Truly a man ahead of his time, which explained his vision and ability to lead. An artist, engineer, philosopher, and businessman, all rolled into one, taking technology and making it more than the sum of its parts. He will be missed.

Steve Jobs has had a tremendous influence in Mountain View. His "no bozos" style of management meant that many of the brilliant people who worked for him went off to form other companies and create insanely great products. Steve always knew precisely the right person to whom he should delegate a task.

So when I was starting my consulting firm I thought who would be the best CEO in Silicon Valley to work for. Even though he was ousted from Apple, Steve Jobs at NeXT, was the CEO I most wanted as a client. So I wrote to him. He delegated the task of interviewing me to Dan'l Lewin, now corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging business development at Microsoft's Mountain View campus. Dan'l told me how he had negotiated with Sony at Apple to get the 3.5" floppy drives in the Mac. Steve wanted full time employees, I wanted to consult, and didn't get the job. WebTV that was sold to Microsoft and led to technology for the Xbox, was founded by Apple visionaries, Steve Perlman, Bruce Leak and the late Phil Goldman.

As a market research analyst, I wrote a profile of NeXT, and worked with another hand-picked hire Ron Weissman, who went on to be a venture investor at Apax Partners, as well as leading marketing at pioneering search vendor Verity, that had an office in Mountain View.

Unusually for a private company CEO, Steve briefed analysts on financials and customer relationships as if he were running a public company.

In the early 1990s there was a little startup on Latham Street called General Magic, where I worked with some incredibly talented Macintosh programmers and designers. The company was chaired by Bill Atkinson, who later went on to create beautiful photographs and wrote an App Bill Atkiinson Photocard that enables you to send large postcards. General Magic's VP Marketing, Joanna Hoffman, is the only woman to have her name inside the early Macintosh computers. Mac sofware designer Andy Hertzfeld is at Google. Many more Mountain View executives and engineers have been inspired, managed and motivated by Steve.

He hired the best.

Due to repeated violations of our Terms of Use, comments from this poster are automatically removed. Why?