"I think I have five more great products in me," Steve Jobs said a very long time ago.
He was 31 at the time and barreling up Route 101 in Silicon Valley, en route to a meeting in San Francisco. Having been kicked out of Apple, which he'd co-founded a decade before, Jobs was wholly engaged in the act of starting up a new company, which he had named -- of course! -- NeXT.
As it happens, I was in the passenger seat, interviewing him for Esquire magazine. I was never one of the journalists who was close to Jobs. But that long-ago assignment came at a time in his life when he must have wanted to unburden himself.
For nearly a week, he allowed me to sit in on meetings and engaged in long, introspective conversations over dinner. And he took me to his house, where we leafed through a photo album with pictures of the team that created the Macintosh computer, his last big accomplishment before his exile from Apple.
August 24ths sad, but unsurprising, news that Jobs was resigning as Apple's chief executive -- presumably because of his deteriorating health -- got me thinking about that old encounter. The businessman I met 25 years ago violated every rule of management. He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager. He had an astonishing aesthetic sense, which businesspeople almost always lack. He could be absolutely brutal in meetings: I watched him eviscerate staff members for their "bozo ideas."
The Steve Jobs I watched that week was arrogant, sarcastic, thoughtful, learned, paranoid and "insanely" (to use one of his favorite words) charismatic.
The Steve Jobs the rest of the world has gotten to know in the nearly 15 years since he returned to Apple is no different. He never mellowed, never let up on Apple employees, never stopped relying on his singular instincts in making decisions about how Apple products should look and how they should work. Just a few months ago, Fortune published an article about life inside Apple; it opened with an anecdote in which Jobs cut his staff to ribbons for putting out a product that failed to meet his standards. But his instincts have been so unerringly good -- and his charisma so powerful -- that Apple employees were willing to follow him wherever he led. Apple will miss those instincts.
Most of the articles written in the past few days about Jobs's resignation have tended to focus on the iPhone and the iPad. But if you take the long view, they're just the icing on the cake.
Have we forgotten already that Jobs virtually invented the personal computer, with the introduction of the Apple II, when he was barely 21? That a few years later he saved Apple from near-disaster by creating the Macintosh -- the first commercially successful machine with a mouse and windows, and all the other features we associate with modern computing? That the NeXT operating system was critical to the next generation of Macintosh computers after Jobs returned from a 12-year exile in 1997? And, yes, then came the iPod, the iPhone and iPad -- all of them so elegant in their look and feel that they became more than devices. They were objects of lust.
There's more, of course. Steve Jobs persuaded the recording industry to use his iTunes to give consumers an easy alternative to stealing music online. The iPhone completely upended two industries: computing and cellphones. The iPad is in the process of doing the same to the written word. And let's not forget Pixar, which Jobs bought at the same time he was starting NeXT, and which has become the greatest maker of animated films in modern times, steeped in Jobs's aesthetic and attention to detail.
Five more great products, he said 25 years ago? When you look at the list, you realize that he sold himself short. It is almost not believable that one person could have affected such a large swath of American culture and industry.
In recent days, Jobs has been routinely called a business genius, and who can disagree? I've been a critic at times of some of Apple's practices, starting with its excessive secrecy, but there is no denying that Jobs is on a very short list of greatest American businessmen ever.
In many of the recent articles, he's been mentioned as a modern-day Henry Ford, who, of course, built the first automobile the middle class could afford. On that ride to San Francisco all those years ago, Jobs himself compared the still-young computer industry to Henry Ford's automobile industry, when anything still seemed possible. "It must have been the most incredible feeling to know that this was going to change America," he said. "And it did!"
As he steps down as Apple's leader, at the too-young age of 56, Steve Jobs has known that feeling more than anyone else alive.