Google’s senior vice-president of engineering Vic Gundotra responded to Steve Jobs’ retirement in August of 2011 by posting a short story on his Google+ profile of an interaction with the Apple founder.
On a Sunday morning in 2008, Gundotra was attending religious services when his cell phone vibrated. After discreetly checking the phone and finding that it said “caller ID unknown,” Gundotra decided to ignore the call. After services finished, Gundotra checked his voicemail to find a message from Jobs asking him to phone him at home to discuss something urgent.
At this time, Gundotra was responsible for all mobile applications at Google, and in that role had regular interactions with Jobs—something he considered to be a perk of the job. After calling Jobs back, Gundotra apologized for not answering during religious services, to which Jobs quipped, “Vic, unless the caller ID said ‘God,’ you should never pick up during services.”
Gundotra was understandably nervous to have Jobs calling him on a Sunday since his regular business interactions at the time often involved dealing with Jobs during the week.
But what the call was actually about was how the Google logo on the iPhone had an issue with the colour. The second ‘O’ in Google didn’t have the proper yellow gradient, so Jobs had tasked someone to fix it and was double-checking with Gundotra that it was okay. On a Sunday.
To say that Steve Jobs was detail-oriented would be like calling Albert Einstein a “genius.” Jobs’ impact on the world will be felt for decades after his death, as he truly set the world on the path to thinking and looking at things differently.
After revolutionizing the way music is listened to, Jobs followed it up by changing the way music is distributed with iTunes. With iPhones, he fundamentally changed smartphones by bringing touchscreens into the equation. iPads created a new market for tablets.
In the world of technology, from Jobs founding Apple to the corporation becoming the largest American corporation in the world (exceeding Exxon Mobil) is very significant.
In 1986, Jobs also acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which then became Pixar Animation Studios. Under his direction, they put out some pretty good movies.
Even though Jobs’ is gone, his impact on the world in terms of technology and entertainment will be felt for decades to come.
And employers could still learn a lot from a man who would spend his Sunday working on a detail as small as the colour of a logo on a mobile-phone application.