This was published 12 years ago
Touched by the hand of Jobs
The Apple boss left a lasting impression on all who worked with him.
By Garry Barker
MILLIONS of words have been written about Steve Jobs, before and since his death, and the flow continues because he and his works have touched so many.
He was a rare, driven, complex, demanding, uncompromising, unconventional, often rude but seldom unfair person who really did ''put a ding in the universe'', as once he expressed his goal.
David Baker worked directly for Steve Jobs in the US.
But what was it like working close to him, day after day? David Baker, a Melbourne computer engineer now back home after a long stint in various roles at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, toiled behind the scenes of the leader's now famous, meticulously, even painfully planned and rehearsed keynote presentations from 1998 to 2003.
He says Jobs always demanded the best from everyone. He could be abrasive, he could call people ''dumb shits'' and if things were not done to his exacting standards, there was ''verbal shrapnel''. But Baker says: ''I never saw anyone treated unfairly. He was never mean or vindictive. People were seldom fired; most were smart enough to know when they didn't fit and decided for themselves to move on.''
At 1 Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters campus in Cupertino, there are many people called Steve but for everyone there was and is still only one real Steve - the boss. No one decreed it, certainly not Jobs himself, but ''Mr Jobs'' just wouldn't have sounded right, even when speaking to him.
''Most of the time we were on the hairy edge of what he wanted us to achieve. He would say: 'That's what I want. Go and do it.' And somehow we would.
''But if things couldn't be built because what we were trying to do really wasn't yet possible, and we had tried all the options, he would finally, grudgingly accept it.''
Walter Isaacson, in the biography he wrote at Jobs' request but which the subject neither influenced nor read, has as its motto the quote from Apple's ''Think Different'' commercial of 1997: ''The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.''
Jobs, together with the people he chose for his team, did just that, revolutionising personal computing (the iMac), computer-generated movies (Pixar), music (iTunes), mobile phones (iPhone), tablet computing (iPad) and digital publishing, which, with the first Macintosh, back in 1984, is where it all began. Or was it?
The true genesis of Jobs' extraordinary achievements came well before that, when he dropped out of college, took LSD, went to an ashram in India and did much else that had little to do with computing but much to do with what he ultimately did with it and for it.
Jobs understood where technology was taking the human race and he was interested in how things worked, Baker says. That understanding came not from any great engineering expertise but through aesthetic senses. ''For him, taste and aesthetics were important; he was a tactile person who liked to feel things with his hands,'' Baker says.
Design was all-important to Jobs. But design, he said, was not just how something looked, it was really how it worked. Baker says Jobs built an innovation engine at Apple, unparalleled in the industry, and it will run even now that he has gone.
''Apple's success was a steady, planned climb in three phases, from one technological plateau to the next,'' he says. ''It has all risen from Mac OS X introduced for the Macintosh in 2000. Then came the iPod, because Jon Rubenstein, then head of hardware, discovered this tiny 1.8-inch Hitachi hard drive he could use in a music player, and then the iPod touch and the iPhone, and now sitting on top of this whole structure, the iPad.''