I mourn Steve’s passing and feel the tremendous void of his absence. At the same time I rejoice and revel in his accomplishments, his amazing impact on this world and the people around him.
Steve and the people he inspired have had a tremendous direct impact on the quality of my professional life as a software engineer and tinkerer. He helped provide and inspire the creation of amazing tools that are a joy to use and work with. He helped show us what beauty can be found at the heart of even our most technologically advanced offerings if we can just imagine the possibilities.
If we wish to preserve the spirit of his vision and carry his way of looking at the world and technology products forward, we should also look at the people who came before that inspired Steve himself. An individual who was a great inspiration to Steve was a man named Edwin H. Land, a scientist and inventor of instant photography as well as co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. Edwin H. Land came about as close as the equivalent of being a rock star to the general public as any scientist has for his time. There is a great article discussing the impact Edwin Land had on Steve Jobs that is well worth a read.
There is a great presentation called 12 Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Guy Kawasaki by Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, bestselling author, and one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984. He outlines the principles that guided Steve’s outlook in regard to business and product development that can be applied to all of our efforts.
If we wish to preserve Steve Jobs’ spirit and way of thinking in our world despite his absence, we would do well to look closely at his life, those who inspired him and the people he inspired and surrounded himself with. No innovator succeeds purely on their own, and while Steve Jobs is no exception, his vision, tenacity and leadership clearly has had broad and long reaching impact on our world.
Thank you for your contributions to our world Steve, you will be greatly missed.
-Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies, TNR Global, LLC