The Interface Man

Steve Jobs’s lasting legacy is that computers are machines that humans could love | OnIslam.net

If you , like many, often find yourself tempted to touch the glass displays of the gadgets you encounter, from phones and tablets to laptops and e-readers, expecting the stuff on the screen to morph at taps and roll at swipes, you can thank, or blame, for this Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who died on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.

Yet while glass-fronted, touch-based devices are the most recent gadgets associated with Jobs, he may be remembered through different prisms: as the show-man, who would gleefully take the stage to unveil new, often much-rumored shiny gadgets; as the savior who in 1997 took Apple from over a decade in the wilderness back to a path of unprecedented success (surpassing in market capitalization, for the first time, Apple’s arch-competitor Microsoft in May 2010 and becoming the world’s largest technology firm); as the “control-freak” who tenaciously resisted the calls to license his admired software to other device manufacturers, allowing competitors who adopted the license model (Microsoft with its Windows in the mid-1980s and Google with its Android over the past four years) to outpace Apple in market-share despite the latter’s often more refined (but also more expensive) products; and as the man who, turning gaunt and frail in public appearances that grew shorter and far apart, was dying, as he was living, very much in public sight, drawing near-constant attention and admiration, the occasional disappointment and rage, and finally an out-pour of sorrow at the man’s death at a relatively young age.

But then legacy is tricky to pin down, particularly when the person whose life is examined has just passed away. Legacy is not the sum-total of a life, a balance-sheet of sorts calculating the “positive” against the “negative.” Nor is it a catalog of a person’s achievements in the eyes of his or her contemporaries -- for it’s subsequent generations that sustain and celebrate or disregard and condemn the legacy of a person from an earlier generation.

Instead, legacy could be defined as the crucial contribution of a person or a group, the contribution that would have never occurred had it not been for that particular person or group. It’s the one-line or even one-word formulation that eventually makes it to history books -- Picasso's cubism; the American and French Revolutions’ assertion that “all men are created equal.” An obvious example would be Shakespeare’s plays which would have never been born without Shakespeare. The eminent British playwright example, however, points to another dimension of legacy. While his works were superior achievements of art in their own right, the lasting legacy of Shakespeare probably lies less in the plays themselves than in their ability to convince more and more playwrights and filmmakers to adopt the seventeenth-century poet’s artistic form - plays and/or poems - for drama that commands wide and enduring appeal. That is reflected in the unceasing adaptations from Shakespeare, as well as the continued draw and use of his linguistic formulations. Similarly, cubism and “all men are created equal,” in their original occurrences or fresh permutations, continue to shape or influence the minds of new generations of artists and politicians and political thinkers.

From this perspective, while it’s still a risk to pronounce too soon the “legacy” of a person dead only days ago, the one word that probably captures Jobs’s enduring influence is “interface.” Jobs, not once but twice, transformed the way we interact with computers and computing devices. The first came in 1983 when Apple introduced Lisa, the first-ever computer that could be operated through a graphical user interface (GUI), later further advanced in the 1984 version dubbed the Macintosh. The GUI made computers usable by the ordinary folk as opposed to the relatively small clique of computer programmers and engineers who managed to work with computers through the arcane so-called “command lines.”

The second interface breakthrough that Jobs led occurred in June 2007, when Apple’s cofounder took the wraps off the first edition of the iPhone. As with the 1983 roll-out, the iPhone spawned a vast industry of copycats and fast became the standard against which competition was judged. But also like 1983, the concept upon which Jobs based his product was not novel. And novel or not, in both cases it certainly was not he who came up with the concept. As is now well-known, the drag-and-drop icons interface was originally conceived of and developed at Xerox, and it was from Xerox that Jobs got the “inspiration” and quickly went ahead betting his young company’s future on the new direction. Likewise, by June 2007, touch-screen gadgets had been around for several years, running on versions of Windows operating system, XP and later, as well as other specialized operating systems for ATM machines and the like.

So why give Jobs credit for, and base his potential legacy upon, breakthroughs he has not invented? The answer is that without Jobs, Xerox’s GUI research project would probably have remained just that - a research project that Xerox might or might not have converted into a foundation for a line of products. In the second instance, without Jobs, touch-based devices would probably have languished as sluggish single-point-touch gizmos for specialized uses, and for people who had no better alternatives.

In both instances, Apple’s innovative interface advancements turned computers and computing devices into more “intimate machines” (Sherry Turkle’s term) that more individuals used and even loved (and remember we are talking about computers here not pets). And as such, computers, for better or worse, found an easier trajectory to what were otherwise non-computer environments: first workplaces, then living rooms and public transportation systems.

The “interface” may sound like visuals or the dashboard built on top of a system, but this is not how Jobs thought about it. Stating in an interview in 2003 what he meant by interface, though without using the word, Jobs said, ''[p]eople think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'' In other words, Jobs’s focus was on producing gadgets that worked well in the hands of regular human beings. That simple ethos was the driving philosophy behind almost all of Apple’s offerings. And it found its most eloquent embodiment in the “interface,” which in turn was a reflection of the type of functionality that Apple’s gadgets sought to offer.

Publicly content with the achievement of his engineers and his own vision, Jobs guarded his prized operating systems, simultaneously denouncing the competition as laughably inferior while refusing to license his software to run on devices made by others. That created the opening that, not once but twice, forced Apple to be number two in a game where it could have been the forerunner. Its “no” to computer manufacturers asking to license its operating system in 1984 pushed the latter to an eager Microsoft, making Windows a de facto only option for manufacturers, running in the early 2000s about 93% of the world’s personal computers (but on a smaller percentage on server computers, where Windows faces serious competition from the free, open-source Linux operating system).

A similar scenario appears to be unfolding with Google’s Android, copying quite unashamedly from Apple’s iOS system running the iPhone and the iPad, and zealously being licensed to every phone-maker of note except Nokia, giving Android a market share that is twice that of Apples (about 38% to Apple’s 21% in the most recent estimates).

With Jobs out of the scene, Apple in post-Jobs era will unlikely shift course on its long-held philosophy of no-licensing, even with the expanding assault from Android. But as far as Jobs’s legacy is concerned, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the fact that he pursued personal computing from a perspective that others, many others, find valid and worthy of mimicking. You may remember this every time you find cold and dead any glass display that does not spring to life at your finger’s touch.