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Only one subject possible today - Steve Jobs

No matter what other news could hit the wires, there's only one topic I could possibly write about in this column today.

The passing of Steve Jobs represents a massive fracture between the future and the past within the technology sector and the IT industry in particular.

Jobs, more than any other figure in the industry, seemed to have his finger on the pulse and was able to bring together just enough of every discipline to turn his concepts into reality in a way that no other visionary has come close to doing.

I'm no Apple fanboi -- in fact I don't own a single thing with the apple logo on it, but I can't help be in awe of the effect this one person had on the way computers and computer-based technology has infiltrated our every-day lives and been adopted by the masses.

For many, in the beginning there was the Apple.

Back when I was still building my own microcomputers, the shrink-wrap world of such devices was very much split into two camps. There was the Apple camp and the Tandy TRS80 Radioshack camp.

Tandy had the more powerful BASIC language (with double-precision math!) but Apple had the colour display and the cool graphics.

Those, like myself, who were in the RadioShack camp tended to be number-crunchers and tech-heads.

"Regular folk" (if such people ever bought computers way back then) usually went for the Apple because it was fun and exciting in a way that appealed to those who weren't interested in 32-bit precision, Z80 block-move instructions or other esoteric stuff.

And that's pretty much the way things have continued to evolve.

While us tech-heads and number-crunchers were doing battle with the DOS command-line interface, Apple was delivering the first of the Macintosh machines with their far more intuitive and friendly GUI interface.

While many of us were writing code to create cool graphic libraries -- the Apple users were simply creating cool graphics because the Apple machines made that so easy.

And, even when computers became "so last week", Apple continued to capture the hearts and wallets of the masses by making their media players, phones and tablet computer so damned sexy that people just wanted to own one for the sake of it.

Of course it also helped that inside that sexy wrapping there was usually cutting-edge technology doing a stunning job of delivering the performance levels that people wanted.

I wonder if it is symbolic that, a somewhat lacklustre response to the new iPhone 4S just happened to coincide with Jobs' death. Is it as if the spark, the creative vision and the leadership that Jobs brought to the company died with him and Apple became "just another consumer electronics company" in the closing of an eye?

Will the corporate committees that will now run Apple and the teams of creative types, engineers and marketers falter without Jobs' determined vision and leadership?

No doubt they'll continue to design, manufacture and market good consumer electronics but, just as when Lee Iococca was briefly at the helm, will the company now lose its way for lack of insight, passion and inspiration at the highest level?

What do you think?

Have we seen the last *real* Apple product now that Jobs has gone?

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