Now what I will write below should be taken as a personal reflection, closer to thoughts about my own next moves rather than a judgement on the man himself. He surely deserves the credit he is getting now. He was a good man and we are better off for having him.
I contrast him with Bill Gates. Bill and his cohorts were the greatest evil I encountered in my past life — and that life exposed me to much of the world that is evil. I use the term evil with care so as to deliberately place him in the category of having done conscious serious harm to the well-being of society.
(Meeting both of these men early in their careers tells you nothing of the personalities they would be known for. They were both personable but strong advocates for their products, people of the kind you routinely ran into that could have become friends.)
Bill did three things that I deplore.
He Stole.
Now this was not as unique to Gates as the other offenses. It was and still is common in other industries, but we forget that before his rise, work in the technology sector was more of an art, more like science where sharing was the norm, as opposed to the culture of commerce. Every key research center worked according to the values of art and what Jobs would later call ‘the liberal arts.’ It wasn’t a perfect time, but it was radically different than what followed, what Microsoft brought.
The Basic interpreter and then the operating system were stolen, pure and simple. I cannot fully represent the chilling effect that had on the communities that could have fed the world. Sharing went away; it had to. Now, we have the extreme situation where companies exist that make nothing at all; instead they ‘own’ ideas so they can extort patent payments.
Some analysts understand the cost to society, as Microsoft sucked wealth out of the ecosphere, but few understand the far, far greater opportunity cost, lost because of the creation of a huge business based on what can fairly be called theft. This extends to Microsoft even today; though they were the giant and though they accumulated untold wealth, none, absolutely none was turned to innovation. For the over a trillion dollars they pulled out of the economy, they have invented essentially nothing beyond the business model and what it takes to reinforce it. The profit was based on the innovations of others.
The bottom line is that the sector was too immature to have protections against predators, and Gates took unseemly advantage.
He Developed a Culture of Destruction.
In post-war America, companies pretty much did well or not based on what they made — how good it was. This is the key idea defining market forces that attracts the faith we have in it: if you create value for the customer you will do well. Gates took a different approach; whenever a competitor or potential competitor appeared, the entire company was turned to crush it. Their primary product was destruction and they were very good at it. Within Silicon Valley, it was known that Microsoft would go further and personally humiliate the defeated — the way a mob boss would — so as to deter competition.
The threat was so effective that Microsoft could force a competitor to withdraw or fail simply by announcing that they would offer a competing product, even if it were a lie. Microsoft did this so often without actually creating the product, that it became the subject of an intimidation watch in the Justice department. (I may have testified.) Even with friendly clout purchased in the US Congress and Administration, their egregious behavior was deemed criminal. Bottom line here: Gates was a dangerous thug when he had the power to be and to the extent he could.
He Built a Closed Empire.
This is what powerful business organizations do when they can, becoming bigger and asserting more control over the market. They did so by unethical means, but the nature of what Gates built was an offense of its own. Microsoft was the first company whose tools are used for everything. Every significant business on the planet had to use their tools, for better or worse. These tools never were designed with the first priority being to enhance the lives and work of the customer. They were instead designed to be merely ‘good enough’ in that regard while being excellent in how they served the strategic business goals of the company.
Few people will criticize Microsoft for this. After all, the tools were in fact good enough. But what if Microsoft really did engage in open competition when it mattered? What if every business process and clerical transaction, every desktop analytical tool on the planet was not designed to benefit a single monopoly but to unlock the creative power the market could empower in those businesses? I solidly claim that we would be vastly wealthier, happier and more just as a society.
I do honestly believe that we would have made significant progress in eliminating problems we face, instead of every one getting worse. One man and his support crew prevented this for gluttonous gain. It is why Google, when they started, took the slogan ‘don’t be evil.’
Steve Jobs...
...has almost singlehandedly been able to reverse the second of these offenses. By this, I mean he fixed it for the individual; it is too late for American businesses. Apple is not going to fight the fight of restoring creativity in business, and it may be too late for American industry to overcome the structural problems it has, many of which I blame on the tech industry. (Read my professional work on virtual enterprises for more on this.) But what Apple has done is restore at least the consumer technology marketplace to health. Now, you simply have to make the customer’s life better or you cannot sell your gear. Apple gets that ‘better’ is multidimensional but it has to be actually better for the consumer. (Jobs himself had Zen values, and understands that what we call kutachi matters.)
This was not an insignificant feat. Jobs is rightfully credited with saving and building Apple, but what he did as well was save the soul of an entire industry. For this we need to celebrate the man. All the qualities we have been hearing about after his death feed this triumph.