CUPERTINO, CAL (SatireWire.com) – After just three months together, the late Steve Jobs has convinced God to focus on customer experience rather than divine adoration, a remarkable shift in deific direction that should see life improve dramatically for Earth’s 7 billion end users.
The former Apple CEO, who died Oct. 5, reportedly persuaded the Lord that people are “existence consumers,” and that He needs to make their lives more user-friendly to maintain a dominant position in the market.
“As Mr. Jobs put it to God, you want people to have a positive experience with every interaction. You want them to say, ‘Hey, God is really useful, something I can use in my everyday life,’” said a man identifying himself Galadriel, God’s new vice president of product development. “Mr. Jobs has made a believer of God.”
The new approach — codenamed “Life 2.0” as “iLife” was already registered by Apple – is still pre-beta and under non-disclosure, but is expected to include improvements on health and security issues. Whatever happens, it will mark a monumental change.
Historically, life has been brutish and short for the majority of existence consumers, who have often suffered pain, depredation, and humiliation while being told they should give thanks for the experience. Added to that are the panoply of rival operating faiths that have confused the market, seeding it with conflicting explanations and instruction manuals written in different languages.
Apple engineer Seth Greending, who secretly worked with Jobs on the “Life 2.0 Project” for several years before the CEO’s death, said he wasn’t surprised his former boss had helped the Almighty see the Next Big Thing.
“Steve is, was, quite the evangelist, and he had a powerful argument to make,” said Greending. “Since the introduction of the EUI, or Existence User Interface, life has been a struggle, frankly. It was never about the end user and how he or she interacted with the environment God created.”
More confusing were the times God intervened to smite whole populations, or perform a miracle, at random and with no explanation.
“This created an unpredictable, unstable environment for the consumer,” said Greending. “God works in mysterious ways, but the end user doesn’t want mysterious. The end user wants clarity, simplicity, something you can look at and say, ‘Boom! It just works!’
“The bottom line is, life shouldn’t be like Microsoft Windows, where it’s a miracle when it works right,” he added.
Particularly baffling was the counter-intuitive nature of the EUI.
“We see examples of this all across the spectrum,” Greending explained. “Humans have to eat to live, yet what they eat can kill them. Counter-intuitive. Humans want to have sex, but are made to feel guilty for it. Counter-intuitive. God visits you with hardship, but you have to love Him. Counter-intuitive.”
And of course there’s the big one: people want to live forever, but they have to “die” to have a chance at it. For Shiram Gudhjami, another Apple engineer from the Life 2.0 Project, this is a classic example of a non-consumer-facing organization.
“If I’m offered competing lives, one of happiness and health for 70 years, and another of hardship and struggle for 70 years with only the “possibility” of living on afterward, I’m going for happiness,” said Gudhjami. “But of course there is no competition, so the organization stagnates. Same thing happened to the Greeks and the Romans. And IBM.”
While Life 2.0 promises to make life easier, some are concerned it may be too easy, causing humans to stop striving. But Galadriel dismissed that fear.
“On the contrary,” he said, “people — the end users — will be our de facto development team. They’ll come up with platform agnostic innovations and solutions that we apply across the entire consumer spectrum.”
He conceded, however, that Life 2.0 has run into two hurdles. The first: life is spread across sometimes conflicting platforms, otherwise known as operating faiths. For example, they’re running Christianity in the West, Judaism and Islam in the Middle East, Buddhism in the Far East. These aren’t always compatible, so a solution made for Islam won’t always work with Christianity, or vice versa.
“We’ve got to introduce a platform agnostic faith so that our end-user developers don’t have to learn different languages and sets of instructions,” he said. “We need a one-size-fits-all solution that’s flexible and scalable. We’re working on it.”
The other problem is resistance from legacy users.
“People are used to the old systems and they don’t want change,” Galadriel said. “They know how it works and they think it’s too much trouble to learn a new system. All the weeks and years spent in training.”
God’s initial solution to the legacy problem was to smite those who refused to migrate to the new platform, but Jobs apparently talked Him out of it.
“Mr. Jobs explained that smiting was in fact part of the legacy system and that continuing to smite would cause the consumer to lose confidence in any new platform,” said Galadriel.
As for life’s built-in obsolescence, a continual complaint among end users, Galadriel said there are no plans to address that.
“Everything has a product cycle, people included,” he said. “That’s what keeps you innovating, trying to improve what you have while coming up with the next ‘Next Big Thing.’
And after Life 2.0, what might that be? Galadriel, God, and Mr. Jobs aren’t saying, pointing out that Bill Gates will die one day and probably try to steal it.
Copyright © 2012, SatireWire.com
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