Josh Welensky: Not everyone is in the club, but he certainly was a visionary

The pseudo-religious obsession by Apple fan-boys to anything Apple turns my stomach. I’m also firmly opposed, still, to the walled garden his company created with its iTunes/App store universe – if ever there was an example of anti-competitive behaviour for the Brussels bureaucrats to examine, it’s that.

From banning Adobe Flash to banning any App that doesn’t quite fit with Apple’s moral or commercial philosophy, Jobs created his own universe that over a billion of us were nonetheless magnetically attracted to. Simplicity and usability demand sacrifice, and Jobs’ greatest skill was a ruthless and persistent ability to translate simplicity into desire. Our lives are complicated enough; Steve Jobs helped make them that little bit more lusciously simple.

We need to stretch our minds first back to 1996. The crash-prone Windows 95 was released a year earlier; the fastest PC you could buy at PC World was a 166 MHz Intel and the Spice Girls were at No 1. This was also the year Jobs re-joined Apple Computer, the company he founded originally with Steve Wozniak in 1976. The company was struggling, with a confused range of models, flailing sales and fierce competition from Windows rivals. One of Jobs’ first decisions was to rename his company as simply “Apple”, a move whose significance would only be appreciated in the years that followed. In the next ten years the world was introduced to a succession of products, from the iMac to the iPhone, that revolutionsed their respective markets through a unique combination of technology, simplicity and style.

There’s little doubt we’ve lost a visionary. Steve Jobs once said: “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”

• Josh Welensky is The Scotsman’s technology writer