Thoughts On The Steve Jobs Legacy

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 29

Reading through Bloomberg News’ mistakenly published obituary today has got me to thinking a little bit about how history will remember Steve Jobs.

In case you missed it, Jobs joined scores of other notable people who over the years have seen their pre-written obituaries prepared long in advance of such articles ever being needed, published by mistake on the Bloomberg News wires.

News organizations routinely write obituaries of notable people years, and sometimes decades in advance of their deaths so that they can ready for publication on short notice. These obits not supposed to see the light of day until the subject of the obituary actually dies, but occasionally they do. Wikipedia even has a page on the subject. The reporters at Bloomberg were probably taking advantage of a slow news cycle to update their files and pressed the wrong button. Notable similar cases include those of Mark Twain, Bob Hope, Vice-President Cheney, former President Gerald Ford and many others.

But the whole incident got me to thinking about Jobs, his life story so far, his legacy, and how history will judge him in say, 50 or 100 years.

Jobs is the kind of CEO that contemporary journalists and business biographers love: The story of his career has humble beginnings, has over the decades followed a dramatic arc, is filled with lots of telling anecdotes betraying an intriguing, cunning and ultimately fascinating personality. But how will he stand up against the titans of American industrial like JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, or Howard Hughes?

In terms of overall wealth, he’s not in their class. The latest Forbes estimate of his wealth is $5.4 billion, and impressive as it is, by that measure alone, it’s small compared to many other great American fortunes. As a percentage of the $14 trillion U.S. economy, which is the measure The New York Times used last year when it built a list of the “Wealthiest Americans Ever” it amounts to 0.04% of the economy, while Bill Gates’ fortune in 2007 amounted to more 0.59% of the economy.

And the great names of American industry are also associated with their philanthropic work, and the charitable foundations that have outlived them. Jobs isn’t widely known for his association with philanthropic causes. Neither he nor wife Laurene Powell Jobs are mentioned on any of the lists of major philanthropic gifts, though it’s certainly possible if not likely that they make anonymous gifts and as such never see any publicity for them. Apple has however been criticized as one of America’s Least Philanthropic Companies by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. (There’s that nagging question about the huge pile of cash Apple is sitting on again.) Here Gates would again, appear to have eclipsed Jobs via the $33 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I asked the historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University about this. He thinks Jobs will clearly be seen as an important character in the narrative of his era, but in a second tier. “Bill Gates will have huge Pulitzer Price-winning biographies written about him,” Brinkley says. “When people look back on the boom in Silicon Valley and the revolution in computers Jobs will be remembered as a player in the group portrait of that era, though not a dominant figure of that era. … His story will certainly be studied, and its an important one, but not in the way that others will be.”

But are wealth and visible philanthropy the only gauges by which history judges great business leaders? How about cultural impact? Look at the many places where the life’s work of Steve Jobs has impacted the daily lives of millions:

-He was directly responsible for making personal computing accessible to the average person, and for seeing the potential that computing could have when given to average people.

-Through the iPod and iTunes, he and his company all but fully upended the 100+ year old recording industry first established by none other than Thomas Edison. More than 150 million iPods have shipped in the course of five years, and the effects it has had on the consumption of media in the last five years is something that’s not yet fully understood, and one that future media and cultural historians will debate alongside the long-term effects of radio, television and the Internet itself.

-The historial impact of the iPhone, a device for which Jobs seems to want to be remembered is as yet hard to gauge, but its potential for having an iPod-like seismic effect is certainly there. Personal computing can now be concentrated in a handheld device. While we in the present debate the finer points of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G, I have to wonder if historians will look upon the iPhone as an important technological and cultural panacea like the personal computer itself, or as a fad that had run its course within a decade only to be replaced by another more fabulous shiny new thing.

-His company, in no small part because of his personal aesthetic, has left an indelible influence on the way products are designs. Every major Apple product quickly spawns imitators, from iPhone knock-offs, to music players that tried to mimic the iPods look and feel to other products that aim to borrow from and re-interpret Apple’s design language to their own needs.

-Pixar, a company he acquired during his years outside Apple, and the changes it wrought on entertainment will also be well-remembered. Animated films, long an important cultural touchstone of American life are all now computer-generated; Not just anyone becomes the majority shareholder of such a bedrock American company as Disney.

-Then there’s the tale of Apple itself, one told so many times that school kids in Silicon Valley can probably recite the details from memory. Along with Hewlett-Packard, Apple is the very archetype of a company started in garage, its founders two precocious 20-somethings who saw technology as a means to change the world. You know the rest that followed: The boardroom confrontation and Jobs’ ouster; The years in the wilderness; The return; Saving the company from certain doom with the iMac; iPod and iPhone Madness; The Mac once again rising to challenge Microsoft’s dominance.

Maybe the story so far, compelling as it is, hasn’t yet risen to the level of importance that future historians will consider a first-tier subject for study. But as we’ve been reminded by the detailed reading of the Bloomberg obit, the story of Steve Jobs has been marked by many, many surprises along the long and winding road. And thankfully, it’s not over yet.

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