Japan Echo Web

Determined to Build a World After Steve Jobs

A messiah for users

On October 5, 2011, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs passed away. The news shocked the world, indicating just how big his global influence was.

Jobs was indeed a messiah for people all over the world. Products he created revolutionized the cell phone and telecommunications industries and their users.

In the early 2000s, long before the release of Apple’s iPhone smartphones, everyone in Japan was using cell phones that could connect to the Internet. Yet such devices were rarely distributed in the West. People thought they could carry around a personal computer that could be connected to the Internet, and single-function cell phones would suffice. Cell phones mainly for voice communication were the most prevalent, and their average price was below $200. As many are aware, Finnish cell phone manufacturer Nokia held an overwhelming global share of 40%.

Since low-priced, single-function cell phone devices were the mainstream, no one was interested in Japanese-made advanced-function phones costing upward of $300. Rather, the telecommunications industry in the West was afraid of being overwhelmed by the Internet industry, and continued refusing to incorporate the Internet into cell phones. Some might say they were working to prevent development of their own industry.

Jobs ignored this iron rule of the telecommunications community and announced the first iPhone model in January 2007. The greatest feature, as everyone knows, was Internet connectivity. Some years ago, I showed a Japanese-made cell phone with Internet connectivity to a person working with the telecommunications industry in the West. He seemed impressed and said, “That’s great.” Jobs gave a form to this sort of response. In this regard, he was undoubtedly a messiah for cell phone users in the West.

Another factor enabled Apple to produce the iPhone. Until the first half of the 2000s, manufacturers capable of making baseband chips, the IC chip that enables telecommunications housed in cell phone devices, and companies developing telecommunications technologies, were the only entities capable of producing cell phones. But in the latter half of the 2000s, companies that commercialized and sold telecommunications technologies, like Taiwan’s MBK and Qualcomm of the United States, started to emerge. These companies enabled computer companies like Apple to manufacture cell phones as well.

What Jobs pursued most vigorously in product development was an interface easy for anyone to use. IT-related products at that time placed emphasis on showing cutting-edge technologies to the greatest extent possible, as if to say that those who did not understand the product did not need to use it; for instance, those who could not handle a keyboard could not use a computer. Jobs, however, thought technologies were only tools, and the most important point was for users to be able to fully utilize them. This thinking was realized in products like the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad. In particular, devices equipped with the new touch panel interface were easy to use intuitively, even for a three-year-old or a senior citizen.

His products gave clear evidence that consumers wanted something easy to use and easy to understand, rather than the technologies themselves, which completely shifted the mindset of manufacturing in that direction. This conversion is irreversible, and we can never return to the technology-centered world.