Thank you so much, Steve

Except if you are living on another planet you probably know by now that Steve Jobs is no longer Apple CEO. Sure, Steve will stay ay Apple as chairman of the board but Tim Cook will be new Apple CEO and obviously if Steve did this change it's because his strengths are not anymore what they were before. Of course it will also help to have a soft transition which shouldn't have big effects on the stock market, but more than this it means something more sad: Steve is going to die.

Of course i hope that he will stay with us as long as possible, but considering that his own vision and the Apple products who came out of it had a tremendous effect on my life i would like to take a minute or two to send him all my thanks, and more. Actually, Disney and more probably wouldn't exist if i didn't had the good idea to buy an Apple iMac as my first computer twelve years ago. Even if the new iMacs are now incredibly superior everything was so easy and intuitive on my first iMac that i found in love with it! And that's one of the reason i like Apple computers: not only the Mac OS X operating system is stellar, but you can feel so much that everything was designed thinking about the user experience before anything else - and, yes, even before making money out of the products - that your Mac is not only a fantastic tool, but also beautiful and you cherish it like the technological treasure that it is.

When people talk about Walt Disney they generally salute him as a visionary genius - and for sure he was one. Personally i consider Steve Jobs being at the same "altitude" than Walt in his vision capacity, although both were not working in the same category - movie and entertainment for Walt and technology for Steve. What do you need to be a genius, by the way? Well, first, a genius is someone who has an incredibly free spirit. Two, he is someone who is "naturally" visionary. There is no genius without vision, it's just impossible. And when i talk about vision, i mean "inside vision", or if you prefer another word: insight. Three, a genius has the constant ability to do the synthesis, i.e to be able to think about all the different plans of the reality at the same time and do the synthesis of them. And for sure, that's what Steve Jobs did from the start.

There is a famous David Lynch movie title which was "Fire walk with me". And i think this would fit perfectly to define Steve. He is a man with so much "fire" and the qualities - or defaults - associated to the "fire energy" as ancient chinese defines it, i.e high idealism, sense of beauty, capacity of vision and synthesis, tenacity, but also sometime a bit dictatorial with "olympian angers". For Steve, the goal, obviously, has always been to have the perfect ideal device becoming real and no matter how long it will take. But behind all this, there is another idea in the mind of Steve: to create products that makes life worth living. If we spend time on this planet it's not to create crap but to bring and share with the rest of the world a certain level of quality, and if possible the highest level of quality. In his case, products that will help people in their life and give them the ability to create as easily as possible what they wish.

Is there anything that i don't like at Apple or in Steve Jobs? Sure, there is. I'm not a big fan of the "control freak" side, but i understand why Steve has to be like this. Because of his knowledge of reality - and in this case i'm talking about "human beings" reality - he knows that someone, somewhere, is waiting to screw everything. It's a law of life: there is no constructive energy without a destructive one. It happened at Apple when Steve was ousted in the 1985 and when John Sculley, Apple's CEO at that time almost destroyed Apple before Steve comeback in 1996. Since then, with the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad Apple has revolutionized our reality and makes things so much more simple that it's hard to don't thanks him for that - does anyone remember how dumbs were the mobile phones operating system before the iPhone? And of course, let's not forget Pixar and its tremendous contribution to the world of animation!

So, yes, thank you so much Steve, mission is almost accomplished - i say "almost" because the perfectionist that you are is intelligent enough to know that absolute perfection is not of this world, which doesn't mean that we don't have to try to get close to it. And that's what you did, wonderfully.


Picture: copyright apple Inc