Steve Jobs

Yesterday Steve Jobs announced that he would be stepping down as CEO of Apple Inc. As predicted a lot of people are wondering if Apple can retain it's magic when he is not at the helm. If you look at the company results over the past three years and how often he has been away, I think they will do just fine.

Here's the thing. Apple knows how to make consumer electronics that people want to buy. There are several reasons people want to buy them. I'm sure some of it fashion. I'm sure some of it is rabid loyalty to a brand. The detractors to Apple always say you can't fix it yourself, you can't upgrade it, it is way overpriced, or Apple wasn't the first to do it. At the end of the day Apple products are so popular because they work and they are easy to interact with.

It doesn't matter what you get from Apple it works. It works on it's own or in concert with other devices. You don't have to sit and fiddle with it, look for a new driver or reload the software. You plug it in, let it do it's thing and it starts working. Apple did a smart thing, they made their devices work just as well on a Windows machine. So you didn't have tom plunge pinhead first, you could dip your toe in with an iPod, go a little further with an iPad or an iPhone and then plunge in with a Mac of some type.

Apple has spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we interact with machines and have applied it to their products. The simplest example is the spaced, concave keys on a MacBook Pro. With this simple design feature, typing speeds are significantly increased. As you touch type you can feel if your fingers are moving off-centre and correct automatically, just like on a full size keyboard. Apple has also discovered how to make a touchpad useful. I have used touch pads on many laptop computers and been frustrated with them all but The touchpad on the MacBook Pro was so good and so intuitive I was convinced in less than an hour this was a good thing.

There is a subset of the population that want to be constantly tinkering with their computer. A Mac may not be the product for them. It just works. There really isn't much you can do to it to make it it run everything 2% faster. Microsoft has that corner of the market sewn up. However, most people use their computer as a tool to do something else. They use it to organize, write, calculate, or create. If you owned a hammer that had to be constantly tweaked or the head came loose on a regular basis you would probably get a new hammer that did the job. If your car took as much maintenance as a Windows PC, you would call it a lemon and get a new one. The same should be for your computer. It's a tool to get a job done, not a item to be used for the sake of using it. There are very few people who just want to sit at their computer because it's a computer.

Considering the size of Apple and the number of smart people required to be that successful I'm sure there is what it takes to move forward with success.

In 1976, two guys named Steve started a computer company in their garage. I doubt they ever imagined I would be typing about them on one of their touchscreen devices while sitting on an airplane, but if they did, they deserve to be seen as geniuses because that is a huge leap.