Steve Jobs died today

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The big news today is the death of Steve Jobs, the primary force behind Apple’s success.  He was a couple of months younger than I am, so his obits raise my awareness of mortality more than most do.

I only met Steve Jobs once, back in 1976 when he was first founding Apple with Wozniak (back when Wozniak was the skinnier of the two).  The two of them were trying to recruit Stanford grad students to join them. They had a good pitch, but I was too risk-averse to join them (seriously, the odds of a new startup lasting 5 years in those days was about 0.5%). I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I had joined them (or a few years later, joined Sun when they were starting up).

I’ve been a loyal Apple customer for a long time though, starting with the first of the Macintosh computers, and going through the “fat Mac” (with 512k bytes of RAM!), the Mac Plus, the Centris 660AV, a Titanium laptop, a G4 tower, a G5 iMac, a 17″ MacBookPro laptop, and (most recently) an Intel iMac. All along I’ve been impressed with Apple’s packaging and marketing.  I think that their biggest mistake was delaying about 10 years too long the switch to a Unix kernel (OS X came out in 2001, and should have come out in the early 90s, but that mistake was clearly Sculley’s and Jobs’s).

I have heard the Steve Jobs was a demanding taskmaster and would not accept second-best from his co-workers.  I wonder whether this drive for excellence is now ingrained in Apple corporate culture, or whether Apple will start a slide into mediocrity (as they did under Sculley).  Will Apple now be subject to the loss of vision and merger frenzy that has destroyed so many once-great computer companies?  I’m not betting either way on that.

I do hope that they continue the Macintosh series, though, and not throw it away to concentrate on the mobile market.