Steve Jobs, No introduction is needed for this iconic CEO of Apple computers. He revolutionized the Personal Computer Industry and the entertainment world with innovative products like Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iTunes etc… He’s a college dropout who once backpacked around India looking for spiritual enlightenment, returned a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing, and he takes only $1 a year in salary. Steve Jobs has upended five industries – computers, Hollywood, music, retailing, and wireless phones. More than anyone else, Apple’s co-founder has brought digital technology to the masses. On January 14’Th, 2009 he announced that he’ll take a medical leave of absence until the end of June due to complex health-related issues. In this blog read the fascinating tale of this imaginative genius.
Rough Beginning
Born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. His parents were so focused on their son’s needs that they even moved to Los Altos, California, in 1968, to put Jobs in a new school because he said that he was not learning anything at his old school. He was an odd student, out of step with both classmates and teachers, with a mind that looked at science from unusual angles. He preferred to spend his time with older students rather than ones his own age, including Stephen Wozniak, an electronics genius four years older than Jobs. In 1972 Jobs attended Reed College. Dropping out after one semester, he hung around the school for about 18 months, before submitting a résumé that greatly inflated his electronics experience to Atari, a pioneer in video gaming. For part of 1974 he worked as a game designer. After saving up enough money to pay his way, he left Atari and journeyed with friends to India to search for enlightenment. He shaved his head and walked through what he saw to be appalling poverty. He soon left India believing that Thomas Edison had done more for the betterment of humanity than all the gurus in the world.
Apple’s Inception
On his return to California Jobs began to spend time at the Homebrew computer club. Steven Wozniak was one of the members of the club, who met Jobs several years earlier when they were both summer interns at Hewlett Packard. In 1975 Jobs and Wozniak became partners, and Jobs gave their enterprise the name “Apple.” They designed their simple computer in Jobs’s bedroom. Jobs and Wozniak cobbled together their combination of a circuit board, a microprocessor, a video screen, and Jobs’s most important contribution, a typewriter-style keyboard. The inventors called it the Apple I. Wozniak had the electronic circuit design skills and Jobs provided the key ideas for its functionality and physical design. Introduced in 1976, more than 600 pieces of the Apple I were sold making $774,000. The partners wanted to build something more sophisticated and easier to use. In 1977 the former Intel executive Mike Markkula, a venture capitalist, invested in Apple, becoming its chairman of the board and bringing in outsiders to help govern the company. Jobs persuaded a successful publicist, Regis McKenna, to join Apple. That year the Apple II was introduced. With a canny sales campaign created by McKenna, and Jobs’s own magnetic personality helping persuade corporate buyers, the Apple II became the first successful mass-market personal computer.
Apple’s Evolution
In December 1980 Apple had its initial public offering of stock, becoming Apple Computer. Shares opened at $22 but rose to $29, making Apple’s value $1.2 billion. In 1980 the Apple III was introduced, but the first 14,000 units were recalled because of defects. The Apple II remained the machine preferred by customers. In 1981 IBM introduced a personal computer and made its machine an open architecture. Whereas Apple made all of its machines proprietary, not allowing anyone to even license the technology. Jobs set about waging war for personal computer supremacy. In 1983, Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola, to serve as Apple’s CEO, reportedly asking, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water to children, or do you want a chance to change the world?” In 1983 the Lisa computer was introduced. It had a 32-bit microprocessor as well as an inexpensive mouse. Jobs had worked on Lisa obsessively, demanding that it be easy to use, attractive to look at, and more powerful than any other personal computer. In the process, he pushed Lisa’s costs too high; the machine was too expensive and flopped. Still, Jobs and Sculley already had put Apple to work developing a machine that would be called the Macintosh. It would use much of Lisa’s internal architecture, but it would be simpler. In 1984 the machine debuted with a spectacular television commercial during the Super Bowl, showing a gallant woman athlete defying a monolithic, oppressive government by hurling her hammer into a screen that represented, without actually saying so, IBM. The first Macintosh was small and beige, featuring the style of graphical interface that would become the world’s standard. It sold for $2,495 and was a great hit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
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An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused deterioration in Jobs’s working relationship with Sculley, and at the end of May 1985 – following an internal power struggle and an announcement of significant layoffs – Jobs was relieved of his duties as head of the Macintosh division. He did not get any assignments and gradually found that important company documents no longer landed on his desk. He soon came to believe that he would find no purpose within Apple. He sold over $20 million of his Apple stock, spent days bicycling along the beach, feeling sad and lost, toured Paris, and journeyed on to Italy. Then Jobs thought back on his experience at Apple. Though he is not an engineer, he felt his greatest talent had been spearheading development of new products. He decided to start a new venture to address the higher education market and left Apple.
