On Steve.

October 14 2011, 6:36pm

Nine days ago, the world lost a visionary who helped shape the way billions of people interact with each other. Not only did Steve Jobs change the world, he did it on more than one occasion. In time, his name will surely be placed among others who have left such an impression. Edison. Franklin. Ford. Michael Agustin, our Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, had the pleasure of working at Apple and expressed his thoughts on Steve Jobs to our team last week, shortly after the sad news became public. After a little prodding, we convinced him to share these thoughts with our entire Community: Many of us at GameSalad were born into the PC revolution. In our lifetime, we went from typewriters to the Graphical User Interface to the Internet and then the iPhone. It is hard to imagine what today would be like without Steve Job’s influence over culture and technology.
Steve’s products had an profound effect on my own life. My first exposure to a computer was an Apple IIe in the 2nd grade, programming LOGO. In high school, I wrote my first graphical user interface framework for a series of games I wanted to build. After getting my first job in the game industry, I had enough income to buy very my own personal laptop, a PowerBook. I loved the experience so much that I found myself working at Apple a year later. To me, Steve Jobs was more than just an icon, he was a philosophy. It was hard to ignore his mad phrases in the news and in history books, such as “Insanely great!”, “Think different.”, and “Make a dent in the universe.” Steve was fired from a company he founded. He took those lessons to found two other companies, whose purchase would influence the very core of the most powerful media and technology companies in the world. Through Steve’s struggle and ambition, I learned that what you love does not have to be disconnected with what you do; That your contribution to the world can simply be what you love to make. You can’t produce great things without building a team as passionate as you and, most importantly, trusting them. And, in the end, you have one short life, so make it count. Steve Job’s legacy is a responsibility to all tech companies, that technology needs to be made accessible and make an emotional impact. It is something we at GameSalad hold very close to our hearts. The way the Mac changed command-line computing with the graphical user interface, so are we all driven to change programming and the way we build interaction.
To Steve we simply say, “Challenge accepted!” -Michael Agustin, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, GameSalad