Digitally Indigenous Content

Note from 2025: Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011. This blog was written and posted the following day.

I am finding the strong and world-wide reaction to the passing of Steve Jobs intensely moving. That so many people were touched by Steve and what he stood for in people’s minds speaks well for the human race. 

Steve was a vital and vibrant human being. He was the kind of guy who was excited to come to work in the morning—not every morning (he was very human)—but the vast majority of them. When I worked at NeXT back in the 1990’s, I had a meeting scheduled with Steve at 8:00am the morning after his other company, Pixar, went public. This was an event that netted Steve a profit of close to a billion dollars, at a time when he really needed it. I hustled to make it to the meeting on time, all the while thinking that there was no way Steve would be there after what must have been quite a celebration the night before. He was not only there, but after responding to my congratulations with a brief “thanks”, we went right to work like nothing had happened.

By the way, when people refer to Steve Jobs as “Steve”, it does not mean they are trying to imply a close and familiar relationship with him—as it would, for example, if I referred to the current President of the United States as “Barack”! Everyone at NeXT called Steve Jobs “Steve”, as did everyone at Apple when I was there. I never heard anyone, from his direct reports to the security guards, ever call him “Mr. Jobs”. 

On the other side, there was only one “Steve”. If there was another person in the company whose first name happened to be “Steve”, we renamed them. Steve Naroff, for example, who headed the Development Tools group at NeXT and is even today still at Apple, was never referred to as “Steve”, but as “snaroff”, his email name. This was not at Steve’s urging or by some corporate policy, by the way—we, the team, did it without really thinking about it, I guess as a form of respect. There could of course be only one Steve.

So why was Steve Jobs so admired, respected and—seems strange to apply to a guy I actually knew, but I guess it’s the right word–beloved?

I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and clearly his amazing success at Apple over the last ten years has a lot to do with it. People love a winner, and Steve helped take Apple from near-extinction to one of the most valuable companies and brands on the planet. No small feat, and worthy of admiration in itself. 

Steve had that doubly-rare gift of not only being superb at what he did, but also of getting rewarded and recognized for it.  There are many people who do great things and are never recognized for them. There are others who would do great things if they were in the right position, but they don’t have the political and other skills needed to get to those positions in the first place.  Steve not only had the ability to recognize and help create great products, he also had the political and other skills needed to move himself to a position where he could cause these things to happen, and get recognized and rewarded for them. This is exceedingly rare. Most people with the skills to rise to the top of a multi-billion dollar company are demonstrably not the right people to actually run the company—at least in terms of consistently producing great products. I think many people’s admiration stems from the fact Steve could do it all.

However, I think a lot of it—and certainly the foundation of my own admiration—is Steve’s mantra of “Insanely Great”. I took and still take this to mean that products should be as good as they can be—as good as you know how to make them. They should not just be “differentiated enough to beat (or neutralize) the competition”, but rather they should serve the end-user’s needs as well as you possibly know how to do that. There are of course pragmatic considerations—like the cost to the end user (it’s not “great” if the customer can’t afford it), the time to market (it’s not “great” if it never ships) and the need to fund the growth of a healthy business that can create more great products. If you don’t take those into account—and there were times when Steve did not, and paid for it—you won’t be able to continue to produce great products. But within those constraints, “insanely great” means the product should be better than it needs to be. In fact, it should be as good as it can be.

The foundation of “insanely great” is a refusal to accept anything less than excellent. This was Steve’s best gift, in my mind. While Steve was personally a fountain of creative ideas (some good, some bad), even moreso Steve was able to recognize the great ideas of others and know instantly when it wasn’t quite right. When you met with him—as we all did at NeXT—he would give you a big job to do, and when it didn’t measure up to his standards he would say “You can do better than this”. While disheartening sometimes, this was really a vote of confidence—because Steve knew you had it in you to do better. And chances are, you did. By setting a high bar and refusing to accept anything less, we ended up rising to levels of excellence and to learn to work together as a team in ways I have never seen before or since.

It must be said, though, that “insanely great” really is “insane” in the sense of not being fully rational. It truly does NOT make business sense to invest more in the quality of your product than you have to in order to beat your competition and win in the market. Also, keep in mind that Steve championed the development of many products that were so far ahead of their time or the technology of the day that almost no one bought them.  “Insanely great” is more a matter of faith and philosophy than it is a bankable business strategy. You have to believe. Still, this is what inspires me about Steve Jobs, and I think it is a key reason why so many of us around the world mourn for him today. 

To me, Steve’s gift to the world is to show us that “insanely great” can not only exist, but win. This attitude builds the kind of products people are thrilled to buy, and the kind of companies we are excited to work for. Pragmatists will probably never understand why doing something better than you need to do it can make any sense.  These voices are temporarily silenced by Apple’s business success, but many of us—myself included—fear to lose Apples’ shining example of “insanely great” products with Steve’s passing if the pragmatists again win the day. 

Looking back on it, if I had to choose—and putting financial considerations aside—I would have chosen to work for Steve during the NeXT days rather than be part of his more recent Apple success story. At NeXT we knew we were developing something insanely great—and the NEXTStep operating system and other products we developed did indeed lay the foundations for Apple’s later success technically, in many ways. But at the time, there were few customers (relatively) and all we had was our belief in the value of what we were producing. We had the admiration of people we respected in the industry—which is no small thing—but at that time, not a lot of validation from the market. Our satisfaction and the excitement we took in our work had to come from inside.

But that’s a lot. Knowing that what you do—your work—has intrinsic value because it’s good, truly good, is almost certainly the greatest gift you can receive in life. Creating and appreciating something of value, whether it’s raising a child, taking a great photograph, or helping develop a new software tool, is probably the best experience life has to offer. I think Steve Jobs has touched a chord in so many of us because he gave us that experience of excellence beyond reason: certainly to those who worked with him, but most of all he gave it to those who got a product better than merely “differentiated”. Customers got a product better than they could have ever expected.

So, my farewell to Steve Jobs. Steve, you were an insanely great individual, and you lived an insanely great life. You set out to change the world, and you did. We are privileged to have been your contemporaries, and to enjoy the benefits of all you brought to the world. May you not only rest in peace, but in the satisfaction of a job unreasonably and irrationally well done.