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MY FIRST AND LAST STEVE JOBS POST
Did I ever mention that Hong Kong has its own Apple Store now?
It opened last month. Here’s how it looks on the outside.
And here’s how it looks inside by the main entrance.
[A few more pics here if yr interested]
Which brings me to the inevitable Steve Jobs post.
I can’t say much that most other people haven’t already said, apart from my personal Mac experience. My first hands-on computer experience was an Amiga 2000 via an Army roommate in West Germany, then with MS-DOS, VAX terminals and Windows 3.1 after I moved stateside. I wouldn’t get into Macs until the early 90s when I had to force myself to learn to use the Mac Classic II in the Mass Comms grad student office in SIUC. Took me 20 minutes to master, and it put me off Windows for life.
Anyway, here’s a few things I think are worth highlighting:
1. As a journalist who covers the mobile operator industry for a living, I can’t stress enough just how much Jobs has done to transform it with iPhones, iTunes, the App Store and the iPad, and what an amazing accomplishment that is for a company that, five years ago, wasn’t even in the mobile phone business.
I could easily write 3,000 words on this (and already have in a pro capacity), but suffice to say that before the iPhone, the mobile industry – from operators to handset makers – was struggling to figure out how to make mobile internet access something more compelling than just downloading ringtones and wallpapers and sticking cameras in the phones. A lot of the same companies, as well as many industry analysts, also said Apple would be a modest success as best. Today, almost all of them are following Apple’s lead.
2. Steve Jobs’ rock-star status. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say that the reaction to Jobs’ death is on par with that of Michael Jackson. On the other hand, how many CEOs of a major multinational corporation spur the kind of posthumous tributes from customers like the one pictured above? It’s hard to imagine people getting this misty-eyed over, say,
It’s impressive that a CEO can make that kind of connection with customers. Granted, Jobs and his customers didn’t always see eye to eye, and he had his critics. Still, with most CEOs today coming across as journeymen with MBAs appointed to whatever company has an opening, fulfilling their contract and moving on, Jobs, for all intents and purposes, was the company (well, after 1996, anyway). I’m not saying Apple can’t survive without him. But Apple would never have gotten as far as it did without someone who believed in the company as much as he did at the helm.
3. Rush Limbaugh is an Apple fan. Go figure.
4. Fox News proves that you can politicize anything.
5. Oh, and guess who’ll be attending his funeral. (Hint: they won't be guests.)
FULL DISCLOSURE: I should confess that I don’t own an iPhone. But I have two functional MacBooks, a barely functional iBook and two iPods (including one first-gen model). And I intend to have an iPhone before the end of the year (not because of Jobs – I’ve been planning to get one for awhile, and while I was going to stick to the iPhone 4, I’m tempted to get the new 4S just to see if that Siri personal assistant really is as good as Apple claims it is).
Think different,
This is dF
It opened last month. Here’s how it looks on the outside.
And here’s how it looks inside by the main entrance.
[A few more pics here if yr interested]
Which brings me to the inevitable Steve Jobs post.
I can’t say much that most other people haven’t already said, apart from my personal Mac experience. My first hands-on computer experience was an Amiga 2000 via an Army roommate in West Germany, then with MS-DOS, VAX terminals and Windows 3.1 after I moved stateside. I wouldn’t get into Macs until the early 90s when I had to force myself to learn to use the Mac Classic II in the Mass Comms grad student office in SIUC. Took me 20 minutes to master, and it put me off Windows for life.
Anyway, here’s a few things I think are worth highlighting:
1. As a journalist who covers the mobile operator industry for a living, I can’t stress enough just how much Jobs has done to transform it with iPhones, iTunes, the App Store and the iPad, and what an amazing accomplishment that is for a company that, five years ago, wasn’t even in the mobile phone business.
I could easily write 3,000 words on this (and already have in a pro capacity), but suffice to say that before the iPhone, the mobile industry – from operators to handset makers – was struggling to figure out how to make mobile internet access something more compelling than just downloading ringtones and wallpapers and sticking cameras in the phones. A lot of the same companies, as well as many industry analysts, also said Apple would be a modest success as best. Today, almost all of them are following Apple’s lead.
2. Steve Jobs’ rock-star status. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say that the reaction to Jobs’ death is on par with that of Michael Jackson. On the other hand, how many CEOs of a major multinational corporation spur the kind of posthumous tributes from customers like the one pictured above? It’s hard to imagine people getting this misty-eyed over, say,
It’s impressive that a CEO can make that kind of connection with customers. Granted, Jobs and his customers didn’t always see eye to eye, and he had his critics. Still, with most CEOs today coming across as journeymen with MBAs appointed to whatever company has an opening, fulfilling their contract and moving on, Jobs, for all intents and purposes, was the company (well, after 1996, anyway). I’m not saying Apple can’t survive without him. But Apple would never have gotten as far as it did without someone who believed in the company as much as he did at the helm.
3. Rush Limbaugh is an Apple fan. Go figure.
4. Fox News proves that you can politicize anything.
5. Oh, and guess who’ll be attending his funeral. (Hint: they won't be guests.)
FULL DISCLOSURE: I should confess that I don’t own an iPhone. But I have two functional MacBooks, a barely functional iBook and two iPods (including one first-gen model). And I intend to have an iPhone before the end of the year (not because of Jobs – I’ve been planning to get one for awhile, and while I was going to stick to the iPhone 4, I’m tempted to get the new 4S just to see if that Siri personal assistant really is as good as Apple claims it is).
Think different,
This is dF