TO: STEVE JOBS (FOUNDER OF APPLE)

Dear Steve:

Very soon I will be joining you in Virtual Reality or wherever it is that we go when we die, but before I do, please let me ask you a couple of personal questions.

Please don't get me wrong, Steve. I admire you for a lot of things you did in your tragically foreshortened life but I simply can't join in the chorus of those who regard you as some kind of technical genius and spiritual guru. You had a good eye for design and understood instinctively what people really wanted (and expected) from computers, but your products did not “change the world.” Your products simply made the noise surrounding us significantly louder.

When you persuaded John Sculley to join you, you asked him if he wanted to “change the world or sell sugar water.” You thought that was a clever way to elevate your personal ambition to a mystical level, and motivate your future CEO, but what did you really achieve (apart from the fact that he sacked you soon after)? You were very good at spotting good products and clever ideas, and putting them inside a good-looking package, but you didn't invent things (apart from your personal image) or make any great technological breakthroughs – you borrowed and stole things (including the company name and the logo, from John, Paul, George and Ringo) and sold them as if they were yours. You created a corporate cult (not unlike the Beatles).

This is not to say, however, that you didn't make very good products and bounce back from your sacking by Sculley to turn Apple into the world's biggest business – without even wearing a suit and a tie. Along the way, you also revolutionised the music industry, transforming music into a commodity more successfully than anyone else.

In a parallel universe, however, Xerox Corporation and Atari could be ruling the world just as Apple is now. After all, they invented the clever stuff inside your products...

Did you know I worked for Apple as a public relations consultant in the early 1990s? Of course not! Why should you? But I learned a lot from reading your marketing/PR instructions – a very thick manual which spelled out exactly where words should appear on the page and the palette of colours, the fonts and the point size permitted. In fact, not much has changed in over 20 years, when I look at your latest announcements and new generation of products. The attention to detail is truly obsessive – as if designers would receive electric shocks if they dared to break one of the rules.

One day, in your Asia Pacific headquarters, I had a strange experience. The regional boss (Dave Whatever) asked me into his office to show me a film of a conference in Cupertino – I think it was one of your annual events when you rally the troops and say how well the company's done in the last year and how well it's going to do in the future and how you will conquer the world.

The conference was held in a very large theatre, filled with employees dressed in polo shirts of every imaginable colour. Some of them had pony tails, headbands and beards, like hippies at Woodstock, millions of light years away from the corporate world – the blue suits and ties of the IBM robots you sneered at in your iconic ad for the Mac.

We both sat down and watched the film and afterwards Dave asked me: “Waddya think?”

I thought for a couple of seconds and told Dave what I thought (a big mistake):

“You know what it reminds me of? The Nuremberg Rallies.”

Dave Whatever said nothing.

And several weeks later, we lost the account (it was my fault).

But was I wrong, Steve? Was Apple not a high-tech, pastel-coloured Gestapo inspired by the obsessive attention to detail and fanatical ideas of the great Josef Goebbels? Was that not the sacred vision you had when you took LSD in the early days, suddenly seeing that even though Goebbels was evil, his “branding” of the Nazis was absolute genius. While other corporations may be scared to admit it, you embraced those ideas completely. In fact, the “sugar water” peddled by Pepsi had much more in common with Apple than people may wish to believe. Instead of “sugar water,” you were selling the digital grey goo of data in which we are drowning. And the hippies in their uniforms (pastel-coloured polo shirts, pony tails, headbands and beards) all worshipped their all-knowing guru as if you had come down from heaven to open their eyes.

Did LSD play a big part in your corporate branding, as well as inspiring the notion that all information should be at our fingertips, all of us living forever in virtual reality, our DNA part of the infinite data that swirls through the cosmos, our minds integrated as one?

Flower power rather than a swastika? Instant nirvana instead of the Thousand Year Reich?

See you soon (I'm afraid).

Best wishes,

Ben Nevis (deceased)

p.s. I also took a lot of LSD in the seventies so I can understand exactly how your consciousness expanded and also how you managed to delude yourself and millions of others...