Fortune declares Apple’s late CEO the greatest business mind in recent time

Mar 26, 2012 07:47 GMT  ·  By

Fortune has named Steve Jobs “The Greatest Entrepreneur of Our Time” in a feature on the top 12 entrepreneurs in the last few decades.

Touting his “intuition, his radar-like feel for emerging technologies and how they could be brought together to create, in his words, ‘insanely great’ products,” Fortune says Steve Jobs “ultimately made the difference.”

“For Jobs, who died last year at 56, intuition was no mere gut call,” says the magazine. “It was, as he put it in his often-quoted commencement speech at Stanford, about ‘connecting the dots’, glimpsing the relationships among wildly disparate life experiences and changes in technology.”

“Though he could be abusive and mean-spirited to people who threw themselves into their work on his behalf, Steve Jobs has been our generation’s quintessential entrepreneur. Visionary. Inspiring. Brilliant. Mercurial.”

Steve Jobs was known for his reluctance to carry out market research by the book. Fortune points out to his intriguing reply to a reporter’s question on this topic:

“None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want. It’s hard for [consumers] to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it,” Jobs famously quipped.

And on the day Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked him what type of research Apple had conducted to test the waters. Jobs replied in a nearly offended tone, according to Fortune, saying: "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?"

The mag goes to stress that it is a good thing Jobs never delved much into consumer studies. Had he done that, Apple would have probably never released blockbuster products like the Macintosh, the iPod and iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad.