Sometimes being stubborn can really pay off big time, especially if you have the will to drive that stubbornness through walls. Steve Jobs did just that and then some.
Murdza reminded me of an article that Vanityfair is running on Steve Jobs and the 30th anniversary of Apple Computer. It’s a pretty long read with lots of comparative analysis to modern cultural icons. I was also surprised by the in-depth disection of the author’s keen observation on the trend o the tech/gadget industry in general…
An excerpt:
One counter-intuitive aspect of Jobs’s media sensibility is that it’s had little to do with content, that great sentimental area of media concern, and everything to do with hardware—the thing that nobody in the American media business has wanted to have anything to do with for two generations. Steve is really an appliance-maker.
And a stubborn one. For most of his career, the rap has been that Jobs missed out on greatness and ubiquity ecause he insisted, unlike the folks at Microsoft, on tying his software to his machines. Perversely, it didn’t seem to matter to him, or even so much to register with him, that, as Windows claimed 97 percent of the P.C. perating-system market, software-is-everything/content-is-king became the market-making truth. His stubbornness here, his blindness, seemed like a business tragedy. Only for a bit of flexibility on Steve’s part, this could have been a Mac rather than a Windows world (ushering in an epoch of peace and happiness).
Except that one day in the near recent past everybody woke up and found out that while all the geniuses were blathering on about content this and content that, the media culture had, in fact, come to be dominated by machines. It’s Steve’s gadget-centric world which we just live in.
iPods, Razr phones, BlackBerrys, plasma screens, Xboxes, TiVos, laptops. Machines are the objects of desire. Machines are the habituating, behavior-changing things. Machines themselves are fascinating, life-enhancing, cool, sexy.
The medium is the message.
This article is so cool that I PDF’d a copy just in case the link disappears (and it almost certainly will). Many have written at length about Steve Jobs, but few offer an observation with a scope that encompasses everything this man is about (even the not-so-flattering stuff).