Having a smartphone in your hand today means the world is, quite literally, in your grasp. Making calls, listening to music, taking photos, watching films, studying, doing office work, paying bills, managing a bank account: there is so much it can do.
A few decades ago the picture was very different. Computers were mainly the property of scientists, engineers and large organisations, tools for important work. The idea of a personal computer had not yet become that popular. Mobile phones were mainly for talking and sending messages, and there was a separate device for listening to music. The distance between the worlds of computers, phones and entertainment was clear.
It was at such a time, in the late 1970s, that Steve Jobs came on the scene. Without inventing any new technology, he changed the way technology is used, and through new thinking and design he narrowed the distance between computers, phones and entertainment.
Jobs was not a computer programmer himself, and he never finished college. Even so, his influence on how technology would become part of people’s lives was extraordinary. Under his leadership Apple made products that changed people’s habits of using technology.
His great contribution was to take technology already on the market, add features to it, simplify it and make it popular with ordinary people. In the mid-1980s he brought the Macintosh to market, which made the experience of using a personal computer simple and attractive.
After many ups and downs, popular technology products followed from his designs and ideas. The iPod changed the experience of listening to music. The iPhone turned the mobile phone into a device for calls, photos, music, video and the internet all at once. The iPad popularised the tablet. Through Pixar, computer animation too reached a new level.
But Steve Jobs cannot be found entirely in these products. His personal life was also full of ups and downs and variety.
Growing up as an adopted child, dropping out of college, travelling in India, searching for spirituality, being fired from the company he founded and returning to it again: his life moved through such varied events. Alongside the successes there were failures at various stages, as well as harshness, controversy and the complications of his personal life.
Steve Jobs died exactly 15 years ago, on 5 October 2011, at the age of 56. A decade and a half after his death, his influence on the worlds of technology and business remains strong. To understand how one man created such an influence, it is necessary to look back at the turns of his life.
Jobs was born in California in the United States on 24 February 1955. His mother was Joanne Schieble and his father Abdulfattah Jandali, who was of Syrian origin.
His biological parents were both young at the time. They met and fell in love while studying at the University of Wisconsin, and Joanne became pregnant before marriage.
Joanne’s Catholic family, of German descent, did not accept her relationship with Jandali, so the decision was made to give the child up for adoption.
Soon after his birth, Paul and Clara Jobs adopted him and named him Steven Paul Jobs.
Paul Jobs was a mechanic who worked with cars and machinery. From childhood Steve learned from him to take care over his work. When Paul Jobs built something at home he did not only make it look good from the outside; he believed the inside should be tidy too.
That trait later left its mark on Steve’s work. He believed that even the inside of a computer, such as the circuit board, which the user would never see, should be beautiful and neat.
Jobs spent much of his childhood in Mountain View, California, close to the technology hub that later became known as Silicon Valley. As he grew older, his interest in electronics and technology grew too.
He enrolled at Reed College, a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, known for its rigorous, intellectual education. After six months he gave up regular study, but he did not stop going to the college, and for about a year and a half he sat in on classes that interested him.
According to Reed College, he attended classes on subjects such as Shakespeare, modern dance and calligraphy as an auditor, not for a degree.
In his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs told three stories from his life. The first was about how the unconnected events of life later join up with one another, or, in his words, “connecting the dots”.
Although he was not a regular student at Reed College, Jobs learned calligraphy there: the design of letters, different typefaces, the spacing between letters and the techniques that make writing beautiful. He did not think at the time that this knowledge would one day be useful.
About a decade later, when Apple began work on the Macintosh computer, he put that knowledge to use. His experience of learning calligraphy played an important part in giving the Macintosh beautiful typography.
Jobs said that if he had not dropped out of college and gone to that calligraphy class, the Macintosh might not have had such typography.
This reveals a distinctive side of his thinking. He did not see technology only as technology; he thought of design, art and the user’s experience together with it.
Jobs came to know Steve Wozniak in the 1970s. Wozniak was skilled in electronics. Jobs had an interest in products and business, an ability to understand what people needed and an urge to do something new.
The two founded Apple in 1976. The now-famous company began in the garage of the Jobs family home.
The Apple I was essentially a computer built by Wozniak. Then came the Apple II, which played an important role in taking the personal computer from a hobby towards use by ordinary people.
Apple grew fast. But Jobs’s biggest dream was to make a computer that was even easier to use, and from that thinking came the Macintosh.
The Macintosh went on sale in 1984. Its major feature was a graphical user interface (GUI), which meant users no longer had to type commands as before but could work using icons, windows and a mouse on the screen. That changed the very experience of using a computer.
Despite the success, Jobs’s position inside Apple was not secure. As the company grew, disagreements arose between him and other top executives over management and future plans. In the end he was forced to leave Apple in 1985.
He was only 30. Leaving the company he had founded was a heavy blow, but it later became the start of a new chapter in his life.
After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, a technology company that made powerful computers for higher education and business. At the same time he invested heavily in the animation company Pixar.
Pixar started out in computer graphics technology and later moved into making animated films. Its Toy Story, released in 1995, was the first full-length computer-animated film.
Pixar went on to make one successful film after another, including A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo.
Apple was going through hard times in the mid-1990s. In 1996 it bought NeXT, and through that deal Jobs became involved with Apple again.
In 1997 he returned to lead the company, and major changes began. Many products and projects were shut down and attention was focused on a limited number of products.
His aim was to make fewer products but make them well. The iMac came in this period, and products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad later reached the market one after another.
The iPod changed the experience of listening to music. Launched in 2001, it was joined by the iTunes Store, which also changed the way music was bought and used.
