Insanely Great: Steve Jobs Changes Opponents

With the retirement of Steve Jobs as Apple’s CEO, the business world loses one of those one-of-a-kind, game-changing, geniuses like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. He will stay on as Apple’s chairman, but health and family concerns have taken priority, as they should, and his days of hands-on, day-to-day leadership of the coolest tech company on earth now come to an end.

The announcement that he was stepping down from the helm at Apple was not exactly unexpected, but it was still bad news for all of us who love and respect entrepreneurial visionaries who refuse to pretend that normal is good enough. One look at Jobs in his bow-tie back in the eighties was enough to convince anyone that this guy had very little to do with normal. Insane was more like it. Like Edison, like Ford, like Einstein, he was and is, thank God, just a little insane. It was no coincidence that an early catch-phrase at Apple was “insanely great.”

Steve Job’s insanely great achievements arose from two great gifts: his obsessive competitive spirit and his insane ability to think differently. Apple’s slogan — “Think Different” — is itself a lesson in competition and innovation. The slogan came about as a slap at IBM, one of Jobs’s favorite early antagonists. Big Blue’s theme at the time was “Think.” Steve Jobs said “The hell with that, think different!” And that’s what he did. He thought different. And he revolutionized the way human beings use computers.

Apple wasn’t the first computer company to catch on; it took a while for people to realize that Apple was committed to delivering a superior product. Bill Gates of Microsoft was, of course, another of Jobs’s key marketplace opponents. I happen to be someone who picked Jobs’s stuff over Gates’s stuff from the get-go. I was an early adaptor of Apple products, dating all the way back to the early days of the Macintosh. I realized how great and innovative the Apple operating system really was, and how much better it was than the system driving Windows-driven PCs. Now hundreds of millions of people around the world have realized that, and Apple sales are through the roof. (Apparently, Apple recently had more cash on hand than the US government did … but these days, that may say more about the incompetence of the Obama administration than anything else.)

Products and platforms like the Macintosh, the Apple IIe, the MacBook, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone, and the iPad not only transformed their market, they also transformed our culture. They were all great ideas, yes, but great ideas are only the starting point. Job’s relentless, insane commitment to innovation and quality was what made them powerful social realities that everyone else had to try to keep up with.

Over and over again, Jobs took an old fashioned concept, innovated it through technology, and changed the whole social landscape. Consider the iPod and the iTunes Store, which took an old-fashioned idea — buying a vinyl 45 rpm single for ninety-nine cents — brought it into the digital age, and put every brick-and-mortar music retailer out of business!

Steve Jobs may now have a successor at Apple, but he will never have a replacement. We at Zimmerman salute him for his achievements as one of the truly great business visionaries of our time, and we wish him well in his struggle against his next great opponent, a rare form of pancreatic cancer.

Don’t bet against him.