This guy, Mr. Jobs, is not your regular CEO. He has a cult following. He is God like to many people. This guy, who wears a black turtle-neck and blue jeans for all public events in the last decade, does seem like the last true tech 'visionary' we will have.
Even my mom knows he created the iPod, but... in the last decade, apart from the well known stuff like the iPhone, and the iMac, Mr. Steve Jobs ended up creating a lot of other things too.
A true visionary creates path breaking products and services, and some of them go on to become hits, and some of them duds. Like a new-age alternative rockstar, the music he creates is unheard of, and he unleashes the new tunes on us, gambling on whether it will be accepted by us all, or would be too alien.
- The iPod-iTunes ecosystem
When Mr. Jobs created the iPod, and eventually iTunes to put the music in it, negotiating with the record companies to give us new and old tunes for 99 cents a pop… he was creating a new music economy, a never before seen platform to purchase music digitally. This radical approach was difficult, as he later admitted, as the record company executives were from Stone Age, but he eventually made this entire system of legally purchasing digital music the de facto standard across the world. Now apart from music, iTunes became the digital store of all kinds of media, be it TV shows, music videos, movies… the user experience is still one of its kind.
- The TOUCH platform
In 2007, when the first iPhone came, we didn’t know how good its touch responsiveness and OS smoothness was, but the more we got to knew the iPhone, the more we could see that there hasn’t been a device like this before. It was a refined, smooth user experience. The fluid and super cool device also had a sibling, the very versatile iPod Touch, which was as cool as the iPhone was, and could do lots. It gave rise to the ‘TOUCH’ web, a world where we could login and check our gmail or facebook in 3 ‘touches’ as compared to 15 clicks on our windows laptop, Google search was instant and fast, with voice search too. This later gave rise to a whole new economy of APPS, the word which is so common now. There are millions of apps, and there is an app for almost anything now!
Over 75 percent of our casual internet usage is only limited to checking facebook, checking email, tweeting, reading the news, and searching on Google. And all of this is more instant, personal, fast and intuitive on a touch interface that Mr. Jobs provided us with. It was without the hassle of sitting on a chair, powering on your PC/laptop, and typing/clicking away to do something we can do in a more intuitive and better way. The iPod Touch/iPhone also were the first consumer devices in the world with gravity/proximity sensors, accelerometers. The refined OS, combined with these new sensors, and the whole multi touch thing, almost made them ALIVE.
The Apps made full use of the devices, making them uniquely versatile, like watching Youtube videos, to reading ebooks, to recipes, and exercising.
- The Post-PC device
Even if we just look at media consumption, it’s a totally changed game after 2007. The Windows PC or even the Mac looked like an old way of doing things. Sure you need an MS PowerPoint to make a presentation, and if you want to type something out, you need your laptop. The iPad had an appeal as it was not a computer, but a different beast all together, a tablet that can be used by directly talking through fingers. Anything, like browsing photos, or watching a video, became personal, enlarged, intuitive, and in-your-face. The technology was already proven and refined due to the iPhone/iPod touch devices doing the same things on a smaller screen. (Most of the apps and features, and even the OS is basically the same), the larger screen makes the device not a toy, but a new age POST PC device.
So what Mr. Steve Jobs is actually doing is not creating devices, but making us fall in love with music again, with cover flow and large album covers on our touch screens, What he is doing is not creating a computer box, but a transparent, button-less, cover-less, screw-less device with an invisible battery, that feels alive due to the many sensors it has. That responds to touch like a furry animal would. This was never envisioned before, though now we have 100 clones.
We are watching music videos while we lie on our beds, because we just thought of listening to that song, that very second. We are reading books and magazines on our touch devices, reading comics, and it feels right.
Mr. Steve Jobs has a cult following due to his changing the way we live our lives, and improving it. The way he has ‘touched’ our lives! His creations for the last decade are the tech world’s greatest hits collection!
What else do you think Steve Jobs created?
0 comments:
Post a Comment