Steve Jobs (II)
9 Oct 2011 - I've been thinking. 'He changed the world.' Did he? 'Thanks to him, we do things differently.' Do we?
No.
Yes, the companies he created produced products of exceptional quality and function. Yes, many of us enjoy using them. But if Mr Jobs had never done what he did, what would have been different?
Frankly, very little. Mac - the PC would still have existed, running operating systems that some may not like as much but which still function well.
iPhone - mobile phones and PDA's existed before, maybe with less functionality and ease of use, but they were still there.
ITunes - download businesses weren't new when it hit the net. Making them make money was probably a first, but not the practice of what we did.
iPad - tablet computers had been around, too. Not as neat, but around.
Well, perhaps you could argue that it was the very neatness of all these devices that made them usable. And the design was what made them desirable and therefore bought in such numbers. Perhaps.
But if I think about which technologies have genuinely changed the way I live, then the internet has to be the tops. Connectivity at a marginal cost that is virtually zero really is game-changing. It makes everyone a consumer, everyone a publisher.
The enormous capital cost hurdles that made newspaper publishers and broadcasters into big fish don't exist any more. And this means there are now millions of publishers, instead of tens or hundreds, so state regulation is harder and governments and dictators have less power over what we see, hear, read and think. We know more about what each other thinks, rather than just what the men at the top think.
Record companies no longer own the access to our ears. So they won't be able to support the fat A&R men whose arbitrary tastes decided who broke through. And music can be delivered a song at a time, instead of in batches of fifteen or so - so there's no need to work up an album's worth of material before releasing it, and bands can give their fans a song a month.
I can buy find small producers and retailers anywhere in order to buy anything. The retailers can change their catalogues every day, and I can still interrogate them. I'm not restricted to buying from a few companies who manage to get their printed bibles in my home for me to shop from. So Sears would never have existed today.
And perhaps most importantly, pricing is transparent. Price comparison sites mean that have to be the cheapest commodity, or you have to have a different offering. You decide. (Read a book called 'The Wheelwright's Shop' by George Sturt. He was the third generation of a family of wheelwrights, and what finally did for the business was the railways - they made 'London wheels' available throughout the country, and they ironed out the huge local variations in price that had existed just because they did, and because no-one could buy from anywhere but the local shop.)
The internet doesn't just mean I can be connected to the rest of the world from my desk - the Royal Mail did that hundreds of years ago. But it does mean we can shift huge amounts of information around at virtually insignificant cost, in a way that has never been possible before.
So my vote goes to Mr Berners-Lee - he really did change the way I live my life.
Sorry Steve.