Be like Steve (Chicago Tribune)

Éditorial de ce matin.

"The resignation this week of Apple Inc. boss Steve Jobs touched off an outpouring on social media. Bloggers blogged. Tweeters tweeted. Facebook posts abounded.

With Jobs gone, technology-lovers fretted, where will the next big innovation come from?

They were answering their own question, just by how they asked it. Millions of people around the globe use social media to keep in touch. Every day people invent improvements. That's the starting point for innovation.

In fact, business innovation is all around us, in everything from hydrogen fuel cells to the latest coffee drinks at fast-food restaurants. Apple has stood for years as a proud example of U.S. ingenuity. Jobs has given a nation suffering through a brutal recession reason to hope for a better economic future.

•••

Although he has stepped down, innovation, we believe, should and will escalate — partly because of his enduring example. One lesson of Jobs' success is that innovation can't be forced. It happens when colleagues talk over ideas in office hallways, or reach out late at night to share a brainstorm.

A great moment in Jobs' career came during the mid-1990s, when he recognized that innovation in desktop computers had peaked. Years earlier Jobs had left Apple, the computer company he founded, after losing an internal power struggle during a sales slump. Now Apple needed a new direction.

Jobs returned in 1997. He delivered the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. No doubt he has an iWhoKnowsWhat teed up for his successor. But the path to innovation was easier for the visionary than for those who had to put up with him. Jobs was a famously demanding boss — impatient, even nasty. That's wrong, but understandable: Investing a fortune in a new idea that might flop is not for the faint of heart. And for all this perfectionism, even Jobs had losers. The Apple III, the Cube and the Pippin game console all failed in the marketplace."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-stevejobs-20110826,0,292209.story