The iPhone followed in 2007. Before it, mobile phones already offered the internet, a camera, music or video, but the iPhone brought a major change by bringing all of these together in one simple, user-friendly device. Its touchscreen-based experience also quickly became popular.
The iPad went on sale in 2010, the year before Jobs died, and popularised the idea of the tablet computer.
Jobs thought not only about what a technology could do but also about how easily people could use it. This is seen as a major reason for his success.
Simplicity was central to Jobs’s outlook. He believed a product should be made as simple as possible, but that simple should not mean shallow. There would be no complexity in front of the user, yet complex work would lie behind that apparently simple technology.
For this reason design was given great importance in Apple’s products. Jobs was exacting about everything, from the outer casing of a computer to its software, and to him the design of a product’s interior mattered as well.
This outlook had a deep connection with art as well as technology. He was interested in music, poetry, typography and design, and wanted to link technology with human creativity.
Many who worked with Jobs have spoken of his exceptional leadership. They have also spoken of his harsh behaviour.
If he did not like an idea, he rejected it outright. He asked employees hard questions and made no compromise on the quality of work. As a result some found his behaviour insulting, and his style of leadership has been criticised.
Many have said he pushed his team to do things that seemed impossible. He would tell employees that they were part of a small team making something others could not even imagine.
Those high expectations often produced remarkable products. For the same reason he fell out with colleagues, and many talented employees left Apple.
To see Steve Jobs as an ideal leader is therefore to leave out a large part of his character. He was creative, far-sighted and hugely influential. He was also difficult, harsh and often self-centred.
Although a man of technology, his interests were not confined to it. In 1974 he travelled to India, hoping to meet the spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba, but on arriving he learned that the teacher had died.
He nevertheless spent several months travelling around India, visiting various parts of the north. The experience had a deep influence on his thinking.
Later he became interested in Zen Buddhism, practising meditation and Zen with the Zen teacher Kobun Chino Otogawa in California. Meditation and spiritual practice became part of his life.
How directly these experiences were related to his business philosophy is a matter of debate. But simplicity, focus and a tendency to cut out what is unnecessary can be seen in both his personal life and his professional work.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both born in 1955. Neither finished college. Both changed the history of the computer industry. But they worked in different ways.
Jobs’s focus was on products, design and the user’s experience. Gates’s strength lay in software and business structure.
The rivalry between Apple and Microsoft is one of the best known in the history of technology. Relations between the two companies became bitter over the GUI in particular, and Jobs made cutting remarks about Gates’s taste.
Jobs believed Microsoft had taken various ideas from Apple. Gates argued that both were working with ideas that came from PARC, the research laboratory of the US technology company Xerox.
The rivalry did not, in the end, destroy their relationship entirely. In 1997, when Apple was in crisis, Microsoft invested $150 million in it, which surprised many at the time.
In later years Gates praised Jobs’s creativity and Jobs acknowledged Gates’s abilities. Rivals though they were, they understood each other’s importance.
Jobs’s personal life was complicated too. As a young man he had a relationship with Chrisann Brennan, and their daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, was born in 1978. At first he did not acknowledge paternity. He later took responsibility for his daughter and admitted that his behaviour had been wrong.
Lisa later became known as a writer. Jobs married Laurene Powell in 1991, and they had three children.
Health also became a major issue in his life. In 2003 he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He had surgery and later underwent a liver transplant.
Even while ill he took part in unveiling important Apple products. In August 2011 he stepped down as Apple’s chief executive, and he died less than two months later.
At Stanford in 2005, the second story Jobs told was about love, loss and recovery, described above. The third was about death.
By the time of the speech he had recovered from cancer, and the experience had forced him to think afresh about the limits of life.
The technology entrepreneur said in the speech that for more than 30 years he had asked himself a question every day: if today were the last day of his life, would he really want to do what he was about to do? If the answer was “no” for too many days in a row, he believed something needed to change.
The commencement address is still very popular. In it he said that people’s time is limited, so it should not be wasted living someone else’s life, and that they must trust their own thinking and their own path.
Jobs ended the speech by talking about an old magazine, the Whole Earth Catalog. On the back cover of its final issue were the words: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” The meaning is that the desire to know and to do should never run out, and that one should always be ready to admit one’s own ignorance and learn something new.
Apple did not stop after Jobs’s death. Over the past 15 years the company has grown even bigger, bringing out many versions of the iPhone as well as the Apple Watch, AirPods and other products.
It is easy to see that his influence is not limited to Apple. Technology companies now give more weight than before to design, user experience and brand alongside making products. The influence of the standards he set can be seen today in everything from the design of various companies’ smartphones to the way apps are used.
But his legacy is not free of controversy. His treatment of employees, his personal relationships, his early stance on paternity, some of his decisions about his health and Apple’s tightly controlled product system have all drawn criticism.
Another important point is that Jobs did not bring about all these changes alone. Behind Apple were countless engineers, designers, programmers and managers, and the contribution of co-founders such as Steve Wozniak was fundamental.
Moreover, most of the technologies that Jobs and his colleagues brought to market anew had roots that long predated Apple. There is therefore no basis for seeing him as the sole inventor of everything. What made him special lay elsewhere.
By bringing together different technologies, ideas and people’s work, he was able to make products that made technology attractive to ordinary people. That is why he is still remembered with such importance 15 years after his death.
Jobs is thought of as someone who, alongside the question of what technology can do, brought to the fore the question of how technology would make people feel in their lives. In the search for an answer to that question, the way we use computers and phones and enjoy music and films has changed.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report