Beginner again
Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced. As it was expensive, it was not so successful but the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated. The NeXT Cube was described by Jobs as an “interpersonal” computer, which he believed was the next step after “personal” computing. Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by such things as the NeXTcube’s magnesium case. This put considerable strain on NeXT’s hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel. In the year 1995, for the first time, NEXT turned to a profit.
In 1986, Steve co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which has created eight of the most successful animated films of all time: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille. Pixar has won 20 Academy Awards and its films have grossed more than $4 billion at the worldwide box office to date. Pixar merged with The Walt Disney Company in 2006 and Steve now serves on Disney’s board of directors.
Return to Apple
By 1996 Apple’s sales were in free fall. Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned to the company he founded. He soon became Apple’s interim CEO. With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company’s technology found its way into Apple products, most notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs’s guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac in August 1998 and other new products. Since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the “interim” modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO. In 2001 Jobs began opening a chain of Apple retail stores, where customers could try out the computers.
Consumer Electronics world
In October 2001 Apple introduced iPod and launched Apple into a broader world of consumer electronics. In what may have been the most brilliant salesmanship of his career, Jobs persuaded every major record company to sell Apple the rights to market their songs on the Internet. In April 2003 Apple opened the online store iTunes, at 99 cents per song, with 65 cents going to the music companies, 25 cents to overhead and only 10 cents to Apple, iTunes seemed fated to lose money. But as Jobs pointed out, the idea was to sell iPods, which could download music from iTunes. By 2004 iPod was the world’s dominant portable music player, with iTunes owning 70 percent of the market of downloaded music.
In January 2007, Apple released another successful product iPhone. On launch weekend, 270,000 iPhones were sold in the first thirty hours. In July 2008, iPhone 3G was released and 1 million iPhone 3Gs were sold in its first 3 days.
When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, the company was struggling to survive. Today it has a more market capital than Dell, HP and Intel. Its iPod commands 70 percent of the MP3 player market. Four billion songs have been purchased from iTunes. The iPhone is reshaping the entire wireless industry. Even the underdog Mac operating system has begun to nibble into Windows’ once-unassailable dominance.
Jobs’s Management style
He speaks very honestly about his management style, often described as extremely meticulous and almost dictatorial. Some of his employees had described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. Mr. Jobs has gone against that trend, ruling with an iron hand, attending to every little product detail, and keeping employees on a roller coaster of praise and fear. He was a hands-on manager, who studied even the minutest details of his products, with the heart and eye of an artist. His insistence on high-quality, good-looking products struck a chord with many people who appreciated the beauty of Apple products, resulting in such fabulous successes as the Macintosh computer and the iPod portable music system. These successes often reshaped how consumers viewed technology and also reshaped the technology itself.
Jobs’s health concerns
In the mid of 2004, Jobs was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his pancreas and he was told that should expect to live no longer than three to six months. In July 2004, he underwent a surgery that successfully removed the tumor. In January 2009, Jobs said that he had been suffering from a hormone imbalance for several months he announced that he’ll take a medical leave of absence until the end of June due to complex health-related issues.
As a visionary, he saw that computers could be much more than drab productivity tools. Instead, they could help unleash human creativity and sheer enjoyment. A marketing genius, he conceived of elegant products that captured consumer’s imaginations. And as a relentless perfectionist, he came up with creations that actually delivered on their promise – raising the bar for rivals. “From the time he was a kid, he thought his products could change the world. He is one of the few people who have affected computing and consumer electronics. “If Steve Jobs leaves Apple, he leaves satisfied. Proud of his legacy, comfortable with his place in history”
Let us wish Steve Job best of luck for his early recovery. The technology world needs his guidance in this troubled economic times.
March 2, 2009 at 3:32 am |
biography blog on the all time great..!!
Good one Ravi.