What Steve Jobs Did for Capitalism
When Steven Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple in August, the articles on his life and achievements had the odd character of premature obituaries. But perhaps they were not so premature. After years of serious health problems, Steve Jobs passed away Wednesday.
A lot will be said about Jobs in the coming days, all of its deserved. He achieved so much in his roughly thirty-year career, and given his drive and his love of his work, he might have continued to reshape the world for another thirty years. His passing is an enormous loss.
I want to focus on only one aspect of this extraordinary career: Steve Jobs helped restore the image of the capitalist business leader as a visionary genius and, in a way, a swashbuckling adventurer.
Jobs was the opposite of the stodgy old image of the businessman as the man in the grey flannel suit selling widgets, an anonymous, interchangeable product whose nature and quality he doesn't really care about. It's not just that Apple brought the ethos of Silicon Valley, the irreverent attitude and casual dress, into the mainstream. More important, Jobs was clearly driven by a love for creating the newest and best innovations.
His career was about creating new things and taking his company in unexpected new directions. Most famously, of course, Jobs transformed Apple from a computer company to a music company and a purveyor of "digital products," even going so far as to change the name of the company, in 2007, from Apple Computers, Inc., to just Apple Inc.
The most revealing and distinctive thing about Apple under Jobs has been its emphasis on industrial design. Apple hired one of the world's great industrial designers, Jonathan Ive, and Jobs gave him free rein to give Apple's products their distinctive look, often letting him specify more expensive materials and tighter tolerances, even when it added to Apple's production cost. Jobs understood that this was not just about giving Apple's products a pretty look. It is about the whole experience of using them. Jobs has always been focused, not just on the amount of memory or processing speed in a computer or iPod, but on how we interact with the machine. Other smart phones are just as powerful as the iPhone, in terms of their components, but Jobs gained a competitive advantage by making the experience of interacting with it natural and intuitive, just as he had done years earlier with the Macintosh. Andrew Rosenthal puts it nicely: "Other computer makers know how machines work and want humans to alter their behavior accordingly. Mr. Jobs and his team labored to understand how humans behave and think and built machines to suit us."
This emphasis on design and intuitive function heightened the sense of Jobs as a visionary. He wasn't interested in putting out just another product. He was interested in changing the way we live.
Back in August, Virginia Postrel offered a quote from Tom Wolfe in 1981: "Businessmen no longer have the conviction that what they're doing is exciting and glamorous, which is, I guess, another way of saying intrinsically worthwhile." But what Jobs was doing was definitely exciting, and Apple's increasingly high-concept design made it more and more glamorous. Postrel concludes that "Steve Jobs made business cool again."
This understates things a bit. Throughout history, the general view has been that artists and poets can be flashing-eyed visionaries. But men of business? They are dull, conformist, small-minded--unimaginative bean-counters who keep the trains running on time but don't care where they are going. Yet Jobs was definitely one of the flashing-eyed visionaries. He was even, as the famous "1984" Macintosh ad implied, a kind of revolutionary.
Jobs was hardly the first person to exemplify these qualities. This is, in fact, the whole history of capitalism. Commodore Vanderbilt, the 19th-century model for the Gilded Age transportation baron, began his career as a young man by running up a flag that read "New Jersey Must Be Free" and running an illegal ferry to New York City in order to break a steamboat monopoly imposed by the state of New York. It's a story you couldn't make up in fiction, though Ayn Rand tried her best to do honor to it in fiction, by way of her heroes in Atlas Shrugged. Her industrialists are intransigent visionaries driven by their love of their work and their desire to create.
Interestingly, Ayn Rand's portrayal may have helped inspire Steve Jobs. Certainly, this was the model of the businessman that he projected back to the world.
That was true down to the last moment. He stayed on as the company's CEO until less than two months before his death. If you had been staring down your mortality for the better part of a decade and had the means to do whatever you wanted with your remaining years, what would you do? Jobs knew the answer. In his famous commencement address at Stanford after his first brush with cancer, he explained that "I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?'" He loved his work so much that he kept at it for as long as it was physically possible.
Jobs's own politics may have leaned to the left, but this is irrelevant to his life's wider meaning. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that the cause of democracy was often advanced by men who opposed it, simply because they provided examples of powerful intellects and great personal achievement, which was an inherent challenge to the claims of hereditary aristocrats. The same thing goes for Jobs's career, which is an inherent rebuke to the petty limits that bureaucrats seek to impose on the private economy's innovators.
This is what Steve Jobs did for capitalism. Capitalism has always been about creators, about revolutionaries, about iconoclasts who set out to transform and improve the way we live. Jobs was our era's reminder of this fact.
