On Steve Jobs, Markos Zuniga, and Bypassing the Gatekeepers

When Steve Jobs died last week on October 5th, I read this quote:

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,” Jobs once said, “And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

At first I disliked the "taste" remark as I long ago grew tired of sniping between Apple (a company whose products I admittedly adore) and Microsoft (a company whose products I find frustrating).  Then I noticed in that quote the interesting use of the word "culture".

Most people see Apple Computer as a company contributing 'insanely great ideas' to the computing industry.  Steve Jobs saw Apple's ideas as contributions to culture.

And of those ideas, Jobs most famous victories were designs that made good ideas possible as great products. They weren't always truly new ideas, but were designed in a new way: the iPod, iPhone, and iPad were after all just a music player, a smartphone, and a tablet computer - products that had been envisioned and discussed by others before Apple redesigned them.  Yet when each appeared, it was executed in such a beautiful way, as if no one had thought of it before.  And each fit into the culture of people's lives - a culture in which we were all trying to move faster and share more information without driving ourselves crazy.

The comment on bringing culture into products especially resonated for me because I was reading Markos Zuniga's Taking on the System when Jobs died.  Zuniga writes about 'bypassing the gatekeepers' using the example of peer-to-peer file sharing of music, and how this began to break the grip that a handful of major record companies had over the music industry up through the 1990s, writing "the labels will suffer the indignity of neglect and irrelevance as technology and changes in our culture render them obsolete."

In light of that challenging dilemma for the music industry, I see one of Steve Job's contributions to culture shining more brightly than the others, and for unique reasons.  While launching the iTunes app (again, an MP3 player and not a truly new idea), Jobs was privately negotiating with beleaguered record companies to implement a new kind of digital rights management for selling music.  Once coupled with iTunes, Jobs had engineered an industry shift into selling DRM-free music in most countries across the world.

As a result of these negotiations, Apple's iTunes Music Store birthed a renewed culture of music buyers, music sellers, and music lovers.

The gatekeepers of the recording industry were being bypassed by the file sharers, and although they knew this, someone was needed to help move them toward a new way of doing business.  Jobs, with his proven credibility and vision, was up to the task.  Having helped all us music lovers bypass the gatekeepers, Jobs convinced them to accept a new role in a new culture.  He convinced them to vacate their comfortable seat driving the bus, in order to accept a new seat on the bus next to the artists and customers they were trying to reach.

Culture was moving forward, yet the recording industry felt paralyzed.  Rather than seeking to 'crush the gatekeepers', as Zuniga might suggest, Jobs helped build a needed bridge from a past culture to a new culture, so music lovers and industry could move forward together.