Apple was never a particularly big commercial success his first time round with it. And the Next completely tanked. The thing Jobs made his money and his first stratospheric success at doing was making movies. Under his leadership, Pixar completely re-invented the idea of the animated film. I don’t know how much was him and how much was people he worked with, but they pretty much invented an entirely new genre of entertainment. They got their own Oscar category practically named after them. And when they sold it to Disney his share was literally worth _billions_.

And then he went back to Apple, and created the iTunes store; the single greatest marketing success pretty much ever. Until that point Apple had been straying into the Microsoft model of licensing their hardware to other producers, and selling their software to work on other people’s hardware. Even going open-source in places. Jobs put a stop to that and went back to a vertical monopoly model; only Apple makes our hardware, our software only runs on Apple hardware, and the media you buy in the iTunes store only runs on our software. (Once they established the market space they let iTunes out onto other hardware, of course, but it started exclusive. And they’ve always carefully treated PC iTunes customers as second-class citizens.) By restricting all aspects of the user’s interaction to be directly under Apple’s control, they could make sure it just worked, out-of-the-box. Which was what the vast majority of people wanted. They didn’t care if it wasn’t the best-quality file format, or if someone else sold better video at a cheaper price, they just wanted to buy a box, take it home, and immediately be able to start listening to their music or watching their shows; thats what Apple delivered. The iTunes store grossed over a million dollars in its first _week_. They didn’t invent digital music – that had been around for ages – they invented a way to get it to people, effortlessly. Apple – and given the timing and the turnaround, I think you have to give a lot of the credit directly to Jobs – were among the first to realise that the user experience they were selling didn’t start at the power switch; it started before you headed out to the store. That strict control over the user’s experience, cradle-to-grave, is still what differentiates the iPhone from the various Droids, and the iPad from a dozen cheaper, technically identical or superior tablets. We control it all, so we guarantee that if you buy it, it’ll work, no fuss. Its like the difference between playing games on a games console vs. a PC.

I didn’t mean to rant. I just find it strange that he gets more credit in the obits for the Apple II (which always seemed to have been more Woz than him) and yet the iTunes store (clearly his, equally important, and far more successful) rarely gets a mention.