A tribute to Steve Jobs

I just came back from office and all news sites are showing up something other than Anna Hazare today and it is there on news sources world over. It is STEVE JOBS.

  It was funny how I first came to know about Steve Jobs. It was in year 2001. Impressed with stories of people who bought fancy cars, traveling to picturesque locations on weekends, holding cool gadgets and getting fatter pays, it was a must to migrate to the US for people who worked in IT. With no exceptions I was trying to find a job in US.

    Since I was a BIOS engineer, I tried to search for "BIOS JOBS" on Altavista(does someone still remember Altavista?). 90% of searches returned the profile of a man called Steve Jobs and told me that he is a founder of Apple computers. Pissed off with (not) seeing it, I changed my search keywords in a intellgent way to "JOBS BIOS". Now the 99% of pages showed the same results. I stopped the search that day and later learnt that there are literally no jobs available in the US at that time because of recession(heck even now).

    2 years gone, my dream became reality and I got a job in Intel US. At Intel US some one told me that "only company in the world which does not use Intel chip to make a computer is Apple and it is rotting". I was telling myself that "Oh that stupid guy Steve Jobs' company"

   Later on I moved to Intel Bangalore and life was a breeze with being back with friends. It was times of fun. One of my flat mate Jimma made a trip to the US & bought a shiny little toy as a gift to his girl friend. Till that time we were only interested in listening to the stories of his affair. But that toy shifted our attention to that one thing he had bought. It was "iPod mini". The circular pad interface alone was so impressive that, I wanted to buy one and bought one. Where ever I had taken it, everyone was amused by it and loved it. Someone on the train loved it too much that he stole it :( Then came iPod nano and I saw one of Intel's US managers charging it on his laptop and I decided to get one. And I got one too. But I never ever thought of Steve Jobs during this whole episode of new found love with Apple.

      It was in 2007, when I watched unveiling of iPhone live. I still do not know whether it was the phone or the Man who talked about it. I was mesmerized. I was addicted so much that I watched that video atleast 5 times. Few months later I visited US and I ordered ipod touch as a first gift to Priya after wedding. It has been four years since our wedding, it is probably the only gift sticking around, used most.
     But my Apple love story did not last long. In 2009 I was moved to from PCs to mobile. I started working on Android and learnt the architecture of a modern smart phone. It was then I came to know what does it take to build one good smart phone and decided I will not buy an iToy. If I need to write down the reasons, I will have to spend another hour.

     There is one thing I can  not deny, most of the computers which will be sold in the world will resemble a Macbook Air or and iPad. When I mean a computer, I mean a real computer where you can design you next home, aircraft, car or even play Crysis-part 7.

    Now I am part of a team working on technologies which compete with Steve Jobs's own stuff. Will we ever succeed, I hope so. I even hope that we will win Apple as a customer some day. 

      I realized that Steve's way of setting a bench mark is "Too Easy, Too Thin and Too Light on the product and Too difficult for competitors".
    It took 10 years of my career to understand Steve's technological vision. I am sure that at least my next 10 years will take the path that he has already laid.

 Thank you Steve for those nice little iPods. And bigger "Thanks" for giving me a job to do in the decade to come.