Steve Jobs: No CEO of his generation came close

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — I was on the Amtrak Acela last night when the conductor broke in over the loudspeaker to give us the news about Steve Jobs.

And I thought to myself: Name one other business leader of our generation who would merit that kind of response.

Name one.

You’ll probably always remember where you were when you heard the news.

No CEO of his generation came close to Jobs. You’d have to go back to the Rockefellers and Fords.

Steve Jobs didn’t just make Apple  rise from the ashes. He did it twice.

Sure, it wasn’t all technical genius and design. Jobs was great at marketing and hype. He built Apple into the world’s first publicly traded religion. But isn’t that half the point?

We have just lived through the Age of Jobs. Over the past dozen years, Apple’s success was a rare bright spark in a dismal and depressing era of national decline, and a reminder of how American businesses used to be.

I remember the first time I became conscious of Apple’s slow renaissance under Jobs. It was back in 1999. I was standing in line in the computer department of a big store in London. The woman in front wanted to buy one of Apple’s new iMacs. The conversation went something like this:

Woman: Do you have the iMac in tangerine?

Shop assistant: I’m sorry, madam. I’m afraid we’ve sold out.

Woman: Oh, dear. What do you have left?

Shop assistant: Right now we still have the strawberry and the grape.

Woman: Oh dear, I don’t know. I really wanted the tangerine. It will go with my curtains.

As I stood there, waiting my turn, I thought: This is something very different. No one has ever shopped for computers like this.

Before Steve Jobs, they came in one color: beige. And in one style: ugly.

In the past dozen years, Apple has reinvented music, the Internet, the computer and the mobile phone. No company has done more to bring us the reality of the mobile, connected, online world that everyone dreamed about back in 1999. Not even Google .

Over the next day or two, you can expect to be swamped with a lot of commentary about all that Steve Jobs achieved. The products. The way Apple products and apps have transformed the way we live and work.

But you know all that already. Millions of you will be reading articles about Apple’s products on iPhones, iPads and MacBooks.

But here’s another way of seeing it. If you really want to measure the greatness of a business leader, look at the competitors — even whole industries — that he destroyed.

I’m not just talking about the record stores, which were swept away in a couple of years when iTunes took off.

Look at the other mobile-phone makers.

Five years ago the smartphone market was dominated by the likes of Nokia, SonyEricsson, the Palm Treo and Research In Motion. Look at them today.

Or the PC companies.

Look at Dell. Hewlett-Packard. Sony.

Look at Microsoft!

These were the titans of the computer industry. Once they inspired awe. Now you feel kind of sorry for them.

How fitting that in Jobs’s last few days, Sprint virtually immolated itself in its desperation to get its hands on the iPhone. That was the kind of effect that Steve Jobs had.