The World According to Steve Jobs

The recent move by Steve Jobs, who left Apple’s top management post after the recurrence of a cancer that first arose seven years ago, gives us the opportunity to reflect on the role of innovations in history.

Innovations — the wheel, the yoke, metallurgy, the stern rudder, the printing press, the steam engine and many others — are what have, throughout history, created and destroyed empires. Since the United States appeared on history’s stage, the innovator has oftentimes been confused with the industrialist who put the innovation into motion. Rockefeller, Edison and Ford, among others, have understood that an innovation must first tend to a market — a market for men, first with the automobile, then a market for women, by invading the home domain (such as with a refrigerator, washing machine or television).

Steve Jobs, a tragic figure, emerged out of nowhere, without support of any kind, before anyone else, to find that the next global market frontier would be that of young people: to entertain, to communicate and to learn. And one would not be able to garner the attention of young people if not for beautiful, simple objects. Yet it is possible to garner this desired attention by helping them obtain that which attracts them the most: music.

Others have developed from Jobs’ software. He knew that others would be nothing without his machines to use. He has understood that the future isn’t a post-industrial society that holds dominion over many services — as many have said — but a hyper-industrial society, where services would be transformed into industrial objects, which subsequently create the need for new services. Jobs has developed these new mobile devices that the youth of today, not to mention those who are young at heart and seek some rejuvenation, need.

Apple, which has become the most valuable technology company in the world, prepares itself for the future of mobile devices: television services and, without a doubt, the machines of tomorrow for the education and health care sectors.

This man of vision has done all of this on a global scale; he has boosted China’s industrialization over that of the United States and he has helped create jobs. Moreover, he has done this by instituting a closed and protected world for his company’s services — an isolation possible only if Apple’s portable devices were attractive enough to justify the secrecy and if the priority was to accumulate the personal rather than sharing, the enemy of the world according to Jobs.

The world to come, which would justify Jobs’ vision, would be a world united, where the rule of law applies everywhere and young people would prevail.

Today, we are distancing ourselves: The world is divided, eroding the rule of law, and power remains among the older more and more. And these people do nothing to assure that more young men and women purchase portable devices that can boost economic growth.

Thus, Apple cannot be a source of innovation sufficient to stimulate economic growth so long as a major institutional revolution does not take place. Such a revolution would provide young men and women a steady income, as did the fixing of wages for automobiles, the nuclear family and child tax credits. We are very far away from that, in a world where young people are, globally, the first victims of unemployment. And there is no one to provide all of the young people of the world with the spending money needed for the purchase of important goods.

The world according to Jobs is not yet for tomorrow. And even farther away is the world of sharing, which would merge the world of Jobs and the world of accessibility.