One More Thing…
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There are all sorts of aspects of the story, though. For one thing, it is a genius who is clearly extremely passionate about his work, and who has a lot of money, but he still has to yield to the disease. That is tragic.
Also, while I don't like Apple, I still like Jobs philosophy, and the pressure they put on other companies to improve their products.
I only wish Apple wouldn't be so silly with patents, they really taint my admiration for Jobs.
Think about it - patents are land claims in the sphere of ideas. We cheer about the innovations, but essentially it is like native Americans cheering on the colonists when they took away their land. I am surprised that for all his desire for aesthetics, Jobs was not bothered by the ugliness of patents. Just mentioning it, because I could admire him more without that elephant in the room.
I wonder is a Steve Jobs of biotechnology even possible?
Craig Venter is great, but I just don't see any of his companies growing bigger then Exxon. But if anything should be bigger the Exxon, it is exactly those kind of companies!
Mr. Jobs has done a remarkable job producing sleek, fun-to-use, affordable, somewhat disposable devices and building Apple into a company that has a chance of sustaining his principles. Even taking into account the fickleness of the mass consumer market, herding sub-component suppliers, etc., there is a certain predictability to the advances in electronics technology (Moore's "Law", increases in battery performance, etc.) that gives a solid foundation for a regularly growing business. Fashioning aluminum, cadmium, silicon, and lithium is way more predictable than discovering a pharmaceutically-treatable, financially-lucrative metabolic disease.
There are certainly smart, extremely hard-working individuals in the biotechnology fields --- perhaps surpassing Mr. Jobs in those qualities, and some we'd certainly label as "geniuses" --- but the fantastically low probability of making even one genuine discovery, and the low odds of successfully developing that into a product, make the kind of serial successes of Apple and Mr. Jobs very unlikely in the biotech field. Biology results just don't flow that easily. Also, there is no clearcut equivalent in biological research to outbidding your competitors for the latest components, streamlining your manufacturing and inventory processes, and relying on economies of scale.
I can say this now only with the benefit of hindsight: my negative answer to bh42222's question stems from the fact that we just haven't observed such figure emerge in the last few decades. Craig Venter is a good example to look at. He certainly earned a great victory in the human genome sequencing (and the underlying technologies), but he lacks even a second notable success of that magnitude. It will probably be the purview of someone else to find the utility in the sequenced genome. Dean Kamen may be a prototype figure of this sort, but as nice as his individual inventions are, no single one of them seems rise to the level of a Steve-Jobs-in-the-biotech-field. I may be stunningly wrong on this (and it would be great fun if I was), but I think the probabilities are on my side, and on the side of it not happening.
But let's put aside the negativity and allow me to ask this question: Do we need a Steve Jobs of biotechnology to fulfill our expectations of medical advancement? I would guess, "No, we don't. The good people toiling away at it right now are doing the best that can be done."
I'd rather live in a world where everyone has a roughly similar risk of mortality. I wish Steve Jobs genius were a way toward curing every case of pancreatic cancer; I don't wish he had a non-scalable way to cure only his own.
Also if he could cure his own, it would incentivize other people to become rich so that they could also cure their cancer.
I have an emotional connection with Steve jobs. I admit that my first computer that I had an emotional attachment was an Apple II. I admit that the Macintosh computer brought me where I was today. Without a mac I wouldn't have created my android app, learned the scheme programming language, gone to HN, to Reddit, to slashdot. If there is any person I owe a consumer debt to it is this man. I can't even write this without crying.
Notice a conspicuous absence from this list? A revamped, much better Apple TV. As he says, Jobs' two biggest successes was to break the monopolies in music and cell phones (the latter thought to be impossible to do just few years ago). One thing he (or Google or anyone else for that matter) couldn't do is to break the cable TV stronghold form the leech-like grip of the likes of Comcast.
So, maybe the mindblowing thing this fall will be something like that. Would be super. I doubt it.
The music industry as a whole Apple haven't broken; record labels still exist and the bulk of commercial music is distributed through them. What they've broken was the physical distribution model in favour of a digital model controlled by them, by providing a large semi-captive audience.
Equally with phones, they haven't destroyed the model of networks selling a pre-agreed bundle of services at a flat tariff with the pre-pay component being vastly cheaper than the post-pay. What they've broken is the assumption that carriers could do what they liked with phones, but again I think this was less of a challenge than you think; pre-smartphones we all had much what came out of the factory because that was all that was possible, and phones have long been a fashion driven market. Apple simply managed to get a bigger fashion leap (not that this was the only leap) on their competitors to the point where carriers couldn't avoid taking the phone on Apple's terms once one had given in.
With TV, I suspect the bulk of HN readers can quite plainly see by now that what we used to call 'video on demand' is both economically deliverable over the internet and a compelling user experience compared with having to organise one's life around a broadcast schedule to receive the preferred content.
The challenge for Apple is how to insert themselves as the default gatekeeper in the way they have with iTunes and iOS. Compared with music the content providers are fewer in number and with a substantially higher cost base, making them both harder to supplant and more risk averse. Compared with mobile carriers, the power dynamics are reversed; the hit product becomes the network's unique content not the hardware vendor's fashionable item. If Apple had managed to produce a hypothetical viable Apple TV product (and delivery channel) prior to services such as Hulu, BBC iPlayer or even YouTube and Justin.TV then there could have been a window of opportunity for them as gatekeeper, but I think that would have been an improbable scenario and is clearly not possible now.
Which leaves Apple with a problem in the Apple TV. The compelling offering is the content not the device; the content providers have a strong incentive to make their wares widely, not narrowly available. iOS has prospered as a closed, Apple-controlled ecosystem, yet the opportunity isn't there with TV. Their only opportunity is to provide a hardware device which is sufficiently far ahead of the alternatives as the first iPod was perceived as being when that launched, but I'd suggest that the market there is already sufficiently mature as to make that unlikely.