Any other business | 3 September 2011

Steve Jobs: the perfectionist who raised industrial design to the level of high art

I’m no techie but I have long been an admirer of Steve Jobs, whose declining health has forced him to step down as chief executive of Apple, the Californian technology giant he co-founded 35 years ago. Many tributes have been paid, the Sunday Times even asking whether he is ‘the greatest businessman of all time’. That would be too big a claim: Henry Ford might feel the title is still his. In Jobs’s own field of consumer gadgetry, however, I’d say his only peers were Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, who founded Sony in a workshop in bombed-out Tokyo in 1946 and built a global electronics brand that, like Apple, is associated with bold innovation and engineering quality. The Sony Walkman, so revolutionary that Morita believed they would never have launched it in 1979 if research had been commissioned beforehand to ask whether people would actually buy it, was the pioneering product that personalised music and created the market for Apple’s iPod in 2001.