Steve Jobs' passing - Goodbye to a great man

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away today at the age of 56. He had a rare form of pancreatic cancer called pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer, which produces islet cell of neuroendocrine tumors. This form is usually less agressive than pancreatic exocrine cancer and patients can usually live longer, with an average survival rate of more than 3 years.

While Jobs' legendary perfectionism and insistence on simplicity and elegance for Apple's products were the qualities of an aesthete, and led to his becoming something of a guru to all Apple employees (Fortune remarked that Apple employees' primary question was always "WWSD - What Would Steve Do?"). But his goal was to create products that could command premium prices and ensure rich profits.

The Apple CEO's unique combination of showmanship, eye for detail and instinct for business strategy may make it hard to identify his rightful place in business history. (He is the young man at left in this picture.)

Everyone knows Steve Jobs pulled off one of the outstanding corporate turnarounds in U.S. history, and he did it on the strength of cool products. Cool products like the Mac my kids use, the iPhone we all depend on, and iTunes, a dependable source of good music for our iPods. Clearly in Steve's case, the "i's" had it.

But coolness aside, Jobs was a master of bare-knuckled business strategies from the old school. Apple's reputation for nearly flawless manufacturing quality, not merely its svelte engineering, is what enables the company to make premium pricing look like a value proposition. Apple devices may cost more, but they always seem to work. In its most recent fiscal year, Apple's profit margin was more than 21%; at Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest PC manufacturer, it was 7%.

Jobs' well-known control-freak ethos accounts for the closed approach binding Apple's mobile devices and their content — songs purchased from the iTunes store can't be played on competing companies' devices, for example. Although in the iPod's early days, many thought this would doom it to irrelevance, Jobs' strategy paid off. There was a method to his madness: He believed simplicity and consistency would draw customers to legal digital music downloads. And he was right. I used to have other music services on my computer, like Bear Share and another I can't remember. All that remains, is the iTunes store.

And the App Store, through which Apple kept a stranglehold on outside software written for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, is the ultimate expression of Jobs' desire for order. Programs can be distributed through the App Store only after they're approved by Apple, which takes a 30% cut of their revenue — another Jobsian exploitation of a very un-Zen business strategy.

Steve Jobs was a Buddhist. According to the press (much of which is quoted here), his business strategies were very much not in the Buddhist tradition. But all of that is nothing but nay-saying now. Instead, I would simply like to offer Mr. Jobs' family and friends my condolences, and express my gratitude for the miraculous contribution Steve Jobs' brilliance made in my life, and the life of everyone I know. He was truly a genius, a man whose work will continue to bless us for years to come.