A whole lot of notions come to mind when you think of Steve Jobs. He's a charismatic figure, of course, one of the true tech visionaries who saw the role that computers would ultimately play in our personal lives many years before any given computer was capable of living up to his vision. He's an innovator, pushing incessantly to bring new ideas to market, sometimes for the worse (like that toilet-seat iBook), but often for the better (, anyone?).
To say that Jobs has earned a reputation as a difficult person to work for would be putting it mildly. Tales of his ceaseless browbeating of Apple employees are the stuff of legend, but this appears to have done nothing to lessen the respect that his minions feel for him. An obsessive tyrant he may be, but it seems that those who serve under him would follow him into the gates of hell without a second thought.
Meanwhile, the public face of Steve Jobs--that enthusiastic grin with which he declares every single new feature of every new Apple product to be "amazing," "incredible," or "unbelievable"--manages to inspire a deep affection and loyalty among consumers that no person in the world of technology (or any other business, for that matter) can match. Even when he billed the terrible old as "the coolest mouse on the planet" back in 1998, he managed to elicit a totally sincere wow from his audience of faithful devotees. What other CEO can work such Jedi mind tricks?
It's hard to imagine anyone--either among Apple's current leadership or elsewhere--taking the place of Steve Jobs. Certainly Apple's 11-year streak of successes has owed a great deal to the hard work of the many people under Jobs' command, but a look at the company's history suggests that without Jobs, there might well be no Apple Computer left today.
After Steve Jobs was ousted from the company by John Scully back in 1985, the company entered a fairly steady decline--one which many educated observers predicted would culminate in the company's demise--until Jobs returned to take the helm in 1997. Almost immediately, the Mac was back. Jobs put a stop to the Mac clone business that had kept the platform mired in mediocrity for years and released the iMac, then the iBook, then the cult-popular Cube and, of course, the iPod, iTunes, and the iPhone. Looking back at the wave of hot products the company churned out year after year, it's hard not to see the hand of Steve Jobs in every success.