Signing Off

Saying goodbye is never easy. Over the past week, hundreds of Apple fans, technology bloggers and industry leaders have said their final goodbyes to Steve Jobs.

As an innovator and creative thinker, Steve Jobs gave the world a line of products that dared to defy the rules of design, software and communication. Today, millions of people use Jobs’ inventions to listen to music, communicate with business partners, video chat with family members and add custom apps to their smartphones.

Jobs challenged the status quo and pushed the boundaries of mobile and visual communication. With sleek and cutting-edge designs, he took ordinary objects and turned them into visually appealing and multi-functional products. Industry leaders were left to compete with Apple’s products, and they did! As a result, mobile phone users have the most expansive selection of smartphones and smartphone software, ever. Constantly pushing the bar higher and higher, Jobs changed the mobile phone industry forever.

He wouldn’t deny his ability to build the best products or employees either. He is famous for saying, “my job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” Even though Jobs challenged his workers to produce the best products, he also pushed engineers, thinkers and developers at other companies. Including ours.

Jobs’ iPhone challenged us to build the best application on the market. We met the challenge and we’ve seen downloads on the iPhone and Android continue to grow ever since then. Even in his absence, we plan to continue encouraging our engineers and developers to push the boundaries of mobile technology and create the tools users will one day grow to love.

With that said, we leave you with a quote Jobs gave to Fortune magazine in a recent interview:

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.