Leading Apple With Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius

Legacy

As mentioned earlier, Steve’s legacy was never more evident than at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. His constantly beating the drum about the user experience had definitely caught hold: The phrase was a prominent feature of many product presentations. It was even true for Sony—a company that Steve had greatly admired from the early days, as well as having a two-way deep personal admiration for then-Sony CEO Akio Morita. The Sony booth at CES gave the impression that everyone must have gotten a memo about the importance of user experience as a term for catching customer interest. They were even handing out a press release, “Sony Delivers New User Experience for Consumers.” And the president of Sony was being quoted as saying that the company had set up a user-experience organization dedicated to making sure all its products work well together. (Of course, Sony would be in much better shape today if they had listened to Steve touting the importance of user experience when he first started traveling to Japan and bringing it up in his conversations with Morita-san.)