ITauthor

So we all know about Steve Jobs. But, what the heck, let's trot through the well-worn path of his public life.

The early years where he hooked up with a brilliant young engineer called Steve Wozniak and got him to design circuit boards that people still consider works of engineering artistry. The huge success of the Apple II in the late '70s when the microcomputer industry was in its infancy. His immediate grasp, on visiting Xerox PARC, of the business potential of the mouse and graphical user interface. The Apple Lisa and then the phenomenon that was the Macintosh. His sacking from Apple in 1985 and the launch of NeXT (identifying UNIX as the operating system that would allow him to continue pursuing the ideas he'd been trying to develop at Apple). The $10M purchase of a division of Lucasfilm the following year (which went on to become Pixar). The transformation of that $10M into a $585M share value when Pixar went public in 1995. The stagnation of Apple without Jobs. His return to Apple in 1996 (shortly afterwards taking on the mantle of "interim" CEO - as if anyone was fooled that he wouldn't stick around). The uber-stylish iMac in 1998 (the first of the iBrands and the fast-selling Macintosh ever). The license to print money that was the iPod/iTunes application/iTunes Music Store triumvirate. The successful replacement of the old Mac OS with Mac OS X, an operating system based on the work done at NeXT. And then in 2007 the launch of a mobile phone - but not just any mobile phone - of course it's not - this is Apple, so it just has to be, indisputably, the best mobile phone ever.

So that's all well and good. But out of all his background of success and his personal qualities - his obsession for beautiful hardware design, his extreme attention to detail, his ferocious determination to protect Apple's intellectual property, his own personal self-branding, his Wonka-esque control over what information comes out of Apple - out of all this, what is it that makes people follow Jobs, and hang on his every word, like no other business leader.

For an answer, look no further than this footage from Apple's sales conference in Hawaii in October 1983:

It's his passion, his complete commitment and his palpable belief in the importance of what he's saying that make this so totally captivating. If Jobs had been an army recruiting sergeant, looking for recruits to fight the evil Big Blue, I'd have enlisted on the spot.