Thank You, Steve

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." -- Steve Jobs

It’s rare that a business item that’s not related to the financial meltdown makes the front page, but Steve Jobs’ medical leave-of-absence from Apple is one such story. Steve Jobs transformed a left-behind tech company to one that is the leader of the pack. He redesigned Macintosh computers with color and rounded shapes, upended the digital music industry with iTunes and the iPod, opened Apple stores when the bricks-and-mortar model was supposedly passé, and became the cellphone leader with the iPhone in 2007. Meanwhile Apple continued to pour resources into the Mac, the OSX operating system, and its user-friendly software, and the Mac’s market share grew in a PC-centric world.

As longtime buyers of Apple products and often forlorn investors in its stock, we are astounded by the company's decade-long reversal and ascent in fortune. Great-men-of-history skeptics say that we give too much credit to individuals (e.g., they might say that the Allies would have been victorious without Churchill and Roosevelt), but it’s clear to this observer that Steve Jobs changed the history of technology.

For self-interested reasons we hope that Steve Jobs returns to Apple, but whether he does or not, we wish him recovery and happiness. Thank you, Steve. © 2009 Stephen Yuen