Ten Easy Steps to Change Technology As We Know It
1) Sell your car, build computers out of your garage, kickstart the entire personal computer industry (Apple II)
2) Figure that it could use some improvement, rebuild it from scratch (Macintosh)
3) Get kicked out of your company and start two more, one of which is pretty good at animation (Pixar)
4) Get your new company bought by your old company (NeXT), use it to make a third redesign of the personal computer (iMac)
5) Figure that you could make an MP3 player better than what is on the market (iPod), and then add video to it later (iPod Video)
6) Give people a place to buy music/movies/tv shows for the device (iTunes Store)
7) Come out with your own phone because the ones that are on the market are crappy and have terrible user interfaces (iPhone)
8) Take the phone out of it and sell that (iPod Touch)
9) Come out with a virtual store to buy software instead of taking up retail space (App Store)
10) Make a touchscreen handheld computer that just may be the next way computers are used (iPad)
This said, we lost an amazing man today. The reason that I wrote this is because I’m seeing a lot of reaction on social media to something in 5-10. I wanted to make it clearer that there is a bigger story.
Do yourself a favor and go to Amazon through a LGF referral and purchase a DVD copy of Pirates of Silicon Valley. Everything about Jobs’ early career (1-4) has been dramatized extremely well, and I would consider it to be a formidable precursor to The Social Network.