Feb
5
Apple’s Got Vision
February 5, 2007
Steve Jobs will go down in history as one of the world’s greatest marketers.
He didn’t invent the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse or the trackball. Digital music players and cell phones were selling for years before Apple (AAPL) introduced
their versions. But Jobs made them better and easier to use.
What Steve Jobs has is vision. The CEO of Apple Inc. knows what consumers want and knows how to make it simple. (For our article “Apple: Keeping things Simple” click here)
He saw the Graphical User Interface and mouse at Xerox PARC and made them commercially successful products with his Macintosh computer. The trackball was licensed from Logitech and introduced in the Apple Powerbook.
As for digital music players and cell phones, do I really need to talk about the iPod and the recently introduced iPhone?
Even NEXT Technologies, the company he started after leaving Apple in 1985 was bought by Apple and its technology was used to create many great products including OS X.
If you were at MacWorld 2007 and saw the iPhone unveiled, you were surrounded by a record audience and loud applause for every other word out of Steve Jobs’ mouth. But it wasn’t always like that. I recently found a video on YouTube announcing the first iPod in 2001. You can watch it by clicking on the link below. There is a small audience and
almost no applause. The audience, which of course is filled with experts in the technology industry, had no idea that the iPod was going to be the hit it became, as well as disrupt the music industry. They never imagined that you could squeeze your entire music collection into a handheld device, as well as videos. And now you can even make phone calls!
But did even the great Steve Jobs realize that his iPod would be the hit it became? Did Steve Jobs have the vision to see the Video iPod or the iPhone when he released the original iPod in 2001?
If he did, would he have named the software that connects the iPod to your computer: iTunes?
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