Steve Jobs: a “ding in the universe”

A few months ago, I had the privilege of watching a “Steve-note” live, as Steve Jobs introduced iOS 5.0, Lion and iCloud at Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference in San Francisco. As he entered, the room erupted in an outpouring of love as 5 000 developers and Apple staff paid homage to an icon of our age. It was an electric moment that seemed to choke him up as he surely knew this would be the last.

His passing yesterday, Wednesday, 5 October 2011, as much as it might have been anticipated, came as a shock around the world. The Apple homepage was devastatingly simple. We all know the impact Jobs made on our world.

Everything has changed
Apple may never be the same, but thanks to Jobs, neither is the future we live in.

Steve Jobs, they say, IS the American Dream. And, in truth-is-stranger-than-fiction style, no Hollywood script could describe the incredible personal and professional journey his life would take.

I won’t say anything about Jobs complete reinvention of the fabric of modern society – that much is all around us. Let’s look deeper, I believe, to his real legacy.

Every society’s dream
The truth is that Jobs is not just the American dream – he is every society’s dream. He has succeeded in doing what any human dreams of – changing the world and transcending their circumstances.

And boy do we in Africa and the developing world need to transcend our circumstances.

And because a musician in Ghana, a writer in Mombasa, or a young app dev team in Durban can sell their creations to the world, he has given us the oxygen to make this transcendence a reality, if we so wish.

That’s what inspires us
That’s what inspires companies like us at immedia to dare to dream, to believe that we can create an app dev industry in Durban, that we can create ‘brain-ready’ jobs for poor people, not just ‘shovel-ready’!

Jobs famously said he never wanted to die the richest man in the cemetery, but that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe”.

Well, there IS a ding in the universe today.

Mission accomplished, Steve. Thank you for an iLife.

This tribute appeared in the industry website Bizcommunity.com