Apple genius is gone

The man who brought us the Apple Mac, the ipod and the iphone is dead at 56. In life, the focus for most people was on the products, while suddenly, in death, attention has shifted to the man who, by all accounts was a hard task master, but engendered fierce loyalty in his staff.

What needs to be remembered is, while there continues to be a flurry of innovation in the area of mobile computing, it was Jobs who made it happen in the first place. While Blackberry and Samsung struggle to work out where the market niche is, they can’t reinvent Jobs’ basic idea and their products will always sit alongside the iconic iphone. The next jump, and one that Jobs would no doubt have pioneered had he lived, is how to give consumers instant access to content, both applications and data. Both the hardware and software industries continues to second guess consumers and generally get it wrong with transitional technologies that won’t even survive as long as Betamax.