Steve Jobs hated the on-off switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in A/C data centers.
Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’ files. The FCC recently allowed the roll-out of White Space, wi-fi on steroid, also in NC.
Who needs the on/off switch! It had some utilitarian legacy (activate and deactivate) when hardware used to rule.
Now, software eats your lunch.
Of BMW’s thousand components, a large portion are software-controlled. From Buggy to Beamer, the engineers have made a giant leap.
Jobs was quoted as saying (this was counter-intuitive and anti-academic):
“if Ford had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said,
faster buggies”. In short, it’s categorically different with revolutionaries.
Think different!
No on/off switch.
Just the dial.
Circular motion.
The experience economy.
Control the product from end-to-end to make every touchpoint with the customer an iSee! (Disneyland).
Progress , like time, waits for no man.
If you keep standing on the track, you will likely get run over.
Not a single word in Jobs biography states directly that he was a futurist. Yet he could intuitively sense what was coming – his biography itself was well orchestrated (momenti mori) and ironically open-sourced (counter-culture life style, but proprietary business model).
In fact, religious zealots did take a shot at him for his views.
I wonder if those people secretly borrow an I-pad from friends to touch and feel (where is the on/off switch?).
I wonder what their legacies are as opposed to Jobs’?
And their destination : paradise or purgatory?
Jobs took his son to a business meeting (antennaeGate) mostly for I-phone IV damage control . “It would be a two-year worth of Business School education” said he.
His biography, which offers more than a two-year worth of B-school, is a must-read for technologists, marketers and culture critics who want to understand the Valley ethos.
When arts (music in this case) found new venue (I-pod) and revenue (I-Tunes), it is unchained melody for the mass (unbundled as singles not whole album).
Be spoiled with IT 3.0 (cloud and social media) but also be thankful sitting on giants’ shoulders
An image evokes in my mind was that of Cinema Paradiso, where the kid got a ride home on the bike’s frame, wearing his mentor’s hat and chatting up as a fee for the ride. However long, enjoy the ride. That’s our reward . As Southwest Airlines would say, please collect your items to ensure faster turn-around at the gate.
Thang Nguyen 555 