Steven Jobs February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

My name is Scott, and I am a PC.

I admit it: PCs have been my life and my passion for quite a number of years.  I remember my first one when I was 8 years old.  I still speak DOS fluently, in fact, the computer that I am typing this on right now is a computer that I built myself a little more than two years ago.

That said, I am still mourning the death of Steve Jobs today.

In addition to my love of PCs, I also have an affinity for gadgets.  Just the other night during some downtime at work, I was replying to tweets on my iPhone while reading a PDF on my iPAD, all while listening to music on my iPOD.  I have them all, and I love them all and a day does not go by where I am not using them.  Steve Jobs revolutionized mobile media for me.  He changed the way I surf the net, he changed how I listened to music, and he changed how I communicated with people.

You Android users out there should be counting your blessings as well.  If it was not for the iPhone, do you think the Android would be half as good as it is?  Jobs did not just challenge his own company; he challenged everyone else as well.  He pushed them to make their products better just to stay competitive, and they did the same right back to Jobs and Apple.  Because of that competition, we have what we have today.

I found a couple of inspirational quotes from Steve Jobs as I was reading through an article about him on the Huffington Post today that I thought I would share:

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity.  Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.  But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — BusinessWeek interview form 1998.

I love this quote, and I feel it embodies everything that EMS 2.0 stands for.  Make things simple again and start over.  Don’t over complicate things and get the important foundational groundwork perfected.  You need a strong foundation to support any sort of change or innovation.  Jobs proved that and we should learn from it.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.  So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.  You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.  This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” — Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.

Jobs understood the importance of the past in guiding his future.  Nothing is predictable, but the past is already there for us to learn from to help us not repeat our mistakes and to guide us to better decisions so that those “dots” fall where we want them to fall, and that final picture is exactly what we are looking for.  The rest of it is all up to the forces that surround us.

The last quote that I found was in an article at Business Insider.  It is the line that he used to convince John Sculley to accept the position of CEO with Apple:

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want to change the world?”

Me?  I’ll pick ‘change the world.’

RIP, Steve.