Steve Jobs Celebration
Apple has put an 81 minute video online – a record of the memorial meeting they held in Cupertino – a celebration for the life of Steve Jobs. Watching 81 minutes of video online is perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea – but as a massive and unapologetic Jobs fan, I have.
Al Gore spoke movingly of the idea that Jobs created products that people love. This is a cliche, of course – but he’s literally right, I think. Jobs had the genius to somehow make us feel so attached to our Macs, iPhones, iPads or whatever that we forgive them almost everything.
I know this from recent personal experience. I spent most of a weekend trying to download the iPad software update for my wife. As I tried to make it work for the tenth or eleventh time, it occurred to me that I was surprisingly relaxed about the fact that this was taking up a ridiculous amount of time.
Why didn’t I mind? I’m not really sure. But I do know that if a PC goes wrong (or, more often than not, tells me smugly that (but not why) I can’t do what I want), I just instantly want to smash it with a hammer.
Star speaker at the memorial for me was the genius product designer Johnathan Ive. Amongst other things, he said this:
“Steve used to say to me – and he used to say this a lot – ‘Hey Johnny, here’s a dopey idea’. And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet, simple ones. Which in their subtlety, their detail, were utterly profound. And just as he used to love ideas, loved making stuff – he treated the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence.”
How many other CEOs do we have whose staff believe that they treat the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence? Then again, how many other CEO’s deaths will very many people care about?
