Friday, Sep 5, 2008
In an industry of clones, Steve Jobs put his smart, stylish, stubborn stamp on our computers.
Jan 5, 1999 | Near the start of "A Bug's Life," this season's computer-animation blockbuster, the dejected hero -- an innovative ant named Flik whose ahead-of-their-time ideas keep backfiring -- breaks down and cries: "I'm never gonna make a difference." Halfway through the movie, when Flik's grand scheme to save the colony has gone awry, he repeats: "I just wanted to make a difference." The ant queen sternly reminds this renegade that "it's not our tradition to do things differently" -- but thinking differently wins out in the end.
Steve Jobs' name isn't prominent in the credits of "A Bug's Life" -- but the film was produced by Pixar, a company Jobs has owned since 1986. It's no coincidence that the current slogan of that other company Jobs now runs, Apple Computer, should coil through "A Bug's Life" like a fiber of marketing-speak DNA. "Think different" isn't just an ad line: It's been the persistent mantra of Jobs' extraordinary career of visionary breakthroughs, appalling hubris and unpredictable comebacks.
"Making a difference" is the ideal that has led Jobs to his greatest achievements and most profound failures. He goaded the original Macintosh team by promising them that they would "put a dent in the universe." He lured Pepsi CEO John Sculley to Apple in 1983 by asking him, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"
Difference -- innovation that simply wasn't available from other computer companies -- transformed Apple into the powerful icon it remains today, both in its own industry and in the broader world of American business. Difference -- incompatibility with existing systems in which people and companies had invested too much time, energy and resources to abandon -- also trapped Apple in a small niche even as the computer marketplace exploded around it.
To understand Jobs' thirst for difference, you have to look back to Apple's creation myth -- the Two Guys in a Garage tale that continues to fuel Silicon Valley dreams. The pair's roles are clearly defined in the saga: Steve Wozniak was the Hardware Guy, whose elegant circuit-board designs for the Apple I and II still cause engineers' eyes to mist over; Jobs was the Marketing Guy, who understood that Woz had a product that could sell -- especially if you put it in a then-sleek plastic-mold box.
Without Jobs' marketer's eye, Apple would never have made a noise, let alone a difference. But in Silicon Valley, even more in the mid-'70s era that spawned Apple than today, marketing was something at which engineers turned up their noses. Engineers design chips and write software; they make things that people use, things that matter, things whose value can be objectively determined: Does it work? Is it fast? Is it cheap? Marketers, on the other hand, deal in people's subjective perceptions, the intangibles of taste and image and brand -- slippery things that an engineering culture distrusts. On the Silicon Valley totem pole, great engineers are the people who make a difference; great marketers just make money.
For Steven Paul Jobs -- born Feb. 24, 1955, a '60s-style seeker who grew up in the heart of the Valley, dropped out of Reed College, designed video games for Atari and then traveled around India before founding Apple with Wozniak -- being dismissed as a Marketing Guy must always have stung. And in many ways the rest of his career can be seen as an effort to shed that label.
Get Salon in your mailbox!