Why Steve Jobs was insanely great
A lot of people don’t like January. They say it’s too gloomy and cold and too long. But I never have a problem with it. I’ve found a system to beat it.
After the New Year, and all the football games, I check out a library book. The next thing I know I will be looking in my mail and seeing a postcard that reads: It’s February. Your book is due. Bring it in.
This year the book that I returned, at minimal cost, was the one about Steve Jobs, Apple’s insanely great leader. He started the personal computer business, saved the music industry with the I-Pod and I-Tunes, saved the Disney movies with Pixar, then took over telephones from Sony and its Walkman, put out the I-Pad and was working on an I-TV when he died.
However, the book hinted, he was rude. If he was shown some possible product that was not insanely great, he would tell the employee presenting it to him, “That’s crap!” Or he might say, “That’s crap,” and “You’re fired.” But it’s probably important to be impolite sometimes or there will be a lot of bad products.
After reading about Steve – the book was so long I started feeling that I could call him by his first name – I took most of my Christmas presents back. In the reason for return blank, I wrote, “Not insanely great.”
I realized that Apple and Steve had been models for me for some time. They inspired me to search for greatness. I thought that while in a grocery store looking for a frozen pizza. I’d seen DiGiorno advertised and thought it had the greatest-looking pizza on TV. But there’s something its people don’t tell you: no sausage. Pepperoni was on all of its pizzas in the store. I don’t like pepperoni. I like sausage.
So I called the president of the company and they put me on the phone with some little girl (her voice sounded little anyway). She said there was sausage pizza only if there was pepperoni with it. I told her while the company may be doing well, it would not reach greatness relying almost entirely on pepperoni. She thanked me and said maybe they might consider adding a one-topping with sausage, and she would pass that on. But she never offered any samples, as Coca-Cola once did when I pointed out a flaw of that organization.
There is another company I like, Mars, because it makes the world’s greatest candy bar, the Mars bar. But I haven’t been able to find one lately. One grocery clerk told me they didn’t carry it and he didn’t think they made it anymore. So I called the company president and ended up talking to another little girl. She explained that the world no longer needs Mars bars because they have put a peanut in the Snickers bar and it is the same thing.
No, I told her. It is not. I ate a Snickers bar once and it was good. However, a Snickers bar is not an insanely great Mars bar. Not long ago, though, I talked to a man who told me he had seen a Mars bar on sale, and is trying to remember where. I hopefully await further word from him. I know they do not pass out sample Mars bars.
There is one other business that came to mind as I was reading the book: The car business. It sometimes makes insanely great products, sometimes not. But it’s improving. Car makers used to believe only big cars were great. Every year they tried to make them even greater by making them even bigger. When Japanese little cars began taking over, Chevrolet announced it also would make a little car, a better one, because its little car would be bigger than any of the Japanese little cars. GM executives, especially, love size, and the more bulk the better. I’d like to see some of their wives. They’re probably all over six feet tall and weigh more than 200 pounds. But GM is shrinking all around now and seems to be getting better. The car magazines report that a GM car, the Sonic, is getting close to insanely great.
It’s too bad Steve isn’t living now, and moving on to the car business. He would be giving us an insanely great I-Car that would be better than the Japanese cars, even if he had to make it in China.
More important, Steve contributed to greatness once again even as he died. A lot of people have famous last words, and books have been written listing many of them. But the greatest last words I ever heard were by, of course, Steve Jobs. Reports are that just before his death, his face grew radiant and he said: “Wow…Wow…Wow.” He has given us hope, that maybe we all will be part of something insanely great, some day, somewhere.
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Sam Woods
3 months agoNice.