Part of Steve Jobs' genius was his drive to put easy-to-use devices in as many hands as possible, Chris Taylor says.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Apple genius always kept users in mind
- Gadgets designed around experience, not electronics
- Jobs always knew exactly whom he was addressing
Editor's note: Chris Taylor is San Francisco bureau chief of Mashable, a popular tech news blog and a CNN.com content partner.
(CNN) -- Just imagine, for a moment, a world in which Steve Jobs had never lived. How might daily life be different?Computers are still around, but not as you know them. They're complex, hateful things, mostly used in the office for spreadsheets and other business applications. Nobody bothered to sell a good-looking user interface with a desktop and mouse, because nobody could be sure there was a mass market for it.
Thousands of people use PCs at home, but they're mostly hobbyists and amateur programmers. If you want to have fun with electronics, you hook up a videogame console to your TV. The Internet still exists, but it never really had as much of a platform to take root on.
There's a thriving market in trading MP3s online, but all of it is illegal. The record labels never got their act together on selling digital copies of songs. MP3 players are large, clunky things with too many buttons. No movie studio makes really good computer-animated films. Smartphones are bulky bricks with thick keyboards. Touchscreen tablets exist -- as prototypes in a few computer labs.
Okay, so maybe things wouldn't have been quite that bad without Jobs. Perhaps Xerox PARC's management would have figured out it was sitting on a goldmine in its Graphical User Interface and early-model mouse. Microsoft might have come up with Windows without the example of the Macintosh. Maybe Steve Wozniak would have found another compadre to help him design, sell and market the Apple II, the PC that started it all.
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