Remembering Jobs, One Year Later
Contributed by Kathryn Galland
Kathryn Galland is Digital Communications Specialist at Loves Data, a digital marketing agency in Sydney. Before moving to Australia, Kathryn lived in Washington, D.C. where she gained multimedia journalism experience. She graduated summa cum laude from Virginia Tech University with a degree in communication. She is also fluent in Spanish.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the passing of Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc. In his honour, it’s only fitting to be looking, not so much at the past, but to the future, as Jobs was often hailed as “visionary.”
While the year following his death was marked with blunders and public apologies by his company –retail store cutbacks and a disappointing map app on the iPhone5, among others – one can see Apple grappling to stay true to its core in the wake of losing its most prominent advocate.
It’s understandable. A hole remains where Jobs’ passion and personality once reined over Apple. Can that void ever be filled? Only time will tell.
Ever since Jobs entrusted Tim Cook as CEO, the future prospect of the ‘world’s most valuable corporation’ has been widely debated. It’s only been a year. Still, just five years ago the iPhone did not yet exist.
Nonetheless, you can’t compare apples with oranges: Cook isn’t Jobs. Few innovators could have had Job’s intuition about what consumers wanted even before they knew it.
At least Cook seems committed to fulfilling Job’s vision. And this is why Apple can survive a few slip-ups.
In 1998, after Jobs rescued it from near financial collapse, he professed Apple’s future, explaining that the “really talented people” in the company would be led by a “good set of coaches, a good plan” and reminded the public that Apple is “not a one-man show.”
Expect Apple to continue to shine in tablet market dominance with the “new” iPad and to grow with the anticipated release of Apple TV.
You can also expect the tiff between Apple and Google to grow.
Convinced that Google “stole” from the iPhone product to create the Android, Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson: “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong.”
If Cook is true to Job’s vision, then we are just hearing the beginnings of the bickering between the two technology giants.
But despite once being ousted from his company or fighting several bouts of cancer, Jobs found a way to work toward the future. In 2005, Jobs told Stanford graduates, “Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”
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