Apple
It's one of those moments that I will always remember where I was when I heard the news.
I was at the bar of a restaurant called Dos Caminos on Hudson Street in Manhattan waiting for the Yahoo! B2B Marketing team covering Advertising Week to arrive for dinner. A waiter ordering drinks from the bartender stopped, pulled out his iPhone and looked at the screen. "Oh my God!" he exclaimed. "Steve Jobs has died." Everyone at the bar paused, looked wide-eyed at one another, and immediately pulled out their own devices.
A friend of mine once said glowingly of the iPhone, "It's like having an antique picture frame in your pocket." How apt that image seems today.
I remember the first time I saw an Apple II computer in 1977. I was 13. And I wasn't very impressed. To my young science fiction-addled mind, a computer was a talking machine that could answer any question correctly in a soothing female voice, like the one aboard the starship Enterprise.
Today of course, a Web-connected computer can answer any question. And it can be answered in the palm of your hand, almost anywhere. Steve Jobs, along with other great innovators like Tim Berners Lee, Andy Grove, Jerry Yang and David Filo, to name just a few, was instrumental in helping this come about.
Jobs took computers far beyond mere computing. He fundamentally and permanently changed the way we live. He was an innovator in movies, music, telecommunications, marketing and advertising.
Innovation begets innovation, and Apple's elegant contraptions have spurred more and faster innovation than just about any others in recent history. There are currently some 400,000 iPhone apps and more than 60,000 iPad apps. A carpenter friend of mine uses his iPhone as a level. I have one that feeds me quotes from New Yorker humorist Robert Benchley. There's even one that will take a picture of the thief who steals your iPhone.
And that's the key to understanding Jobs' legacy. He was a true enabler of enablers, in the best sense of the term. And that's why we at Yahoo! celebrate his life and work.
Thanks Steve, for everything you taught us.
--- Michael Mattis
