exist, innovators don’t live comfortable, easy lives, they fail all the time and they live high stress lives. How you deal with the pressure is down to the person involved. Steve Jobs could be viewed as handling the pressure badly due to his outbursts and personal interactions. However you view the man and his methods, there is no doubt that he was a visionary and an innovator with a unique ability to believe in the impossible (and make others believe it too, most notably the engineers and developers that worked for him). And his stubborn drive to overcome every barrier set in front of him to build good-looking simple to use technology is an example to everyone with a good idea or in the middle of building “the next big thing”.

Belief in what you are doing and the conviction that you are right should drive you to accept no compromise, cut no corners, produce awesome! Anyone can do good, only a few can do extraordinary. That was the overriding message i got from the book and the lesson I learned overall? It isn’t Steve jobs that puts me off Apple products, it’s the snobby attitudes of the people who use them that puts me off; not all Apple users are like that of course but the few that are just turn me off. The latest ridiculous and somewhat childish backlash by some iPhone users against Instagram after they released an Android version of the app is proof some of these folks need to grow up and realise that Steve Jobs and Apple aren’t against choice, they just believe their approach is better for some people, and it is, but it isn’t the choice ALL people will make. Nor should they.

I respect Steve Jobs’ vision and drive and I think the technological world is better off thanks to his vision.