I didn’t like Steve Jobs.
And why?
Because at my dinosauric age of 39, Steve Jobs completely turned my easy chugging life Upside Down.
This is what he did to me:
– He made me go crazy with his attention to detail!
Check out this MacBook remote control I bought some time back:
When I peeled the small tape that sealed this slim box together, I was awestruck. The tape was EXACTLY as slim as the groove it was supposed to sit in. It was NOT EVEN 1 micron broader.
This attention to detail has consumed me in my everyday life.
When I open lunch boxes, envelopes, anything at all – however insignificant, I remember this MacBook remote control box!
I once gave a video descriptive rant to the head of business of Cafe Coffee Day (a coffee shop chain in India) about how their sandwiches were packed in boxes with tapes that were too broad, too long and too difficult to open. I told them to buy this remote control to understand the solution.
Steve Jobs made me think of everything with perfection. And that torments me every single day 🙁
– Steve Job made me understand simplicity.
Every time I operate my Sony Bravia using the remote control below, I feel nauseated:
That’s because Steve Jobs taught me that there is NO NEED for complexity and confusion. His iPod, his iTouch and his iPhone constantly remind me of that.
Now, every time I operate ANYTHING that is non Apple, I keep applying this logic of ‘simplicty’ to it and wonder why most people JUST DON’T GET IT…?
This obsession with simplicity has seeped into my life. The way I talk. The way I think. The way I write and definitely the way I do business.
It’s very very difficult to be simple and that’s the pain I live with now.
– Steve Jobs reinforced my sense of MORALS (and hence made me feel guilty of my previous misdeeds).
At a time when iTunes was not popular, digital music of the pirated variety was proliferating like a weed.
I was (still am) obsessed with music and there was no way to ship CDs of music I loved from the USA when I was in India. Yet to enjoy that new music, I started falling prey to ‘packaged’ cassettes that I know had been ripped off from original albums.
Once iTunes came along, I have NEVER EVER burnt or bought an illegitimate sound track. And I feel so proud about it! At the same time I now look back and retrospectively feel guilty of having bought pirated music.
– Steve Jobs made me very Ambitious (and restless).
As an Indian Games Company, we were chugging along OK.
Making games and selling them to Indian brands, etc was what we understood.
However, the iTunes platform and the ability to make SMALL, self created games and SELL them to the entire world made Entrepreneurs like me WAKE UP!
We did not HAVE to be EA to be big in games. We could be games2win!
Now, every passing day, even small ideas give me INSPIRATION to create some kind of app and put it out there – in the hope that it could be my lucky break!
A simple game of ours called ‘Super Mom’ that we built in Mumbai – that cost us less than 2000 US$ has already grossed us 100,000 US$ on the iStore (Ads+downloads) so far.
I do not know WHERE and HOW that would have ever been possible.
Steve Jobs continues to give me sleepless nights ‘coz I still dream games and apps all night long and have the ability to make them HAPPEN when I wake up.
Steve Jobs, you are my Guru. And true to Guru tradition, you torment me to make me perfect.
May you now teach the Gods a thing or two….
This day (the day you passed away) is surely what I call ‘Sunset on Earth, Sunrise on Heaven’
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Addendum: Thanks to Steve Job’s inspiration, my Company was finally able to hit #1 this June!!
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First Published on: Aug 25, 2011