A Tribute to Steve Jobs

Not only by its name, NEXT owes a lot to Steve Jobs and how he saw the world.

On August 24, 2011 Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple. Just a few weeks later, on October 5, he passed away. In the brief period between these two events, I somehow came to think that NEXT as a conference name could well be a tribute to Steve Jobs. It is well known that he founded NeXT after his first departure from Apple in the mid-eighties. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.

More than a decade later, Jobs returned to Apple, and NeXT became the foundation for the great turn-around and the tremendous success of Apple. And by the way, next.com still resolves to apple.com, thus serving as a constant reminder for why we can’t have the next.com domain.

It was of course a dream of every conference organiser to have Steve Jobs on stage. But he had other, more important things to do. So besides his famous keynotes, he rarely appeared at events. One of the few exceptions was the Wall Street Journal’s famous D Conference, where he appeared five times between 2003 and 2010. Here’s the last interview he did there.

Steve, R.I.P.

Photo by Serhii Butenko on Unsplash