As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 draws near, it may be remarkable to argue that the person who changed the way of life the most in the past decade is neither late al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, U.S. President George Bush, who started the so-called “War on Terror” or his successor, Barack Obama, the first African-American U.S. president in history, who also guided the world’s biggest economy during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Even before his death in May, bin Laden had long become just a shadow of his former self of a decade ago. The fact that he was caught almost unguarded in a luxury house in a Pakistani city showed that even he had lost faith in his own doctrine of an endless and glorious war against the U.S.
In terms of influence, Bush fares not much better. His memoir, one of the biggest things for an out-of-office U.S. president, came and went without much notice, which is remarkable considering the consequences of the decisions he made as president, including deficit-fueling tax cuts for the rich, the Afghanistan war and the controversial Gulf War II.
Obama won the Noble Peace Prize, guided the U.S. during the worst months of the financial meltdown, passed a historic health care reform bill and ordered the strike that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet the national debt debate earlier this month has shown that the single strongest force in Washington is political gridlock powerful enough to dethrone the U.S. from its “AAA” credit status.
On the other hand, it does not take an Apple buff to recognize the influence of the tech giant’s founder and reviver Steve Jobs, who announced his resignation as CEO last week. Since his return to Apple in 1996, he rescued the company from the brink of bankruptcy to become one that held more cash than the U.S. government in July. And that is just a side effect of what he really has done to the world.
The verb “revolutionize” has been hanging around Jobs for the last decade. In 2001, Apple launched the portable music player iPod and the iTunes online music store in 2003, revolutionizing the music industry with the popular gadget and $0.99-per-song online purchases. In 2007, the company introduced the iPhone and revolutionized the smart phone industry. In 2010, it revealed the iPad and practically created the tablet device industry.
Now millions of people are using the “i-devices” and about one million people in mainland China are employed to assemble them. The two major events in the technology industry ― the decision by Google to acquire Motorola Mobile, which is widely speculated as the search giant’s inroad into smart phone manufacturing despite Google’s denial, and the decision by the world’s No.1 PC maker Hewlett-Packard to give up PC manufacturing ― are both consequences of Apple’s success. In a globalized and digitalized world, the ups and downs of technology companies affect millions of people working in related industries.
The company became one of the biggest single contributors in shaping the modern way of life. Just look at all the touch screen-swiping fingers in buses, trains, offices and even at the dinner tables.
Of course, such revolutions are common in the industrialized world. Newspapers, telegraphs, radios, TV and the Internet are all world-changing inventions. But it is rare in history that a world-changing invention is imagined, fine-tuned and promoted by a single person. Steve Jobs was not just a famous CEO but also a famously authoritarian one.
It can be argued that Jobs had been the person who most changed the world in the past decade. However, deifying him would be a misinterpretation of his success. And Apple was not without flops.
The key lesson in Jobs’ success is that the world is both old and new. It’s new in the way that political figures can no longer matter-of-factly claim to be the movers of the world and old in the way that the almost Renaissance-like mix of inspiration, ingenuity, preservation and meticulous attention to detail from one person can still make a huge difference in a globalized world.
