The online virtual world most of us take for granted is only 20 years old.

In the very short space of two decades we have eagerly and voraciously moved our lives and businesses into it and become dependent on it.

Look around you and see people everywhere staring longingly at their mobile screens, checking status, checking in and checking up.

Each seems intent on their interaction, to the point where it appears to the innocent passer-by as if they are greedily sucking air from their virtual breathing apparatus.

This new online and PC world required a pioneer, a visionary.

Someone to stare far into tomorrow and beyond and see what can be done. Someone to bravely say “what if” and then see about getting it done.

In our generation that forward looker was Steve Jobs, pioneering products, brands and people.

He started Apple Computers at a time when the PC was unknown and unwanted. He built software platforms far in advance of their marketplace needs. He innovated digital films when he purchased and breathed new life in to Pixar films. He returned to Apple after his forced departure, to take an ailing almost irrelevant company to corporate world dominance, with a suite of new horizon products that include iTunes, iPhone and iPads.

Steve Job’s gift seems to be his unwavering consumer focused vision of technology and what they could become as he uncannily built category definers that would be purposeful, useful and intuitive.

He thought nothing of relentlessly driving his handpicked tribe to seemingly reach far into the future and drag back to today unseen of and unheard of technology.

His ability to make the world see the future is also clear as he regularly ignited the passion of the everyday consumer, geek and non tech ahead alike, to stand for hours outside one of his global retail stores to be the first to buy and use one of his latest who would have known I needed gadgets.

From a corporate viewpoint he rebuilt Apple over the last decade and a half to tack into the wind. To seek and desire difference in order to find market opportunity. To work for Apple requires checking in the obvious at the door and joining the Don Quixote search for virtual and technological windmills.

This and where to from here for Apple was the on air discussion between myself and Jason Jordan of Perth radio’s 6PR in this weeks FutureTech segment as we paid tribute to the life and times of a gone to soon true innovator.

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