Books, Business, and Steve Jobs. A tribute.

This post is a tribute to Steve Jobs. I know that its been a long time, and i'm late and a thousand different things and so on, but I didn't want to rush things and lose the chance to say something I really felt about this man who has radically changed the way we look at things.

I had been to the local stationary shop here in Manipal since my brother wanted to buy a few books. After we had done our thing, we looked around the shop to see what else was new. As we were staring at a 6-in-one book which carried a huge price, the shopkeeper came up to show us this book even as we said we were not going to buy it. This book had plastic sheets that one could attach to the spine of the book. The high price of the item was due to it allowing the lucky owner to decide on the allotment of pages per subject. As we were coming out, i started thinking of how things have changes since i was a kid. Back then we had just a handful of choices and our page size was decided by either an imaginary line or by crudely cutting the book. The page quality was shoddy and so was the binding. These days, we are spoiled for choice in page size, kind of binding, cover and even the pictures on the cover! And now, even how we intend to divide the book pages to use.

However, thinking along these lines and about the past just concluded one thing for me, this choice was always there. We could choose how we wanted our television channels, how we wanted things set up, recently how to choose hardware, or the tone for our doorbell. Later came the advanced electronics era where we could decide which track to play on one box ( a cd player ) by clicking buttons on yet another unconnected box ( a remote ). One would suppose that this trend would definitely find an money making equivalent on the internet, an exponentially expanding phenomenon. people did try, but it took a Steve jobs to intelligently figure a way out to make it work. And how! It made apple richer than Microsoft. And made the app developers richer too. The guy gave attention to 4 things only - quality, quality, quality and quality. Users of any product of Apple knew that they would get to use software that were vetted by the quality people at Apple and they would get the best experience ever. The hardware was/is top notch. The UI looks amazing.

This is why one of my idols is Steve Jobs. He paid attention to detail and it made him re-invent the way people live, both through his products and through the android based devices that look like they are inferior clones of the apple gizmos. Well done, Steve Jobs! may your soul rest in peace.......