A Great American Innovator Steps Down

Apple co-founded Steve Jobs is no longer CEO of the company, and while it’s not often that a CEO’s departure is news, in this case it’s making the front page just about everywhere. Because Steve Jobs is today the equivalent of a major rock star 20 years ago. Or a major movie star 40 years ago.

Apple doesn’t just sell products – it sells cool. Apple products are elegant in design, and easy to use, and they have a certain kind of personality that the PC never attained. Not everyone likes the products, but those that do exhibit a loyalty that is sometimes seems to border on dogma.

It wasn’t always this way – when Jobs left the company in 1985, Apple began a series of marketing and product blunders that nearly drove it into extinction. Apple products were in a niche market, and lacked a certain universal appeal. The Mac was always a great machine, but the software was limited and the machines too expensive for many homes, especially those who wanted to share files between home and work.

In 1996, Jobs was brought back into the fold, and things began to turn around. Before long he introduced the iPod, which was not the first MP3 player, but was certainly the best. This was an example of Apple’s new model of doing business – not necessarily being the first at an innovation, but doing it with an elegance unmatched by competitors.

The iPod was a great example of this thinking. Small, simple and intriguing, it was also cool in ways that the other MP3 players were not. As a result, it’s not easy naming two other brands of MP3 players any more.

In order to create a market for the iPod, Jobs opened a music store called iTunes. Not much attention was paid to this move by the music industry at the time, but iTunes has come to dominate the music world. When it opened, no one would have guessed that it would virtually replace record stores in, well, record time. Today, iTunes is the dominate player in music sales. No one else comes close.

Apple has become a force of nature in the field of computers, music, movies (through Pixar) and lifestyle in general. And that has happened because of Steve Jobs. It’s hard to imagine what the company will do without him at the helm. It’s well known that he has had some serious health problems, and it is assumed that these problems are the reason he is stepping down from his position.

But Jobs has been an icon of innovation and a model for American industry in general, proving that there is a market for intelligent, well-designed products that appeal to the imagination. He will be sorely missed.

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TODAY IN HISTORY (from Wikipedia):

1920 - The 19th amendment to United States Constitution takes effect, giving women the right to vote.

1957 - The USSR announces the successful test of an ICBM – a "super long distance intercontinental multistage ballistic rocket ... a few days ago," according to the Soviet news agency, ITAR-TASS.

1970 - The then new feminist movement, led by Betty Friedan, leads a nation-wide Women's Strike for Equality.