Alcatel-Lucent

By Simon Poulter, Corporate Public Relations

The very sad news that Steve Jobs, the Apple founder and former CEO, has passed away at the age of 56 has been met by an unprecedented wave of tributes for a business leader.  Indeed, even at a time when arguably weightier matters and global economic turmoil are pressing, Steve Jobs’ death is the lead news story of the day around the world. This is profound testament to the global impact he and Apple have had – and will continue to do so – from their humble beginnings in a Silicon Valley garage, to being one of the world’s Top Ten most powerful and most popular brands.

Steve Jobs has been described, invariably, as “a visionary” and “the Da Vinci of our time”. Such superlative is underpinned by the indisputable fact that, over the last decade and more, his leadership of Apple has had more influence on culture than, arguably, any other individual. Whether you own an Apple product or not, the consumer electronics in your home, the PC you use for your work, will have all been influenced, in some way by the way Apple – under Steve Jobs – challenged and changed the total experience of owning technology and consuming digital media.

“Steve Jobs was a man who demonstrated that vision and passion can create global change,” says Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen.

He is absolutely right. Before the iMac arrived in 1999, home computing and the Internet – beyond the technology cognoscenti – wasn’t seen as part of one’s lifestyle. Computers were bland, beige functional objects used for productivity. No one regarded them as hubs of a ‘digital lifestyle’. Twelve years on, our lives are almost exclusively digital. The iMac changed the home PC into a home entertainment center; the iPod changed portable entertainment and iTunes changed the business of digital content distribution; the iPhone changed mobile telephony – introducing a pocket PC that also happened to make phone calls. The iPad, once again, has added a new paradigm for connecting with the world and the consumption of media – it’s no accident that newspaper and magazine publishers are universally investing in ‘iPad editions’. Apple hasn’t, of course, just been about well designed devices, but also about its understanding of application.

Perhaps, ironically, the home computer that was initially positioned as the hub of the digital lifestyle is – in Steve Jobs’ own words – nearing redundancy. At one of his last public appearances, to launch the iCloud service, he talked about ‘the cloud’ becoming the digital center. This vision takes the digital lifestyle into a new paradigm, exactly ten years to the month since the very first iPod was launched, a product designed to connect to a home computer. Innovation is a transitory beast, and the pace of progress remains breathless. Steve Jobs’ vision also maintained the stamina required for Apple to keep ahead of the pace.

Steve Jobs drove a true remarkable brand culture, an experience that was common to everything Apple lends its name to – from its products to its services and even its retail stores. Some might even say that the Pixar studio has a taste of Apple. There are many apocryphal stories about the level of detail Steve Jobs attended to in the rise of the Apple brand but, perhaps, none exemplify the depth as well as the opening of the box containing a new Apple product: It’s a luxurious experience in its own right, and one that it’s almost impossible not to feel the hand of Steve Jobs in the process.

Innovation, however, is nothing if it isn’t meaningful, and Steve Jobs’ influence went beyond the interaction between silicon and software. From the music we listen to and the movies we download, to the photographs we share online and even the phone calls we make, the devices we use to fuel this lifestyle – have all benefitted from a profound understanding of the consumer experience.