What Steve Jobs had taught me indirectly?

When I first heard the news, I was really sad about it. I have never ever seen him or known him in my life, but he has taught me many things as a role model whom I have taken as a benchmark in entrepreneurship. Unlike most of the businesses out there where they always fight in price wars, Apple does things differently from the rest. For example in the recent few IT Show, my wife bought a MacBook Pro there even though it has no price difference over, except for some really cheap freebies that the authorised resellers threw in such as a mouse with a very low quality and simulates like an Apple mouse… (I would rather throw that away!) And the interesting thing is that they can almost always sold out the Apple products! Right in the first place, we don’t really need to buy from the IT Show… But it seems to be the hot button to push them to buy…

Even though I don’t live in United States, I have learnt a lot from Steve Jobs! His presentation skill is probably the best… It is world class! He showed me how to present everytime I need to… I did that by going to YouTube to see and learn from his past presentations.

He taught me how to deal with crisis when iPhone4 faced reception issue. One thing that amazed me is that he actually shows the world that this problem is common by demonstrating other phone brands such as Nokia and Blackberry. He even posted them up on Apple website. All these things made all the phone brands seemed panic and retaliated with their press releases.

He taught me how to work on product creation when I read books about him. The single most important factor is that he sets the vision of the products, and gets his hands dirty by testing the products himself. He does not believe in doing product survey because the potential customers do not know what they want. It’s like when Henry Ford (the car inventor) asks what the people want and they can only answer that they want a faster horse because cars don’t exist back then.

He also taught me about marketing communications. When the shop owners want to sell Apple products, they must set up the standard Apple environment inside. It is so clean and tidy. We all know this is an Apple corner and nothing else! All collaterals are very standardised, and even their prices. I also like their website as it is very simple and well-aligned across different countries. Most importantly, branding is something that the CEO must take charge of personally.. And Steve Jobs had done them all. Whereas for the rest of the companies, they are too consumed by the lame reasons of being MNCs themselves that they can’t do this or that, and excused themselves that these are the things that only small companies can do.

I have no idea how the logistics and supply chain works for them but I believe it must be superb since I guess Tim Cook was the man behind, and he has been highly recommended by Steve Jobs to take over his CEO role.

Also, I admire his entrepreneurship when he was out of Apple. At that time, he had actually started up two companies which eventually become very profitable and were bought over by Apple and Disney.

Lastly, I have ever thought of starting up a music online store. The path was super difficult as different sings are owned by different companies. And the kind of dedication that they want from me basically needs me to pay upfront tens of thousands of dollars! When Steve Jobs wanted to start iTunes, he managed to convince the companies to sell as such a low cost. He had magically went past the difficulties that I had!

With so many things to learn from him, it is such a pity that he has to go. Perhaps the heaven needs his help to revolutionise the apple tree that Adam and Eve have eaten… There is no reason why God has called for him to be home at such a young age. But whatever it is, I felt privileged to have known such a legendary person on earth – Steve Jobs. Thank you!