Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

The tears didn’t fall, but they were there.

I don’t believe in idols anymore, but I do admire people and seek to learn from others. In the past decade, I’ve come to really admire and respect Steve Jobs.

For me, it’s his sense of humanity that is most important. Many people bring technology to people. Steve brought how people worked to technology and forever changed our expectations about what’s possible.

Which is why I found myself almost crying yesterday afternoon when I read on Twitter that he’d passed away.

An important voice in the world is now silent. He guided us to build technology for people, enabling us to be more creative, free and human. Fortunately, we had that voice around long enough to learn from.

Steve – your Stanford Commencement speech has been on my refrigerator since you gave it, pushing me forward, reminding me to do what I love. I didn’t have to meet you in order to learn from you.

Thank you. You are missed.

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In the past few weeks we’ve seen something new from Steve Jobs: an interest in communicating with “the commoners” using digital communications channels like email and blogging. First, it was the email he sent in reply to a developer about the iPhone OS 4.0 release and then last week it was a letter on the corporate website, talking about Flash. Now, I haven’t looked into this extensively, but it seems to me that he’s taking a bit more of an open stance towards communicating with the world at large about Apple decision-making.

Importantly, the letter on the Adobe issue was indicative of his interest in communicating with developers about what’s going on behind the scenes. The Jobs who lost the PC developer war to Microsoft refused to do this. It looks like he might have learned a few things. I highly recommend reading the entire letter from Jobs, but in particular, this paragraph is highly informative. For those of you looking to understand the strategy Apple’s employing and how they think about their business, here it is, quite concisely (emphasis on the devices piece is mine):

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

And just for a bit of fun, if I was on the team at Apple really focused on the developer platform and its adoption, this might be my theme song right about now:

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