The article published  in  “The Guardian” on the 6th October 2011  by Julian Baggini points out a peculiar aspect of Steve Job’s work, after his premature death. While the most acclaimed him as a renewer in the technological field, Baggini underlines how Job “transformed the business world”, showing a new image of capitalism.

The first innovation concerned his attitude to consumers: market has the job of giving customers what they will want in the future, not just what they want. So the traditional motto  “the consumer is king”in not always true, because consumers do not always know what they really wish. As soon as they see a new product, they will find out  they want it. Soit sounds rather foolish to think the market has to propose “the conventional” because buyers are not always conservative and they appreciate “great innovations”.

Furthermore, it is not always correct to believe  a good mass-product has to be cheap or given for free. Job’s new idea is against “open-source movement” (e. g. Wikipedia) or “race-to-the-bottom chains” and rather seemed in liner with the opinion that  goods should imply a price to pay. The cost will be a warrant to its quality and this is exactly the case of a premium product.

Even if this could sound undemocratic, a business company has to strictly control its copyright, refus license to other parties and to tie its products to his own suppliers, as did “Apple. As for the price question mentioned above, to Steve Jobs tight control was synonym of excellence.

Thanks to such principles Jobs “made multinational brands respectable”, making his devices whorsipped. He discovered  people are easily convinced to buy premium products.

Maybe he has not changed capitalism completely: free market always manages to do everything to increase its efficiency. And, if Jobs hadn’t invented I-Pad, someone else would.

Market laws will provide survival just to the companies driven by individuals able to select good ideas and Steve Job was one of them. He succeeded in discovering devices “that really took off”. 

He therefore represented a proof capitalism is not selfregulating. It is not “maximally efficient” by itself because it needs good managers to be interpreted and see avant-guard. And to tell the truth, Steve Jobs did not consider  capitalism necessarily a faulty system but his being against free-market fundamentalists demonstrates self-regulation is not surely one of its features.