I was really tired, and didn’t think I had anything particularly profound to say about Steve Jobs, so I turned down a request to appear on TV to speak about him. There was this media hype and over-the-top coverage here in India too, and I was in no mood to be party to it. However, I was rather amused by this great Indian middle-class need to identify in some way with this genius who combined good taste, innovation and commercial success to an extraordinary degree --- the CEO of the second largest company in the world, someone whose rise from the depths of commercial failure to the pinnacle of glory inspired a veritable fan following of millions. It is perhaps some deep-seated desire in our elite to identify with success, to announce that we too are part of the world elite, that we share this experience, that some of the stardust of celebrity will rub off on us. But watching the various shows, I was quite disappointed since there wasn’t anything insightful in what the talking heads and the over-eager anchors had to say. So I felt that I should perhaps put down what I might have said had I been a talking head1. (Some print articles have begun to appear that make more insightful points, relevant to India and to how Apple products are affecting lives.2)
Steve Jobs, who can best be described as a digital impresario, certainly was charisma personified. I greatly admired (it is difficult to use the past tense, since his work lives on) his work, for it brought an elegance and a simplicity to technology. Computer technology naturally tends to manifest itself in complexity, often making complexity its badge of honour. In the mid-late eighties, I wrote a handful of research papers during my graduate school years on a Macintosh, and greatly appreciated the intuitive interface and ease with which a newbie could get started on the machine. I have always held that a device is well designed if you do not need a user manual to get started. Most consumer electronic products fail on that count. I currently work on two iMacs, a Mac mini, a MacBook, having put to pasture an earlier Mac laptop, not counting an iPad on the way, and have several iPods in the house. I abandoned the PC running the politically correct Ubuntu because of the needless complexity in installing software, which happens “out of a box” on an iMac, thanks to Jobs’s understanding that users will willingly install trusted software if the system is end-to-end secure. And I had never really warmed to the lax security and bewilderingly crowded user interface of the Microsoft stable. So count me in as an Apple addict even if I don’t sport an iPhone3.
Steve Jobs presented a refreshing alternative to geeky, clunky computing technology. Yes, the man was a genius. But let us make it clear that he wasn’t a Leonardo, the kind of polymath who comes once a millennium, an artist, scientist, inventor, and visionary whose ideas were centuries ahead of their time. Nor was he an Edison, the other personality to whom he was being likened. Edison’s inventions went way beyond the light bulb, extending to the entire system of electricity generation, distribution, standardisation and consumption. All this apart from his phonographs, cameras, projectors and a thousand other inventions. Jobs’s innovations are unlikely to affect us on such a grand scale a hundred years later. Nor is it even accurate to say that he affected more people with his technological innovations than anyone else in our times. Such accolades can only be given to the scientists who have multiplied our food production, through the use of nitrogen fertiliser or hybrid crops, or those who have defeated disease through vaccinations or the development of disease-combating chemicals and medicines.
While Malcolm Gladwell has noted that Jobs and Gates happened to be at the right place at the right time, Steve Jobs was nonetheless someone special --- apart from seeing the potential of a technological invention, he had the farsightedness to see how a user could relate to it. He was able to take an artistic concept, marry it with an artisan’s realisation and then produce a device with mass market appeal on a grand scale. Not just once but over and over. A true Modern. (Let’s not call him “post-modern”, a term which usually carries connotations of a stance where scale, quality and precision associated with industrial-level production are deprecated in favour of the artisanal).
For this reason, I would call Jobs a great designer. Not just an obsessive CEO who developed good looking products that everyone aspired to own. He was indeed one who belonged to the tradition of American design embodied by Charles and Ray Eames. For Jobs, as for Eames, form comes from function. As Jobs did with the mouse and the graphical user interface and the personal computer (none of which concepts he invented) integrating them into a system with an intuitive user appeal, Eames (with Eero Saarinen) took the technologies for moulding plywood (pioneered by Alvar Aalto) and materials such as plastic, fibreglass, wire-meshes and applied them to chairs (which needless to say, he did not invent). And he was able to scale this innovation to mass production levels for Herman Miller. Charles Eames revolutionised furniture, and seating in particular, the way Jobs would later make his ding on personalised computing, communication and music.
In the world of mass communication and entertainment too, Jobs followed the tradition of the Eames couple. Charles and Ray Eames produced stunning innovations such as the exhibitions “Mathematica:…” for IBM, the Nehru exhibition, then “A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age” and “The World of Franklin and Jefferson” (1975–1977). And extraordinary movies such as “Powers of Ten”, “Tops” and “The Toy Toccata”. Jobs would take the late great musician Frank Zappa’s idea of selling songs over the internet, marry it with the WebObjects technologies developed in his wilderness years at Next, and build iTunes and the Apple Store. And Jobs innovated with Pixar, which produced some of the most durable animation films of recent days.
What was it about the products of Jobs and the Eames couple that so strike a chord among the masses, while not compromising on quality and beauty? It is the way that they mercilessly applied Occam’s Razor (even as Jobs did not apply the razor to his face) to everything they did, stripping a concept down to its basic functionality, and letting the form evolve from it, clothed in the right selection of materials. This minimalist design paradigm comes not just from good taste but an internalised deep philosophical position of getting rid of clutter. Even the way Jobs dressed was minimalist — simple, contemporary, modern urban. Black mock turtle neck (St Croix), jeans (Levis 501), sneakers (New Balance 991). All simple and mass-produced in a thoroughly modern milieu.
The anchors in various TV shows then got round to voicing the question why India has not produced a Steve Jobs. The short answer is that the socio-economic environment prevailing in our country does not encourage innovation, and the investment and economic structures do not make production on a mass scale easy. There is a great deal of risk aversion, and failures are not looked at as learning experiences but are frowned upon, and the person is labelled for life as a failure. This is in stark contrast to Jobs’s country, where you are not branded a failure forever if one of your ideas did not succeed. The phoenix can rise there, not here. Indeed, for almost every one of his successes, Jobs had a failure. But he took the good parts of the failed product or idea, and turned it into something that could drive or hold together his next innovation (for example, the important role played by WebObjects and NextSTEP in the Apple Store infrastructure).
Let us look at education. The important message in Jobs’s education is not that he was a college drop-out, but rather that he was able to “drop in” on various courses that interested him at Reed College, while officially not a student. In his Stanford speech, he mentions the central role that typography played in shaping his sense of taste. Would you find a single university in India where a great liberal arts education meets the world of technology4? Unfortunately, we in India have taken CP Snow’s Two Cultures too far, and therefore shortchange ourselves. We have designed universities where we have over-regulated what a young person can study5. So our youth cannot “drop in” on what interests them, as Jobs so eloquently spoke about in his Stanford commencement speech. When Ashok Vajpeyi was Vice-Chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, his liberal vision allowed my colleague Wagish Shukla to enlist my help in devising an IT curriculum for a true liberal arts programme. That vision was sadly abandoned to the orthodoxy of keeping it a university for the propagation of Hindi.
Oh, and another thing we should learn from the extraordinary success of Jobs: Apple doesn’t do market surveys, it propounds and follows a vision. It isn’t timid in doing so. There are some inevitable missteps, but the next version of the product is an improvement. As the company’s history teaches us, most tellingly in the years when Jobs was exiled by managers, the traditional management culture is not just pernicious, it can rob an enterprise of its soul.
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