World without Jobs

MANILA, Philippines - I have a friend who once likened the Apple company to a cult led by miracle worker Steve Jobs. The Apple retail stores were white, immaculate places of worship that Apple’s minions would regularly pay homage to, led by the geek priests known as the Mac Geniuses. On a regular period, the world watched in captivated awe as Steve Jobs (yes, he’s earned the right to be one of those people whose names must be mentioned in full, always) delivered his keynote speeches and held up his latest miracle, the indulgence that we knew we needed if we wanted to be saved from horrible product design and bad customer service.

Friendly fires: As collaborators early on in their careers, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates once had a famous falling-out, but that seems to be all patched up now.

I’ll end the metaphor now out of fear of being accused of blasphemy, although please note that I likened Apple to a cult, not a religion, but I digress.

By the time Apple rolled out the Macbook and the iPod in the early 00s under Steve Jobs’ leadership, there was no Sony, there was no Microsoft Windows, there was no Toshiba, Dell or Hewlett-Packard. When the iPhone came out, hardly anybody I knew was carrying a Nokia anymore and now, the Finnish mobile phone company is set to disappear by 2012, according to the Wall Street Journal. In other words, every established technology brand that I grew up with in the 90s was effectively mangled and messed up by Apple’s reentry into the market. Nobody cared that Sony was the biggest player when it came to CD Walkmans or that Windows completely monopolized computer interfaces. Then, with the advent of the iPad, there wasn’t even any obliteration to be done; everybody else just struggled to keep up.

Going back to my hazardous metaphor, it’s difficult to maintain a strong following when the group’s founding leader is hanging in the balance. Charts have shown stockholders that the rise and fall of Apple’s stocks have reflected Steve Jobs’ precarious health fluctuations. Heck, when Apple gave him the boot in 1985, it got into such bad shape that the company bought NeXt Computers, the company he founded after he was kicked out, in 1996 just so they could have him back again.

Now, Steve Jobs is leaving for real and it’s the end of an era. But if there’s one thing he should be proud of, it’s the fact that he built a company that will go on even without him and created a following that will remain devoted, so long as Apple doesn’t deviate too much from his vision. So it’s only fair for him to finally get some rest, then have his apple and eat it, too.