Steve Jobs the Man

Steve Jobs “The best leader of 05” Steve Paul Jobs is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Apple Inc, which he co-founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976 when he was just 21 years old. Steve Jobs is also the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios which has grossed more than $4 billion and has won 20 Academy Awards so far. In 2006, Pixar merged with The Walt Disney Company and Steve Jobs now serves on the Walt Disney Company’s board of directors and is the largest individual share holder of Walt Disney. Steve Jobs after a conflict with Apple’s board of directors resigned from Apple in 1985 and founded a new company called NeXT the following year.
Apple Inc’s take over of NeXT in the year 1997 reunited Steve Jobs with the company he had co-founded and became its CEO shortly after his return. Steve Jobs is known for revolutionizing the world of personal computer with his innovative user interfaces. Steve Jobs is also famous for revolutionizing the music market with his iPods and iTunes online store. Steve Jobs has also entered into the cell phone market with Apple iPhone. Apple has earned the name the most innovative consumer electronics company in the world due to the contribution of Steve Jobs. Early Life
Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali in San Francisco. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Santa Clara County, California. During his school days in California he used to attend the after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company. Later he joined the company as summer employee along with Steve Wozniak. In 1972 he joined Reed College in Portland, Oregon after graduating from high school. However he dropped out of the college after one semester and spent his time in college by taking classes in philosophy and devoting time to study counterculture.

In 1974 Steve Jobs went back to California and attended meetings of Hombrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. He joined a video games manufacturing company as a game designer. His primary motive was to save money to go on a trip to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. After saving enough money he went to India with his friend from Reed College, Dan Kottke and returned back with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothes. He returned to his job at Atari and was given the task of reducing the number of chips in the circuit board for the game
Breakout. Having little knowledge in design of circuit boards, Steve Jobs joined hands with Wozniak and successfully reduced the number of chips by 50. Although Wozniak was content with inventing electronic gadgets, Steve Jobs had bigger dreams of marketing the electronic products. Steve Jobs was fascinated by a computer built by Wozniak for his own use. He then persuaded Wozniak to join him in building and marketing a personal computer. Steve Jobs and Wozniak built a prototype of Apple 1 computer in Jobs’ garage.
The prototype impressed a local electronics equipment retailer who gave an initial order of twenty five. With this initial order and a sum of $1300 raised by selling Jobs’ Volkswagen micro-bus and Wozniak’s Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator they set up their first production line. Jobs asked Wozniak to quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and take charge as Vice President of research and development of the new company. Jobs received marketing advice and strategies from a former CEO of Intel who happened to be his friend. As a result the Apple Computer Co was born on April 1, 1976.
Though Apple started with the marketing of printed circuit boards it gradually entered into the personal computer business. The Birth of Apple Computer The first personal computer marketed by the Apple Computer Co. was Apple I in 1976. Apple I was sold for $666. 66. Apple I was sold as an assembled circuit board (motherboard) with CPU, RAM and textual-video chips. It lacked basic features like keyboard, monitor and a case. They had to be attached by the owner of the unit. However, Apple I was the first single-board computer with video interface and an on-board ROM.
Sales of Apple I earned the company $774,000. Two years after Apple I was introduced, Jobs and Wozniak came up with Apple II which revolutionized the world of personal computers. Apple II was a huge success and dominated the home and small business personal computer industry for the next five years. Apple III was introduced in 1980 which faced stiff competition from IBM and Microsoft. Apple III had a design fault (lacked a cooling fan) which resulted in recalling of thousands of units. Apple III+ was introduced 1983 which was also a failure in the market.
In 1983, Jobs felt that the company needed expert management in order to face the competition from IBM and hence lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola offering him the post of CEO, calling it an opportunity for John Sculley to change the world. Apple then came up with Macintosh which was a commercially successful computer mainly because of the user friendly windows Graphical User Interface (GUI). Macintosh made the user world much easier by replacing the command lines with objects displayed on the screen which the user had to click using a mouse to perform some function.
Software companies seeing the growing popularity of Macintosh’s interface with the public had to change their interface to accommodate picture icons or buttons to their interface. The reason behind Macintosh’s success was its user friendly interface, flexibility and its ability to cater to specific needs and it slowly gained the attention of big business corporations which was dominated by IBM computers. Unsuccessful NeXT Venture After the sales slump in 1984 Steve Jobs’ working relationship with Sculley worsened.
In May 1985 Sculley and the other board of directors relieved Jobs of his managerial duties. Jobs resigned from Apple and founded a new computer company called NeXT Computer in 1986. Steve Jobs tried to recreate the magic he had done with Apple with his new company NeXT by creating a new generation of personal computers. Jobs attempts failed as the computers were highly futuristic and costly. Having failed in the hardware division Jobs tried to revolutionize the software division. Jobs felt that OOP (Object Oriented Programming) held the key to success in software development.
Jobs said that OOP concept could make the programmer’s job much easier as the OOP approach introduced modularity which meant that programmers could complete 80% of their program using pre-written chunks of code thus saving time and money. NeXTMail and NeXTStep operating system were the other notable ventures of the new company. Return to Apple After Apple’s take over of NeXT for $429 million in 1996 Steve Jobs was reunited with the company he had cofounded. He replaced the interim CEO and immediately cancelled a number of ongoing projects in Apple namely Newton, Cyberdog and OpenDoc. The research in NeXT found its way in Apple’s products.
The most important of this is the evolution of NeXTStep operating system into Mac OS X. There has been no looking back for Steve Jobs after returning to Apple. In 1997 Steve Jobs announced that Apple had entered into a partnership with Microsoft for introducing new versions of Microsoft Office tools for Macintosh. In the same year Apple opened an online retail store called Apple Store based on the WebObjects application server of NeXT. The next few years saw Apple releasing new computers like iMac, iMovie and Final Cut Pro (the latter two being special video editing systems for multimedia professionals) and new versions of Mac OS.
Recently Jobs released the world’s thinnest notebook MacBook air. Achievements of Steve Jobs From being a college dropout, Steve Jobs has come a long way in co-founding Apple Inc and revolutionizing the personal computer market. Through his Apple computer Steve Jobs changed people’s idea of a computer from gigantic mass of vacuum tubes restricted to big business houses and Government organizations to a user friendly small box used by the common man. Apple II was a huge success and earned the company $139,000,000 within a p of three years and the company recorded a growth of 700%.
Apple dominated the industry from 1978 to 1983 and recoded a growth rate of over 150% per year. Though the NeXT venture was a commercial failure it catalyzed other important events mainly the World Wide Web. The Mac OS X is also an evolution of NeXT technology. Steve Jobs has featured on the cover of TIME magazine for five times and has appeared in the TIME’s list of 100 Most Influential People in The World for four times. Steve Jobs has also been featured in the Fortune Magazine’s list of most powerful businessmen in the world.
Under the leadership of Steve Jobs Apple Inc has earned the name “the most innovative consumer electronics company in the world”. Apple Inc has entered other computer related industries like music through iTunes store and iPod and cell phone industry through iPhone. Steve Jobs’ contribution to the computer industry is highly commendable. REFERENCES Burrows, P. , Grover, R. , & Green, H. (2006). Steve Job’s Magic Kingdom. New York. Business Week, February 6, 2006, Issue 3970, page 62. Burrows, P. , Grover, R. , & Green, H. (2006).
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