The Second-Order Effects of Steve Jobs

M uch has been written about Steve Jobs’ amazing leadership at Apple and how he transformed the company into one of the world’s most recognizable and profitable brands after his return from NeXT. But if you look closer, it’s easy to find examples of how Jobs-inspired Apple and NeXT products were platforms for many of the amazing innovations we take for granted today. Between 1987 and 1997, we experienced a Cambrian-like explosion of completely new ideas bursting from computer science research labs into broader society at an unprecedented rate. Although Jobs wasn’t directly involved in the innovations around the Internet and World Wide time you clicked here [on the NeXT], you had another window, every time you clicked on a diagram, you had the diagram in another window, when you clicked on a map, you got the map in PostScript, scalable and perfectly printable.