Thank you Steve, for changing the world not once, but four times with the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
Thank you for showing us that in a world of mediocrity there is room to be successful creating great art.
Thank you for being intensely genuine no matter the consequences.
Now that you are gone I mourn for the loss to the world and to me.
I mourn for the loss of what might have been.
What more could you have created in just 5 or 10 more years! After all, you were only 56. If seems fair that you should have been given a few more years.
StarrForce would not exist if not for Steve Jobs. It was my love of the Macintosh that in 1985 inspired me to move from Texas to California to somehow make the Macintosh part of my life.
Eventually this turned into being the “Macintosh Problem Solver” at Regis McKenna Inc., the PR agency for Apple Computer. Apple was giving Regis McKenna Macs and Laserwrtiers and I was the guy who figured out how to connect them and make everything work.
This lead to networking all of Regis McKenna’s Mac offices across the US using Shiva NetModems and setting up email to each Mac desktop using InBox. This was long before the internet, back when 20 meg hard disks in vogue.
It was a job I loved and that eventually lead to my starting a couple of IT consulting firms that helped companies setup Macs, and later PCs, as Microsoft stole the baton from Apple.
In the 90s the business world, and in my case the venture capital word, had solidly moved to PCs after a romance with the Mac that was too short. Running a company that setup and maintained PC networks was a good business but it wasn’t my passion.
My passion was still the Mac and the ability of technology to change the world.
After wandering in the desert for a few years in 2004 I became increasingly interested in Salesforce.com. It was the first product I’d used since the Mac that would have a profound impact on how people used technology.
Now I’m running a company focused around great technology—Salesforce.com–that is changing the way people work with the power of cloud computing.
There is no doubt that Steve Jobs started it all for me and for that I am forever thankful. May the world be blessed with a few more Steve Jobs. We really need it.
– Darren Starr