Goodbye, Steve, and thank you for the music.

One of my old religion teachers was a young man who left the priesthood in his final year before being ordained. He was one of those people that easily influenced the juvenile self – set you on a new path, gave you a new way of thinking.  I remember he opened up the topic around who in the world, dead or living, would you most like to meet. He often said that people, guessing his theological background, expected him to say ‘Jesus’, but he said he knew enough about Jesus and found the idea of meeting him to be too clichéd.  Instead, he said he always wanted to meet some obscure European film director whose name I can’t remember, but I do remember the description of one of his films depicting a glass church floating up a river.

It’s a question I’ve come back to several times, but over the years I reasoned that Steve Jobs would have been the first person I’d most like to meet.

Growing up as a life-long Apple user – our first machine being an Apple LC II, with a 15Mhz processor, 2 Mb RAM and a 40Mb hard drive – I witnessed the worst of Apple. 90′s Apple.  From the flat, grey graphics of OS 6,  through the sturdiness of OS 7.5.6, the multimedia-gilded edge of OS 8, and finally to the now rose-tinted vision of OS 9.  The Newton.  Powerbooks with upside-down Apple logos. Gil Amelio. And the dreaded taunt every teenage boy feared, “There are no games for Mac!”  Yes, I suffered greatly as an Apple fan, always preaching to the heathens about greater stability, security, and the virtues of self-mounting floppy drives. In the end, it was always the quality and durability of Apple’s products that kept us as returning customers.

Steve was never in the picture.  He was a background character from the past who went off to experiment with NeXT, an OS that I likened to being as obscure and doomed as BeOS.  Even after NeXT was bought by Apple and its IP was integrated with Apple’s products, and Steve becoming CEO in ’97, the ‘new’ Apple didn’t come to light until after 2000.  The iMac had started turning heads in the mainstream consumer market, and when the iPod arrived I knew that this was the Apple I’d always believed would win people over to their way of thinking about computer products.  I was given my iPod by my wife back in 2002. Nobody could believe it when they saw it then.  Nobody can believe that it still works today.

In the last two years I’ve come to understand what it means to have a vision: to have an opinion and a belief about something so broad and yet well defined that you can sit down and talk non-stop with fervent vigor about what needs to be done and how to do it.  Steve was the perfect visionary.  He never gave up on his early dreams of what computing should be, and best of all he gained control of a crack team of designers and engineers who could make those dreams real.  There was no magic in the air at Apple’s HQ, only people who understood and shared Steve’s vision and were willing to put in the hours to make it happen.  And how could you not share in Steve’s vision?  Every expo he got up on stage in trainers and denim, and every word out of his mouth had an effect on the company’s stock. Everyone believed him.  I used to joke that he could project a reality distortion field;  that he could pick up a brick, describe it to you, and you’d want to buy ten of them. That was Steve’s genius: he sold the vision and the product inside and outside of the company.  He’d hold that product with one hand in the air, and – boom – tomorrow’s front page.  Not only did everyone get it, everyone wanted it.  It peaked with the iPhone.

As a kid who grew up following computer companies instead of football teams, I was very grateful to Steve in some way for helping my team win.  Walking around the college campus, seeing academics and students alike beam their correctly-orientated Apple logos from their laps… I will admit, it did give me a sense of deep satisfaction, a sense of peace, that the world was waking up to common sense.  No, I wasn’t making money from it, nor did I have my name to it, but I knew that people were sharing  in the experience, and that, I believe, is what Steve really wanted the most.

I am sad that I’ll never meet him. Perhaps, being in the software industry now, I felt that maybe I would, at some distant point.  But having shared in his vision and his victory, perhaps I know enough about Steve already. Perhaps it would be too clichéd of me to say I always wanted to meet him.  Perhaps it would be more appropriate for me to ‘think different’, and go searching for the man that filmed the glass church floating up a river.