Life without Steve

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Published on Wednesday, 12 October 2011 11:12

Written by Liam Kruger

Image: mayakaloyanova.blogspot.comSteve Jobs is dead. His legacy continues in the company that he built, and the products that he presented to the world – even so, a vacuum has been left in his wake. Who will take his place, as the central figure in the world of technology – the name and face that everybody knows?

Tim Cook, Jobs’ immediate successor at Apple is one thought; there is a certain continuity, at least, in having Apple’s CEO be the individual that we identify with the heart of technological progress. And yet, as Apple’s plummeting share prices following Cook’s failure to announce the iPhone 5 last week will attest, there is a sense that, while Jobs was the absolute head of Apple, leading it where he felt it needed to go, Cook is merely the company’s figurehead, running it with no more charisma than any other CEO would.

We could look too to Erich Schmidt, CEO of the goliath Google – with whom Apple has had, and continues to have, an on-again off-again relationship. Certainly, Schmidt is a giant of internet policy, whose decisions greatly affect almost every technology user out there. But Schmidt has been that giant for years – and pioneers generally don’t come from the incumbent ranks.

Mark Zuckerburg is another candidate; the shift that we’ve seen from innovation to hardware to innovation with software, particularly social networking platforms, would be well represented in having the world’s attention shift from the maker of Apple to the maker of Facebook. But again, Zuckerburg has already made his mark, and a mild change to the news feed hardly constitutes innovation.

The question, of course, is a wrong-headed one; we will not see ‘another Steve Jobs.’ But if we’re looking for another such pioneer, somebody who’ll be having the kind of impact that Jobs has had, we’d be better suited to look not in corporate boardrooms, but in the garages and basements of the world – garages like the one where, not four decades ago, a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first rudimentary models of what would become the Apple Mac computer.