OneAndOneIs2

So Steve Jobs lost his battle with pancreatic cancer this week. Apple fans everywhere are devastated. A frequent counterpoint to the people bemoaning the loss of a tech industry titan are those who come out with the opposing view "He was just a figurehead, he didn't invent the iPhone, it was the brilliant engineers at Apple who made it successful."

Naturally anybody who disputes this view is dismissed as an Apple fanboi. So I thought I'd offer my own view, speaking as somebody who's never bought anything made by Apple.

They're quite right: The iPhone was created by some very clever people working at Apple. But they're also completely wrong: A big company with lots of money and clever people does not necessarily give rise to impressive new ideas.

In the mid-90's Apple was basically an also-ran in the computer industry - it occupied a niche amongst designers but realistically everybody owned a Windows PC and MS's biggest was concern was this upstart Linux thing that people were giving away for free.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late 90's and within a decade they were top of the heap when it came to media players and they had literally re-invented the smartphone. Even die-hard Windows users owned iPods or iPhones and made heavy use of iPlayer.

So what did the other big tech company with many clever ideas and a guy called Steve in charge do in the same period? What did all those clever people come up with?

That's right. Vista.

That's the difference it makes having someone with courage and vision in charge, versus somebody without. MS tried to launch a tablet PC multiple times over the last decade or so. Why didn't it work?

Watch this video and judge for yourself:

That's the vision and foresight of Steve Ballmer at work. It's not exactly an iPad, is it?

Conventional wisdom has it that big companies can't be big innovators: They're too big and monolithic to change direction and come out with things that are new and different. Windows is a good example - how different is Windows 7 from Windows 98? Aside from the glassy 3D interface that they copied from Apple, there ain't much in it.

In the mean time, Apple's OS completely moved architectures, from PPC to x86. Then again to ARM. They completely reinvented their OS to base it off a Unix architecture and then re-invented it again for a touchscreen interface. They reinvented media players so well that people stopped talking about mp3s and started talking about iPods. They reinvented smartphones so that people went from talking about the merits of 'qwerty VS numeric' keypads to talking about the merits of keypads vs. on-screen keys. They succeeded in launching a tablet computer that people would buy on their first attempt where Microsoft failed repeatedly to the do the same thing.

They're both rich companies. They both have some very smart, talented people working for them.

The difference between them is that one had clear leadership from somebody with a clear vision. Somebody who would say "That IS a nice feature, but we don't need it here so it's bloat so get rid of it. That WOULD be a nice feature but we can't do it, so figure out a way to make it happen. And that IS a nice feature, but it's not nice enough, so make it better".

That's what made the iPod succeed where the Zune failed - the iPod was brilliant at doing music, and didn't do anything else. The Zune was okay at being a music player, but also tried to be a PDA and games machine and so it failed.

That's what made the iPad succeed where the Origami failed - the iPad had an OS designed from scratch to work with a touch-screen and didn't have any legacy apps that needed a keybaord and mouse. The Origami was just a PC where they threw out the keyboard and mouse and hoped you'd believe that the stylus you'd probably lose within a day would be an adequate substitute.

Could Steve Jobs have made an iPhone by himself? No, of course not. Nobody could do that: Nobody knows enough to be able to invent a piece of hardware like that AND program it AND make it work with all the WiFi and telephone systems. That's not how the modern world works: You get a bunch of people together who all know how to do specific things, and between them they come up with something amazing that none of them could have done individually.

Could Apple have made the iPhone without Steve Jobs? Blatantly not: They were only able to do it because Jobs had the vision and foresight to migrate their OS to BSD so it could later be ported to ARM for the iPhone; and to master a totally new hardware form-factor in the shape of an iPhone; and to make sure that they did everything so well that each interim step was a big success that allowed them to make the next game-changing advance.

I never bought anything Apple made. I don't intend to, either: I consider the hardware over-priced and the software too locked-down and too demanding of YOU to do things THEIR way.

But I can recognize genius when I see it. I'll miss the presence of Steve Jobs in the IT industry; and I hope Apple can continue to innovate in his absence.

I still won't buy it tho :)