“The one and only time I met Steve Jobs was back in 1991,” Alan M. Webber writes for The Christian Science Monitor. “I was managing editor of the Harvard Business Review (HBR), and I’d made the trip from Boston to Silicon Valley to see for myself what was going on. I’d just wrapped up a presentation in one of the classrooms at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., when Mr. Jobs materialized and started a conversation.”
“‘That was a great article,’ he told me. ‘One of the best things I’ve ever read. It’s absolutely right. It’s not computers. It’s computing,'” Webber writes. “He was talking about an article that we’d just published in the July 1991 issue of HBR, a piece written by Andy Rappaport and Shmuel Halevi called ‘The Computerless Computer Company.’ …The future isn’t in computers. It’s in computing. ‘Defining how computers are used, not how they are manufactured, will create real value – and thus market power, employment, and wealth – in the decades ahead,’ the authors wrote. ‘A computer company is the primary source of computing for its customers.'”
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“The future, in other words, is a verb, not a noun. That insight, it seems to me, is at the heart of Apple today. The computer is a thing, but what people want is not a thing, but to do things,” Webber writes. “Armed with that strategic insight, Jobs has turned Apple into the most admired company in the world, according to Fortune magazine, for four years running. He has made it the world’s favorite entertainment hub, listening hub, reading hub, watching hub, you-name-it hub.”
Much, much more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]