Steve’s greatest job: the editor to Apple visionaries

When Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., died a fortnight ago, my dad went out and bought an iPhone. This emotional response was hardly atypical: rock stars, journalists and politicians alike lauded the man whose sense of showmanship had helped him transcend the shadowy ranks of the business world into the stratosphere of celebrity and brought sleek premium electronics to the hands of millions of Americans.

Arguably the most recognizable CEO on the planet, Jobs’s charisma and keen eye for aesthetics helped Apple become a technology behemoth whose annual revenue exceeds $60 billion.  The company’s shareholders benefitted greatly from his success, rewarded with a share price currently hovering around the $400 mark, up 430 percent from when Jobs regained control of the company in 1997. And so, the legend goes, Jobs became the poster boy of globalization, enshrined forever as the idol of conservative, free-market philosophy.

Well, almost. There’s something about Jobs that makes conservatives a tad uncomfortable. Steve was no straight-laced nerd; he publicly reveled, for a while at least, in the bachelor lifestyle and described dropping acid as “one of the best experiences of my life.” More galling than that, he has no public record of giving to charity. Indeed, when he returned to Apple in 1997, one of his first actions was to abolish the company’s charitable giving arm, insisting it should be the shareholders’ choice of whether or not to donate their money to charity.

Honestly, I have no problem with this stance. After all, why someone would bother to do all in their power to dodge government taxes for a couple decades only to then hand the bulk of their money over to what is likely a more wasteful organization (I’m looking at you, Bill Gates) escapes me. Moreover, to judge the professional legacy of a tech entrepreneur on the size of his heart is like criticizing a quarterback’s performance on the basis of his inarticulate post-game interview.

No, my beef with the way Jobs will be remembered lies in the fact that he will be portrayed as some kind of omnipotent figure who not only ran Apple, but also designed its software, inspected each unit, and was at the store to personally hand you your purchase, $100 rebate and all.  Steve Jobs was, without a doubt, a marvelous innovator with sharp business acumen, but to brand him a full-blown genius is to negate the efforts of Steve Wozniak, Jef Raskin, and thousands of other Apple employees along the way.

Jobs was never a programmer or engineer. His greatest talent was how he added value to everything he touched. “Value added” is a concept that refers to the extra features of a product that go beyond what would normally be expected, that provide the product with something more than normal while adding little or nothing to production cost, (e.g. placing the logo of a small horse on a polo shirt).

In the United States, it has been estimated that, on average, 30 percent of a given product’s price is generated purely from the addition of these extra features. Steve Jobs was the king of added value. His brilliance in this regard can be seen in the minimalist architecture of the iPod, the sleek packaging of each and every product, even in the excitement generated by his presentations.

Nowhere is this concept more clearly elucidated than in an example given by Jobs himself in his Stanford commencement speech, a video recording which was tweeted, retweeted, posted, and pasted ad infinitum over social media following his death. In it, Jobs explains what gave the otherwise unremarkable Apple computers an edge in a competitive market: fonts. Apple computers were the first to indulge consumers’ artistic sensibilities by giving them a choice of which script to write with—simple, virtually costless, and totally unique.

On the day of his death, the internet was flooded with tributes to Steve Jobs. Public figures threw the terms visionary and genius around like they were going out of style. Even President Obama chimed in with a memorable quote, saying, “The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”

Yet to think of Jobs as having invented all or indeed any of Apple’s currently marketed devices is to vastly conflate his role in his company’s fortunes and to reinforce the utterly flawed representation of successful entrepreneurs as messianic figures, conquering heroes of laissez-faire ideology. Jobs was not a god. His role was much closer to that of a newspaper editor. He took peoples’ primary creations, cut them down to size, presented them in an aesthetically pleasing manner, and changed the fonts. Steve Jobs should be remembered above all else as The Great Editor.