Jobs had outsize influence on the young
— -- SAN FRANCISCO - The Apple store here has become what almost every Apple store has morphed into since word spread Wednesday of Steve Jobs' death. A shrine. But not to the businessman Jobs was, but to the pop culture guru he embodied.
Between the flowers and the notes, you'd think a star had died, or maybe a world leader. In fact, he was both to many - and perhaps no more so than to twentysomethings weaned on Jobs' iWorld.
"What he did for me and my generation is he turned technology into fashion," says Natan Edelsburg, 23, vice president of Sawhorse Media in New York. "Just walking into the subway with those white earbuds was the essence of cool."
But the impact of Jobs' creations was more than accessory deep. The intuitive user experience coupled with the functional design of Apple creations - the Volkswagen Beetles of the tech world - combined to permanently skew the view of a generation.
"I simply prefer working someplace that uses Apple products," says Edelsburg. "We know they're simple to use and made with quality."
For others, Jobs' influence went well beyond the jewel-like talismans that popped up in the company's stores. For millennials such as Ricky Yean, 23, Jobs was a beacon that guided his trek from a poor immigrant upbringing in Los Angeles to CEO of a start-up in Palo Alto.
"Coming out of college, Steve's success gave us the courage to pursue what we were passionate about," says Yean, who emigrated from Taiwan at age 11, attended Stanford University on scholarship, and then founded the social networking-focused site Crowdbooster. "His products, of course, touched us all. We don't know an i-less world. But mainly it was the man's drive that inspired me."
Like many of his generation, Yean cites Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address as a touchstone that he still watches to get fired up. In it, Jobs tells graduates "your time is limited, don't waste it living someone else's life."
Yean says he was in a meeting with colleagues his age when news broke of Jobs' death. "At first we didn't believe it. Then there was deafening silence," he says. "I felt like crying."
Such sentiments are to be expected considering those under 30 have Jobs to thank for living life - from high-school on - continually connected to both their data and each other, says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
"From music to video to social networking, that generation has redefined the way it communicates thanks to these technological tools," he says. "They expect to access anything they want, whenever they want."
Jobs was in a very concrete way "the Pied Piper for that group," says Peter Sealey, a Silicon Valley advisor and founder of The Sausalito Group consultancy. "He created the world in which they live."
That Apple touch extends beyond tech toys and into movies from Pixar, which Jobs bought, developed and sold to Disney. The company's string of kid-friendly blockbusters such as the Toy Story franchises changed a prevailing attitude in Hollywood "that a G-rated movie was going to be the kiss of death with audiences of a certain age," says Sealey, who ran marketing for Columbia Pictures. "Now, all these twentysomethings know and love Pixar's animated work."
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