dubographi.es  Jesse Hodges' Blog

When my Grandfather died our family did an interesting grieving exercise in which each of us defined my Grandfather with a single word. When I heard today that Steve Jobs had died I immediately thought back to this exercise and the word that would fit Steve best. I think I found it:

Quality

I’ve experienced it first hand. My first apple computer was a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet (series 1). I bought it in 1998, just a year after Steve had resumed work for Apple as CEO (it was the first laptop released since his return). I was fourteen years old and my PowerBook and I were inseperable. I grew up on that computer and it taught me valuable life lessons. I attribute a lot of my positive qualities to the hacker ethic that I learned on that computer. 

Fun fact: if I had invested the cost of the computer (approximately $3000 including a low end $600 CD burner) in Apple stock, I would be a cool $103,000 richer today. The laptop now resides in my water-heater closet with a dead battery and some 10 year old linux distro on it. I don’t regret it. I’m happy to be on the user’s side of Apple’s success because it embodies something important. I’ve owned dozens and dozens of Apple products. I’ve never been dissapointed and I’m happy to have contributed to their massive Wall Street success.

Apple’s success is meaningful and deserves metaphysical exploration. If you could boil down the model for success into just a few sentences, what would it be? I believe that Grant Huhn put it nicely (as quoted by John Gruber):

Apple is doing, and has been doing, things much different than any company — in any industry — for at least the past ten years. Apple’s products and operation are vastly superior. Many people have recognized this all along. Some people will never recognize it.

It’s just now the numbers confirm it.

When I read this for the first time it struck me as true, obvious, and I didn’t think I’d think twice about it. But it stuck with me. What ultimately struck me was the contrast drawn to other companies; no other company in the history of the world has had the same kind of success with a quality-first business model.

Stereotypical Big Business consists of diehard, cutthroat, undercut-your-competitors and squeeze-your-customers-for-all-they’re-worth practices. We see this everyday and we know there is something fundamentally wrong with it. Under Steve Job’s leadership Apple bucked this trend and created quality products that are built to serve their customers.

The kicker is that Steve made it work. Eight of the top nine most valuable (by market cap) businesses in the world are either banks or oil companies. Deep down inside, all of us know these companies are evil. Steve’s Apple tops the list. And quality got them there.

There are few words as profound or meaningful as quality and Steve embodied it. He brought it to Big Business in a way that has never been seen before, and our society needed it desperately. We are all better off for emphasized quality and we owe Steve Jobs a great deal of gratitude.