Steve Jobs: You Will Be Missed

In 1987 I worked in downtown Portland, Oregon at the Nynex Business Center (formerly IBM Product Centers).  We sold IBM, Compaq and Apple products.  I was a young college intern, fresh off the dairy farm and I was in awe of our sales team.  They lived a lifestyle I had only read about.  They traveled, they drove BMWs, they lived in downtown condominiums...and they all had something in common - they were in awe of Apple's Macintosh computer.  That was my first impression of the genius in Steve Jobs.

Here are five things that have most impressed me about Steve Jobs:

1. He was driven out of Apple and the company tanked.  Steve came back and re-created one of the most respected, innovative and successful companies on the planet. 
2. He went into a different industry with Pixar, and created a wildly successful company in the movie industry while pioneering a whole new genre of big time, money making, annimated films.  Pixar was sold to Disney for billions of dollars.
3. He repeatedly impressed us with his designs and understandings of what we wanted, even before we did.
4. I have been in the mobile industry for over a decade.  Steve changed my world.  He did not move the enterprise mobility industry forward with baby steps, it was giant leaps that took us beyond our own imaginations.
5. He not only was a product guy, he created markets.  His vision of the Apple iTunes store revolutionized mobility.  A market place?  This required an entirely different set of skills, but he had them.

Steve showed us that success can be accomplished repeatedly.  Genius can be genius across many different industries.  He showed us that success is not a roll of the dice, but a mindset.  I will miss Steve Jobs.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor Volunteer

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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.