Steve Jobs - A Heartfelt Homage.

An adopted child, Mr Jobs caught the computing bug while growing up in Silicon Valley. As a teenager in the late 1960s he met Steve Wozniak in HP during his summer job. But it was only after dropping out of college, travelling to India, becoming a Buddhist and experimenting with psychedelic drugs that Mr Jobs returned to California to co-found Apple with Mr Wozniak, in his parents’ garage, on an April Fool’s Day in 1976.

He once said, “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions. His great rival, Bill Gates, he suggested, would be “a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”.

In retrospect, Mr Jobs was a man ahead of his time during his first stint at Apple. Computing’s early years were dominated by technical types. But his emphasis on design and ease of use gave him the edge later on. Elegance, simplicity and an understanding of other fields came to matter in a world in which computers have become fashion items, carried by everyone, that can do almost anything. “Technology alone is not enough,” said Mr Jobs at the end of his speech introducing the iPad 2, in March 2011. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.” It was an unusual statement for the head of a technology firm.

Mr Job’s on-stage persona as a Zen-like mystic notwithstanding, Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified. He eschewed market researchers and focus groups, preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he said. His judgment proved uncannily accurate: by end of his career the far outweighed the misses.

 Although his authoritarian streak was well known, Mr Jobs was nevertheless good at attracting talent. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design guru, Phil Schiller, its marketing leader, Scott Forstall, the head of its mobile-software operation and Mr Cook, the firm’s new chief executive and former chief operating office, are all world-class managers. When he was asked how he chose members of his team, Mr Jobs said he always looked for bright and competent people. But more important, he added, was to find people who cared a great deal about precisely the same things that mattered to him.

The strength of Apple’s senior team is one reason that the firm’s share price barely flinched when news emerged last month that Mr Jobs was relinquishing his role as chief executive and becoming executive chairman. Another is that he left it in an extremely good position to take advantage of changes sweeping through the world of technology Under his guidance, Apple has developed not just amazing hardware, but also “cloud” based services such as its iTunes online music store and its new “iCloud” services, which allows people to store all sorts of contents on Apple’s servers and access it on all sorts of devices.

Another striking – and often underappreciated – aspect of Mr Job’s success was his ability to say no. At a company like Apple, thousands of ideas bubble up each year for new products and services that it could launch. The hardest thing for its leader is to decide which ones merit attention. Mr Jobs had an uncanny knack of winnowing out the wheat from the mountain of chaff.

It remains to be seen whether this disciples who are now running the show can make equally smart choices and whether Apple will be able to prosper without its magician-in-chief at the helm. The lukewarm response to this week’s launch of its new iPhone 4S should give some cause of concern. Without Mr Jobs, Apple suddenly looked much more like just another technology firm, rather than a producer of magical products that excite the world. With Google and its allies chasing it in smartphones, and Amazon’s launch of a bold new tablet computer, Apple faces serious competition for the first time in the new markets it has created.

I read much of the contents written in the paragraphs above in this week’s edition of The Economist. Most of these are already known to me as well as you, along with Mr Job’s Hollywood style comeback – creating Pixar Animations, Next Computers and then leading his own child – Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy to being the largest technology firm, even ahead of Microsoft! But it was a good way to pay homage to the master, by re-capitulating what he stood for in his life.

Yet another instance I see – this time in the life of Mr Jobs – someone who fought throughout his life, to bring down something divine to the world of mortals. As he rightly said, people will not believe something till they were shown that. Repeatedly he showed to the world how to design a computer, a tablet pc, a cell phone properly. Before the advent of iPhone, iMac, Macbook, iPad, world did not even have an inkling to what a properly made such equipments can be.

Many such masters have used their lives to create that inspiration from the precincts of the Non-Form to the world of mortals. From the ancient world were Pythagoras in around 400BC, and then followed by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. On the other parts of the world were The Buddha, and more recent were Mozart, Michelangelo, Jesus, Einstein, Newton, Fynemann and many more. All these humans were instances of inspirations, with varied experiences, each trying to bring into the world, which did not exist during their times. Generations have hailed them, worshipped them and venerated them saying that they were ahead of times – they were some Avatars. The sources of such phenomenon was the heart of creativity – Being holistically a disciple of life; about viewing life as a mystery, and oneself as a philosopher trying to investigate the same. In the process, such awe-inspiring creations fall out as side-effects.

Steve Jobs had been one of my Inspirations, who did exactly the same in his life – standing for a continuous battle towards perfection – towards creating something that never existed – in an effort to ascend humanity to the next level – closer to that Omniscience and Aesthetics of the Gods.

I would not mourn saying Steve Jobs passed away. Yes, his physical self has ceased to exist, and that is a huge loss to humanity and to Apple for sure. But I would not mourn saying Steve Jobs passed away. He was much more than his physical self. The aspects of his that makes him legendary are immortal and ever inspiring.His audacious creativity, fearlessness, Never give up attitude, perfection at his work, his guts to dream disruptively big were part of what made him "Steve Jobs". These ethereal virtues will persist to eternity and beyond. Steve-You will be alive forever, in the hearts of mortals and Gods-for generations to come.

Till all the crowd of followers and copiers are in the search of a new genius to copy ideas from, and thousands of professionals being manufactured in the conveyer belts of stereotyped schools and universities, here I pay my homage to a short but intense life lived by an extra-ordinary person - pushing human race to evolve to a more beautiful world - the iWorld.
RESPECT FOR THE MAN - THE VISION - THE REBEL - THE PERFECTION - THE STEVE JOBS.

A side note – I was happy to learn that Mr Jobs had converted to Buddhism, and that he had spent years in ashrams with the Buddhist monks, before he started Apple. Certainly you need to re-establish that eternal connection, to do anything near to what Mr Jobs did in his life. 

I want to end this essay of paying my tribute and respect to this great soul, by quoting a favorite quote from Mr Jobs himself -
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I have ever encountered to help me make big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride,all fear of embarrassment of failure - these things just fall away in the face of death,leaving what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the traps of thinking you have something to lose. You already are naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

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