In my past I have had lots of dealings with Apple: I was there when they took a stake in ARM (remember the Newton?); I managed the company that ran the Apple Centre in Oxford; placed the ad that welcomed Apple to the RISC club; and I burnt the late night oil when Apple bought Acorn’s education business. Oh, and I once applied for a job at Apple but was turned down because I wasn’t ‘an Apple person’, whatever that meant.  Still I never met Steve Jobs and never even rang him even though I had his phone number on my Mac.

What Apple does is design computers and lead the digital music revolution, through savvy integration of the supply chain, with its iPods and iTunes online store. It made the mobile phone more useful with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and the iPad is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices after years of the tablet being just a promise or a prop on Star Trek. Steve Jobs can be credited with reinventing the company in the face of industry competition.

I am sure he was charismatic, motivational, far-sighted and all of those things that people who really know him say of him. However, for me his key understanding was that technology companies need brands and the more ‘cult’ the brand the more loyalty and hence the more sales there are. He has touched my life not because he was some kind of saint but because he understood that although good technology sells, good-looking technology sells better. He knew that we all want to own aspirational and inspirational things and we will pay more for them, providing they deliver what we want. He made technology cool and changed people’s perceptions, and I thank him for that.