Steven Paul Jobs started a company, in a garage, on April 1st 1976. He was 21 years old. Yesterday, at the age of just 56, he died. The company he founded had become, by market capitalisation, the most valuable in the world.

It is one of the most extraordinary success stories in the history of American enterprise, and a surefire reason why Steve Jobs will be remembered amongst the greatest business leaders of all time. But capitalist overlords rarely excite, at least for me, enormous amounts of sympathy or emotion. The death of a fellow primate is always a sad moment, but I don’t tend to feel, as I have felt over the past day, genuine grief at the passing of someone on account of their being an ‘industry leader’.

In this sense I understand the instincts of those people whose Facebook posts proclaim bewilderment or distaste at the mass mourning of Steve Jobs. Some didn’t like his products, and that’s fine; some thought his products were overpriced and overcommercialised, and maybe they were right. Perhaps Apple’s consumers are overly fanboyish and sheepish, and were always going to react to Steve Jobs’ passing with a gushing sentimentality and pseudo-religious idolatry that’s difficult to stomach.

Let’s not forget, however, to think about why people have become advocates rather than merely consumers of Apple Inc., and why they have bought Steve Jobs’ products in such quantities as to make him, and his company, so rich. To call him an ‘industry leader’ or a capitalist success story is simply to beg the question, and not to define the unique talent which has roused such an unparalleled outpouring of grief over the past day.

Far more than a businessman, I believe that Steve Jobs was an artist: a man whose creative vision resulted in more than merely ‘products’ or ‘tools’, but beautiful objects with which millions of people now have deep, meaningful connections. He put the form around functions, found beauty in the possibilities offered to us by technology, and created machines so intuitive, tactile and joyous as to be almost human in their nature. He took personal computers which originally required one to type code into a command line, and made them accessible with a graphical user interface—windows, buttons and pointers to utilise our sense of sight—and a mouse to utilise our sense of touch. He took the music that delights our sense of sound and, with the iPod, enabled us to put it all in our hands and pockets. Finally, with the iPhone and iPad, he transformed the personal computer into a fully-fledged portable computer; one that didn’t require a mouse but instead used the most human pointing device of all: our fingers. Just this week, with the launch of ‘Siri’ and the iPhone 4S, we learned of Apple’s plans to utilise the voice as a means by which to control our devices.

It is true that Steve Jobs did not personally invent all of the technology that made this possible, though he does have his name to 313 Apple patents. What he did do, however, was understand what all of us wanted fundamentally: not as a businessperson to a market of consumers, but as a human being to a world of other human beings. We wanted to perform tasks, consume content, play, create and communicate, with all the benefits afforded by technology but without the sense of technology being in the way, impenetrable without a manual or a degree in computer science. He acted and innovated on that visionary instinct, despite all the risks, and built a place in our too-often-barren capitalist landscape for technology we can understand, and technology we can love.

It is that direct connection between individuals and the possibilities facilitated by technology—possibilities that weren’t there before, and which have changed the way we see, and interact with, the world—that is the true mark of Steve Jobs, and the essence of his genius. It is also the reason why people are mourning the death of a businessperson they never met. For, like with all great artists, he has given us a contribution that strikes a chord with our humanity, broadens our horizons and enables our own creativity every day.

As the great man remarked having announced the iPad 2 last year, ‘It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough, that it’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.’ Call me a fanboy if you like, but for as long as I can remember my heart has sang using the technology Steve Jobs pioneered. As he leaves us for good, I can’t help but express how it sinks.