Ankur Sharma

Steve Jobs did it by building Apple aficionados . Marc Andreessen did that with Netscape when he forced people to look web browsing as an entertaining experience and not just "a geek activity". Sean Parker ,  Shawn Fanning and John Fanning did it with Napster when they changed the way people look at the music. They all are/were great product guys who knew what the tribe wanted even before the tribe had laid eyes on their products. They didn't do the focus group studies or market research to know the viability of their idea. They didn't show the stakeholders, mocks of their products so that they can "fill in the blanks". But is that the only way to leave the product legacy? I don't think so. Google products , passes through at least 3000 eyes, before they get released even for the Beta. Agree, their hit rate is low but that is because they churn products dime a dozen, an evidence of their agile environment - one of the most important as...

I usually don't read a book just because everyone else is reading it - it makes me thinks conventionally, corrupts my thought process into more of a mass one, not the kind I usually love to live with. But if I can take the liberty of paraphrasing Steven Levy from " In The Plex ", with his new book, Walter Isaacson made me chase everyone elses' tail lights, and for the first time, I am kind of proud at being conventional. From today, I am going to start reading Steve Jobs in Hardcover, which has gotten shipped at a 50% pre-release discount, from Indiaplaza (Yes, Flipkart ; they pipped you this time!), a couple of days back.  Now if you please excuse me, I have to go to get some carrot juice for Mr. Jobs! It's Halloween after all!

It takes a toll on you. All of a sudden, it makes you believe that death is imminent. It is close by. And you better live with the philosophy Steve Jobs made famous with his commencement speech , "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" Just in case you are not following my blog, the two people who I wrote about, were Steve Jobs and Jagjit Singh . They couldn't be more different from each other. But from the time I have been thinking about writing this note, all I could see was similarities. They both were geniuses in their own field and transformed the way people saw their respective industries. Mirza Ghalib once said, "When your creations are started being used by tawayafs and fakirs " - 19th century version of common man - "then you are destined to be immortal". Steve Jobs did that to Personal Computers and Jagjit Singh to Ghazals.

Last month, when I wrote a post about Steve Jobs , his famous Stanford Commencement Speech and Karma; little did I realize that I am going to write another post about him so soon, and not for all the right reasons. He is no more and his passing away has made even the President of United States comment about how Jobs was "bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it". Surely he was. He first changed the way people publish content, by working with Adobe. People only talk about their conflict, in the light of iPad not using Flash. Rarely do they talk about what they both together did to publishing industry. I believe his second biggest contribution was to change the way people see music. Sony had already started this revolution, but it was Jobs and Ive and iPod, who drove it from inflection point. Now there is nothing else which has not already been written about him, post his death. But having said that, there is one thing which...

"You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." When Steve Jobs spoke of these prophetic words at his Commencement Address at Stanford University in June 2005, what flummoxed me that a man of such stature, who had like made Apple rise like a phoenix in recent years was giving away pretty much all the credit of beautiful Typography and developing Macs to Destiny. This was the time, when iPods, Macs & iTunes were already a sensation and though India which at times considered the "nerd country" (owing to the PhDs they have produced in United States), Macs & Ipods were still not a commonality as they have become now. Among all this, I had just started working, was pretty much broke but was consumed by idealism of capitalistic nature which was sweeping away India (where I live). And here was the poster boy of  all the "nerds...