January 24, 2012

It’s so nice to see that the Russian SVR (foreign intelligence service) is in favour of Scottish independence ;)

October 5, 2011

Insanely great

R.I.P. Steve.

I learnt just over two hours ago the sad news that Steve Jobs had passed away, aged 56. My sincerest sympathies go to his loved ones. What follows is my attempt at a personal tribute/obituary.

To be glib about it, you put not just one, but several ‘dents in the universe’.

You started out by tinkering around with home-made circuit boards in the garage with Woz, and blustering through early demos at the Homebrew Computer Club. Apple might then have seemed like one of an endless procession of ephemeral Californian technology companies - just another Atari; a sandals-and-socks firm. But greater things were to come.

The Apple II would give you the springboard to redefine how computing worked. In your visits to Xerox PARC, you first saw an odd new interface paradigm in operation. A graphical screen; a ‘mouse’; rectangles called windows. These ideas would coalesce into the failed Lisa project, and then the Macintosh 128K which would ultimately deliver on the promise of the concept. Later, you would found NeXT, which saved Apple technologically, and Pixar, which continues to push the boundaries of film-making.

But let’s cut to the chase. What’s more important than these creations is your overall approach: that you personified how liberal arts values and a strong aesthetic sensibility could drive innovation more coherently than simple engineering alone.

You showed people that they could, and should, relate to technology emotionally. On a level more akin to interpersonal relations than to issuing commands to an unforgiving and arbitrary master. You showed us that technology was there to adapt, fit in with and bond to one’s life and identity. That you could feel it, and that it could empower you.

It’s true to say that you were never an innovator. You were something different - a special kind of translator. One able to be inspired by true visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Isaac Asimov, and then distil their great ideas into a kind of exacting passion and single-mindedness that drove everyone forward much more than it ever frustrated.

It was why you directed Susan Kare, Andy Herzfeld, Bill Raskin and others in a skunkworks project called ‘Macintosh’ which would go on to define the spirit of modern computing, in spite of it nearly being stillborn. It was why you put Kare to work designing just the right kind of mouse cursor for the original Mac, and sent her back to the drawing board again and again. Why the Mac had a single mouse button for decades in spite of protestations from all sides. And it was why you phoned Vic Gundotra at Google in an apologetic mid-weekend panic because the Google logo had the wrong kind of yellow on its iPhone app icon. The stories are endless and almost mythical.

The truth is that it was always your way, whether we liked it or not. And generally, we did. Because from the introduction of consumer networking technology at Apple, to the way Pixar insisted on making movies with heart, everything you did was infused with a fundamental optimism that we can be better, and that we can do things in a better way.

But which way? It was never a utopian vision of technology as a neutral, benevolent force, like that which has guided Google to ubiquity, nor did it ever really align with the libertarian ‘hacker spirit’, which would come to be embodied by the likes of John Perry Barlow and Richard Stallman. Instead, it was an idiosyncratic mixture of aesthetic rigidity and just a smidge of hacker-ness: at Apple especially, you did things partly because you could, but only if they were done beautifully.

What I will miss most, then, is the integrity which you brought to everything you did. Despite being skeptical and distrusting of many of Apple’s latter activities, it’s clear that they were still infused with the kind of coherence and designed-in honesty that made Apple iconic. In other words, in some sense, I kind of knew you were a big part of everything they created. And that everything they didn’t create was significant by its absence.

I could see this in the way the slim pizza box-like LCII, which was my first taste of modern computing as an eight-year-old, had every port it needed in just the right place, as compared to monolithic IBM-compatibles of the day with hulking great chassis. I can see it in the MacBook Pro that I’m using now, which runs an operating system which doesn’t work against me. I could see it in the design of the original Macintosh user manual, as beautifully minimalist and relentlessly positive as it was. Heck, I’m pretty sure I can even see it in the keyboard on my desk.

Your true legacy will be if whatever Apple does in future continues to embody that elusive sense of being a complete ‘thing’ - that aura which everyone else tries so hard to emulate. Apple would be best served viewing imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, and rather than lashing out, concentrate on building whatever’s next.

Because it has always specialised in defining itself by being different. And you always seemed to know just what ‘different’ should feel like.

For that, amongst many other things, we will miss you.

—GRW

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September 30, 2011