What’s Steve Jobs got to do with the REO business? Nothing at all, not that I know of, anyway. So what am I doing putting those two together?
Well, for one, Steve Jobs just died, and a lot of people are talking about it. And two, I myself am in the REO business, and I have been a user of Jobs’ products for decades.
The truth of the matter is, there are a lot of different products I could use instead of Apple products. I could use a PC, I could use an Android Phone – they would get the job done. Actually, I have used lots of PCs and of course I do have Windows running inside a virtual machine on my Mac, because so many REO systems are writtten – for no good reason whatsoever – only to work on Microsoft Internet Explorer.
But I use a Mac (and before that, an Apple ][+ if you can believe it), and it’s not often that my iPhone is far from reach. The question some will ask is, why, when there are cheaper alternatives out there?
The short answer is, like so many things in life: you get what you pay for. I know, you’re reading this blog post here on my web site, SiiconREO.com – and you see that I am a REO broker servicing the greater Silicon Valley area – you’re thinking I must be some kind of huge geek, right? Well, maybe.
But the reason I like Apple products is the same reason that for years, real geeks spurned them – it’s not the kind of technology that you’re meant to screw around with. The thing is, I like technology that just works. I don’t want to have to screw around with it. I want to plug it in, and put it to work, so I can focus on what my job really is: serving my clients.
Sure, sometimes my fancy Apple hardware and software lets me down, and I do have to end up screwing with it to get it to work. But not often – and seemingly a lot less often than technology from a lot of other vendors. For the most part, the technology part of the job recedes into the background and I am just left with the task at hand. Ahhh. Apple’s technolgoy empowers me to get a lot of work done, wherever I am – at home, in the office, on the road, in the field, on vacation – with a minimum of fuss and worry. I view it as a force multiplier – I can’t clone myself, but I can increase my producitivty through the judicious application of technolgoy such that the effect is in many ways the same.
Many years ago, I actually wrote an e-mail to Steve Jobs. This was right after he had come back to Apple and taken over. I had just bought a Newton MessagePad, and Steve Jobs went and killed it off. That thing cost me like over $1,000 as I recall, and that was back in the mid-90’s when $1,000 was a pretty good chunk of change. So I wrote Steve an e-mail and I said basically, WTF?! I’m sure I must have insulted him in some way, because the next day, I actually did get an e-mail back from Steve – or one of his asisstants, who knows.
I looked for that e-mail about a month ago – I couldn’t find it, the e-mails I’ve saved only go back about 7 years, not 15. His response to me was short and to the point – something about how if Apple should once again flourish in the years to come, I needed to look myself in a mirror and say shame on me for writing such a nasty e-mail.
Yes, shame on me. Sorry Steve. Mea culpa, or my bad, as they say these days. Thanks for all those far-out groovy times basking in your reality distortion field. I’ll go ahead and pre-order an iPhone 4S now, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors.
