I’ve never meet Steve Jobs.
The closest I’ve ever come is standing a few feet from him as a crowd gathered around him after a Keynote during MacWorld 1999. It was at this Keynote that he was introduced as the iCEO. Here we also had a demo of his great showmanship as he rolled out a wall of about 50 iMacs booting from a server and running a movie, plus this year they would come in colors. I was again at MacWorld 2007 when he announce the AppleTV and, of course, the iPhone. “An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator…. these are not three separate devices!” was how he announce the iPhone. I remember being disappointed. I was there for hardware, not a phone. Where’s my new MacPro. Little did I know how much that little device would change things.
When I visited the Apple Campus in summer of 2007, for my first and only time, he was unavailable as he was having an “Oprah moment” and announcing to those at the Apple campus they would all be getting free iPhones. “And YOU Get a iPhone!” Alas, everyone but the visitors.
Many will talk about how he changed Apple and the world with Apple devices, but he helped to “push the human race forward.” Through Apple, Next, Pixar, and Apple again, he had “no respect for the status quo.” Steve Jobs, and those at the companies he lead, have taken great leaps forward and inspired industries to move forward or be left behind.
Remember “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who actually do.”
Source: Flickr / ianaberle
