Steve Jobs

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives, the Apple board said

in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

I can't claim to have known Jobs well, though as a reporter covering Apple (AAPL) I spoke with him on several occasions. But in the nearly 30 years I have lived in Silicon Valley, I was struck by one thing that never changed: Whatever Steve Jobs did mattered.

In the mid-1980s, I worked as a software engineer at Sun Microsystems. The period marked the nadir of Jobs' career. He had just been pushed out of Apple, the company he co-founded in 1976 with his high-school friend Steve Wozniak. Jobs had gone on to start NeXT, a maker of computer workstations designed for the education market. NeXT never became a major force in the industry, which Sun dominated. But at Sun, where I worked under technology visionaries like Eric Schmidt, Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy, that didn't seem to be important. Everyone at Sun carefully tracked the progress of Jobs' little startup. Everyone was aware of NeXT and everyone respected it. Everyone, it seemed, was aware of the genius of Steve Jobs.

Jobs, of course, had earned that respect. At Apple, Jobs had already created the Apple II, the first computer that would appeal to consumers, and the Macintosh, the machine that made computers accessible to the masses. He had also shown that his uncompromising aesthetic and sense of design mattered, even if many in the industry remained unconvinced at the time. Few would dispute that today.