This post is just a translation (with some corrections) of a comment I made on Facebook the day after Steve Jobs’ death. I wanted to translate it to commemorate his importance for technology and for the world… farewell Steve, and may the Earth be light for you!

The famous Stanford speech everyone is talking about is beautiful and inspiring for people who’d like to work in tech, but it is not all that Jobs was. Jobs was a great innovator and a visionary in all things he has done, but I want to recall at least four which I think are the most important. Please keep in mind: though I use some Apple products, I’m fundamentally not an Apple fanboy: but I think there are some things that Jobs did that deserve to be kept in memory, because they are fundamental advancements in consumer electronics and informatics.

First,  at the end of the ’70s – beginning of the ’80s he contributed in a fundamental way to the birth of the Personal Computer as we know it now: an object everyone (or almost) can buy and use. Nowadays, it seems obvious you can buy a PC in a supermarket (or assemble it yourself, it’s not that difficult), but at that time you had to be good with the solder and have a strong will to assemble the small house devices, which also costed a lot of money! I think this was his biggest contribution to technology: he was one of the pioneers which brought computers from the garage of some nerds and from rich universities to the home of normal people. He was not alone in this adventure, of course: but his role must not be forgotten.

Then, after having contributed to its birth, Steve Jobs began a series of events which, eventually, will make the PC as we know it “die”, disappearing from millions of homes: he has been the main proposer of the so-called “post-PC devices”. But why did he try to “kill” his own creature? Because the PC is now a mature device: it can do almost everything, and probably it won’t become much quicker in the next years (unless you want to use a nuclear plant to power it and liquid helium cooling instead of a vent to keep its temperature low) – but at the same time, it’s an unsatisfactory and “hostile” object for millions of people. It does a lot of things almost nobody needs, it consumes a lot (which means its battery, if it has one, won’t last for long), it’s heavy and difficult to move, it doesn’t cost a fortune, but it’s not cheap either… But if you cut that great part of functionality that only a small part of the users actually use, then you can make a device which works much better in a world in which the Internet is 99.9% of the functionality that 99.9% of people want to use. You can make a modern, light device, with a easy-to-use user interface, made to be used in mobility, blazingly fast to do what it does (though unable to do everything a PC does). And Steve Jobs was the first to understand that this was the future: and then it was his Apple which launched iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air: the first three devices to answer this call. It is not that smartphones, tablet or ultraportable laptops did not exist before those: it’s just that they were PCs enclosed in a smaller shell, trying to replicate all functionality of a real PC, sacrificing speed, ease of use and beauty in the process. On the other hand, Apple’s iDevices sacrificed a great part of the functionality of real PCs, but gained an incredible ease of use, a fantastic speed, becoming also a reference for a beautiful design for everyone else. If you are one of the ones who never used a smartphone, you may think it’s “useless”; actually, it’s quite the contrary. Smartphones and tablets can change your life into a simpler and better one (if used wisely, as all things): they can substitute a classic PC in most situations, not making you regret for the change. Apple and Jobs invented a completely new type of user interface which, with an “osmosis” process, is now beginning to be used also in good old PCs (think of Mac OS X Lion and Windows 8)… in the end, we will have no “PCs” and “post-PCs”. We will have a wide range of devices varying in use case, mobility, power consumption, capabilities, but with coherent interfaces; no one of them will be considered “useless” and all of them will be easy to use also for people with NO tech interest AT ALL. That’s technology for every man, brought to its maximum: that’s a dream much nearer than it was 10 years ago; and it’s due to Steve Jobs and Apple in great part.

Furthermore, Jobs and his firm have made functioning something that many thought wouldn’t work at all: digital distribution. Many thought it was impossible due to online piracy which is fairly easy and, of course, really cheap. But piracy was (and is) tempting not only because you obtain what you want for free, but you also obtain it without much effort: until some years ago, the alternative was going to a shop to buy a real object, or ordering it into the Internet on an obscure site to see it delivered after some time – not very effective. iTunes managed to bring the “ease of use” of piracy to a legal and fairly cheap context. It was just the start: when the idea of obtaining things legally in digital distribution became spread, there also began to be cheaper services (like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime… I’d like to try those – unfortunately none of them is available in Italy yet) which are already famous and used by a lot of people. Piracy has not disappeared, of course (it never will), but there’s now a different equilibrium between legal and illegal distribution, which gives consumers much more choice than before.

The digital distribution model was so successful that it was eventually transfered to software: again, by Apple with its App Store. It wasn’t really  a “new” idea (you could find software repositories in most Linux distros from as far as 10 years ago); but – in Jobs’ style – it’s made simple and usable by everyone. And now, since “copy is the highest form of admiration”, it’s a triumph of different “stores”: Google has its Android Market and the Chrome Web Store, Market its Windows Marketplace, Amazon its Android Store, Nokia the Ovi Store… app stores are far from being perfect, but they make installing software simpler. Not for us “techie guys”: I can’t find any difference between installing a program with an installer in Windows, from a repo in Linux, with the curious dmg method in Mac OS X, or from one of these stores. But the average guy does find differences and he definitely favors the app store.

Last, but not least, something about Jobs many tend to forget. He has the great merit of having financed and managed another company beyond Apple: Pixar. He believed in a strange project in which not many believed; he didn’t sell the company until it finally reached its objective; and look at where Pixar is now. Look at the wonderful special effects, at the marvelous cartoon that Pixar has made in the years: Steve Jobs had, too, a small part in it – one that I think deserves to be remembered.

I think Steve Jobs was not a great “inventor”, as someone is carelessly saying on the TV. He worked with engineers and designers which were probably much more capable than him in what they did. His greatness stayed in the capability to coordinate them, make them part of an idea or (better) of a VISION. Someone compared Steve Jobs to Leonardo da Vinci and, while it’s a strange comparison, there’s at least one thing the two characters had in common: being a technician and an artist at the same time, with no bound between the two things. Steve Jobs is not an inspiration for a guy like me because of what he invented. He was a CEO, I want to be an engineer – a technician. He is an inspiration for all people who, like me, work or want to work in technology because he proved that truly believing in it, putting a lot of effort, coordinating different expertise, it’s really possible to develop technology that makes people’s life better. And that should be the objective of everyone in this field. So, farewell Steve.