Never imagined it would be this hard to write a post on him. When I read the news yesterday, I first confirmed it on many other sites and refreshed all the pages, just hoping that probably all of them were reporting wrong. Of course I can’t say this was too surprising knowing the number of surgeries he had gone through and the latest reports of his health but it still was a shocker. As I am writing this post today, two days after Steve Jobs passed, after all those emotions have calmed down, I am still speechless. If I had written this post yesterday, I know it would have come out totally different. It would have probably been much harder yesterday for me to come up with words but even today I don’t have the right words!

If you think I am being overly dramatic, it’s not just me! When I think of it now, I understand why there was such a huge reaction to his death. What is it that made Steve Jobs stand out from the pack? Generally, people don’t even know who are the CEO’s of the companies they like or even what the heck do they do. But Steve was different. Doesn’t matter if you liked Apple’s products or not (or if you liked them but just couldn’t buy them due them being out of your pocket and hence your hatred towards them) but you knew who and what Steve Jobs was. What was it that makes him so special? There are a lot of his quotes doing the rounds but my most favorite among them is this:

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains

This quote pretty much sums up everything Steve Jobs was. It pretty much tells about the DNA of the Apple that Steve Jobs built and the way he wanted it to be. Isn’t that what the KISS principle says? And this is reflected in every Apple product. When average people go out to buy, say, a smartphone, it doesn’t matter to them if it has a 1.0 GHz processor vs a 1.2 GHz processor, if it’s a Qualcomm or Tegra. All that matters to them is, can it do what they are expecting and how easy can it be done – as simple as that. This is where all the problem lies! Principles of software engineering say that ‘designing’ should be given the most time in a software engineering cycle but rarely it happens! When Google was testing their homepage in their early days, for user behavior patterns, one of the interesting response they got from a person was “Does it take this much time to load the homepage?”. It was the case that, like other web pages of those days, he was expecting  lot of pictures, flashy graphics, advertisements and other bloatware to load but in case of Google it was just plain simple search box which took no time. Even today, Google’s homepage is still the same – plain and simple! However, this doesn’t mean not being perfect. Jobs on the other hand was (this past tense sucks!) known for his perfection.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through

This is the difference between ‘getting it done’ and ‘getting it done perfectly’. He is the man who brought Apple from getting bankrupt to being the largest company in the world. Apple’s products doesn’t even dominate the market share and yet they have the largest cash reserves. How many products have you seen hundreds of people lining up for hours? China has one of the lowest (or the lowest) wages in the world and yet they have the largest Apple store and a crazy fan following in China – something to really think about right?

When I thought of writing this post yesterday, things I wanted to write about was – what Steve Jobs did and why he was great. But when I started writing it today and reading about related articles on him (in the past), it made me really angry. I realized that the problem was not in Steve Jobs attitude but in fact in some people having a problem with it! All he is about is being simple, elegant and doing it perfectly and if you have a problem with that, well then you are the problem!

If he’s seeing all this from up there, he must be saying it to himself “iWin”!

Rest In Peace Steve Jobs! The world can’t thank you enough. In your own own words:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

UPDATE: Here’s a great post about Steve Jobs. Few things that I wanted to write but couldn’t.