Steve Jobs, Father Of Innovation, His Legacy Will Live On

Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com
It couldn’t seem any more appropriate than writing about one of the most influential people in the realm of technology on the very machine he helped design.
Steve Jobs, a man who has encouraged many people by his ambitions and dreams through his work at Apple, passed away on October 5, 2011 after battling with what one could say was the malware of the human body, cancer.
He had been struggling with pancreatic cancer since 2004 and has taken two leave of absences since then to try and straighten things out. 
At the moment of his death, Jobs has seen what started in a garage in 1976 become the world’s most valuable company in 2011. 
It seems as if everything he touched had pure innovation and integrity in an industry that was mostly driven by rip-offs of whatever he helped create.
Jobs left his post as CEO of Apple on August 24 this year, leaving the reigns of his position to Tim Cook.  This was not the first time he left the position at the empire he helped to build.
He originally left the company in 1985 and started other endeavors that still live on to this day as million dollar companies.
Jobs helped start Pixar Animation Studios in 1986, seeing blockbuster hits like Toy Story and A Bug’s Life take off under his command as CEO.
Apple knows the value of Jobs as a business leader more than any other company he has been a part of.
The company brought back Jobs into the picture after almost filing for bankruptcy in 1996.  Since then, Apple has sold over 300 million iPods, holds over 68 percent of the tablet computer market share with the iPad, and has one of the most popular smartphones in the world with its iPhone.
Despite the popularity of all the products Jobs saw come out under his leadership, the most influential in my life was his innovative software.  Any designer that has the intuitiveness of Steve Jobs could pull out an eye-appealing product, but no other company has been able to back it up with software as well as the company Jobs co-founded.
Jobs reliability in software, and obviously choosing his programmers, was the reason my dad first introduced me to a Mac in the 1980s.  Jobs made sure everything was pristine and slick with his Mac computer line, right down to the packaging. 
When his new iMac computer entered our household, my family sat around a box and took pictures of each step of unpacking the new product, including the instruction manual (which consisted of a couple of images to show how to plug it into a wall).
New York Times released a report after Jobs resigned in August saying that he had 317 patents to his name in Apple products, including a glass staircase he designed for an Apple Store.
Jobs was more than a business man, but an innovator, and one who will live on with how our world has been shaped because of his standard.  My only hope is that another young mind as brilliant and creative as Steve Jobs is out there somewhere, tinkering with a new idea or concept in their garage.
Apple and the world of technology will not quite ever be the same without the father of innovation, but we know his thumbprint in our world of devices is so big that we will be able to move on in a fashion only Jobs himself could’ve designed.