“I don’t know what the world is going to look like next year.
Or even tomorrow. We live in exciting times…
and that excitement cuts both ways,
good and bad. Scary and delightful.”
~ John Carlton
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In 1982 I was shown my new office at UCLA Medical Center – against the wall was a Wang word processor, accompanied by an impact printer covered by a sound dampening hood. I pulled out the manual, booted up the machine and was off and running in a quarter hour.
THEN I went to USC’s MBA program and got the joy of sitting for hours in the halls outside the computer lab, waiting for my turn to use sluggish PCs.
Muttering about it to a pal who had just joined this company I’d never heard of… Apple… she said “Why don’t you get a MAC?”
Elaborately simple explanations over dinner in an Indian restaurant, and I bought the first Mac – 128K with 400Kb discs that had to be interchanged, and who cared? I created brilliant reports in no time flat.
Of course I upgraded it to a Mac Plus so it would have resell value… silly me… then donated it to a school. My closet has every laptap Apple released since then in a nice grey pyramid. as I type this on my Macbook Pro. My Titanium sits as backup for when I’m multitasking.
Every four years or so, as I shifted my clients and consulting work to new settings, I’d find myself explaining all over again how completely simple it was to use the Mac, as every PC devotee responded with “But there are no programs for the Mac…”
Funny that. I only needed word processing, graphics (bless PowerPoint2) and spreadsheets so who cared if PCs had a gazillion programs? And Tetris to use my my language centers stalled and needed a break.
Every couple of years someone would sheepishly say “I just sat down at a Mac. NOW I get what you meant!”
Bless Steve Jobs for his relentlessness. And from being so public and unapologetic about it.
I don’t love everything Apple puts out, I can think of ways to improve the usability of the iPhone in about 5 minutes, but never mind. His relentless push to break through “that’s how it is” has inspired 10,000 creators to be as relentless in finding ways to unleash their own creativity, enriching all our lives in every arena.
And making Breakthroughs the norm has spawned 1,000 campuses that devote their curriculum to out of the box thinking. Perhaps I’ve understated that creators count. World population nearing 7 billion… Unleashed creatives and problem-solvers? Probably 7,000,000.
Thank you Steve for the world you’ve fertilized on all our behalves.
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“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games. I’ve failed over and over
and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
~ Michael Jordan
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