Steve Jobs’s death let the economic world think about how he has changed capitalism.

Julian Baggini, “The Guardian” journalist, wrote an article on 6^th October 2011 suggesting a reflection on the  changes brought about in capitalism by the efficient work and career of Steve Jobs.

The article proposes a discussion on the main changes his company and him introduced in the traditional policies of capitalism.

Jobs’s success was due to the creation of items that people came to want more than anything else only after they were launched on the market. On the basis that you can’t give consumers what they want because they don’t know what they want, the old rule that “the consumer is king” underwent a real crisis. This is the first relevant change in the traditional idea of capitalism Steve Job introduced into the system. iIt follows that the market should not satisfy ordinary conventions because even new great innovations can become popular.

But, when a great innovation becomes popular, it comes at a cost. And this is what S. Jobs showed. The idea that the market can charge a premium price for a premium product,  is an idea colliding with the open-source movement as wekll as with the basic idea of  the race-to-the-bottom system.

The principle rests on the reliability of a great brand. Premium prices and premium products depend on the “designer label” of multinational companies. They create items of substance behind them. Great companies have become what they are because they have given buyers something reliable.

The journalist also analyzes  the attitudes that made of Jobs an undemocratic and demagogic man: S. Jobs always used tight control on Apple’s copyrights, refused to license to third parties and tied his devices to his own content suppliers.

Jobs’s way of working killed the idea of open and collaborative work but it has been successful  on his own and to his company and it allowed Apple to become the biggest company in the world.

Steve Jobs'idea may sound  old-fashioned considering that people in business have been demoted in importance beneath “market forces” and that every last bit of potential for increased efficiency would be squeezed. But indeed  every business does what is best for itself.  It follows that if Jobs had not created his premium products, someone else would have done it because human innovation can work quicker than natural evolution.

So the new idea of capitalism is that the market is not surely self-efficient and needs therefore someone who can see some crazy ideas are made of gold and can use them as devices for market’s development.