One year since Steve passed away, why do I care

It's been already one year, lightning fast, since the late Steve Jobs passed away. I remember vividly the very day this was announced in our part of the world, I was in Paris that day.

Like I think most of us, there a great times and troubled times in our life. This is part of what life is about and why we grow and learn more than usual in these tough moments. Human nature is lazy and we sometimes wait for adversity to kick in to really unleash our full potential. This day was a day like this to me, I wanted to fully be part of the social revolution and walk the talk.

Since quite a while, when I felt a bit down, I went back to Steve commencement speech to recharge my motivation and inspiration batteries -- listening to it while I write this btw. It's there, in your face, what you really must focus on to get rid of that grey weather on your mind. "Stay hungry, Stay foolish" coins it pretty well to me.

On that specific day, one year ago, I felt the urgent need for a change. It became obvious and explicit when I heard on the radio, going to work, "Steve Jobs is dead". Passion didn't seem to be my day to day and I wanted to embark onto new heights. I enjoyed very much the revolutions we've been through in the last 30 years and each time I tried to grab a piece of it to fuel my path. Started with the PC revolution in the early eighties -- I founded my software company, then came the Internet revolution -- I was preaching fortune 500 top execs with the IBM logo in the back then switched to Sun Micro to live the Silicon Valley excitement about it, and now is the era of the Cloud, Mobile and Social Networks -- brought me to Salesforce.com. Steve inspires many of us, since long. When leading a team of developers back at the software company I founded years ago, I'd share with them "The journey is the reward" and the story of the Macintosh. I wanted to inspire them to achieve "insanely" great things.

So this is why I care. I'd really like to meet with more youngsters willing to change the world. The conventional wisdom surrounding us tends to mitigate this, wrongly. Let's remember more often individuals like Steve and the ones he chose to have in the Think Different campaign, the crazy ones, the misfits, to change the world and make it a better place for all of us.