He named his business after a healthy piece of fruit. Apple may have been an unlikely name for a computer company in 1976, but it’s become a meaningful reminder of the exceptional insight of Steve Jobs. He understood how technology would develop across many decades, but uniquely that our relationship with it must be both a personal and healthy one. He helped an entire generation realize their dreams of the future with technology that the average person can claim as their own. Today he has died at the very young age of 56 and we’re left to wonder how that relationship will continue to evolve without him.

 

Jobs was at his most public when describing the ideas behind his company’s innovations. The group of people he worked with were exceptional at making discoveries and on a stage, often broadcasted to millions, he found a way to share them privately, in a child-like way that showed his anticipation for us to reach that same sense of discovery too.

He was at his most private perhaps in creating a business culture that placed its top values on ideas and measured their success through human impact. He shared little about his personal life with the world, and appeared professionally in just a pair of blue jeans and a turtleneck. Both choices from a man who perhaps wanted to avoid distractions that might take away from the drive and focus of Apple’s work.

In the early development of the company’s first personal computer, he famously motivated his programmers to invest the extra man-hours and mental stress to shave seconds off the boot-up process by having them add up how much time in terms of human lives that would mean to the millions of people who would use them. “Think Different” is a motto long-associated with Apple and the inference is both one of creativity, but also of understanding the human value in business too.

That Jobs often thought in terms of living time is a mark of his visionary nature and surely made him appreciate what his illness had robbed him better than anyone. Ideas still to be formed, dreams still to be realized, and discoveries still to share. An early death is a curse, but how thankful he must have been at least in knowing about it soon enough to do something about it. If anyone can plan for that situation, surely Jobs did.

I’d argue that the company has unintentionally been ready for this day. From its first personal computer to the personal assistant technology unveiled this week, Apple has been very consistent in its ideals and focus, even when Jobs was removed from it. Like other organizations such as Walt Disney or the Jim Henson Company that have had to move beyond their passionate founders, it’ll be a guiding set of principles that will allow the collective within Apple to move on as if Jobs were still alive. There’s a true legacy to follow in that sense.

What Apple won’t be able to avoid is that from this day forward there will always be someone somewhere wondering what new device or technology there might have been if Steve Jobs were still with us. The good news is, it’s this very kind of question that inspires young visionaries to think of their own answers and become innovators in their own right. And like Steve Jobs, they will think very, very differently from the rest of us.