Steve Jobs. Photo by Matt Yohe
Steve Jobs
b. 24 February 1955, d. 5 October 2011
Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.
Co-founder and previous CEO of Pixar Animation Studios
Jobs was born in San Francisco, and given up at birth for adoption by his still to be wed parents. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, who, despite his meeting his biological mother, remained unequivocally his “real” parents throughout his life. The location of Jobs’ upbringing can be seen to be of great importance to his future technology-entrepreneur career: Silicon Valley teemed with computer engineers bent on producing commercially viable personal computers. On a fateful day in 1969, Jobs met Steve Wozniak (“Woz”) for the first time: in the future, their relationship would prove revolutionary in the world of personal computing and consumer electronics.
Jobs’ tertiary career consisted of one semester at the liberal arts institution, Reed College. After dropping out, Jobs briefly worked at Atari Inc. before travelling to India to indulge his fascination with Eastern mystic practices.
In 1976, after returning to the United States, Jobs saw the potential of the personal computing circuit board that Wozniak had designed, and along with Ronald Wayne, the three started to run Apple from the garage of the Jobs residence. By 1977, the Apple II was released: Jobs and Wozniak so believed in the revolutionary possibilities of the new Apple computer that Jobs went in search of venture capital. Semi-retired Intel CEO Mike Markkula invested USD 250 000 in Apple, believing it would one day be a fortune 500 company. Apple went public after just four years of existence, and by 1981, Jobs’ net worth was over USD 200 million.
This initial spectacular success, however, was followed by period of uncertainty, growing animosity between Jobs and Apple CEO John Sculley, and the commercial failure of the Apple III. Apple III’s failure coincided with technology giant IBM’s entering into the fast growing personal computer market. As Apple lost market share, Jobs began the Apple-Lisa project: a graphics driven user interface developed by Xerox PARC that was more end user friendly than the command line interface that pervaded the market. Due to Jobs’ temperamental managerial style, he was removed from the Lisa project, and took over the Macintosh project. Mac looked to design a PC “as easy to use as a toaster”. Initially more successful than Lisa, Mac began to lose market share, and after a failed attempted board coup orchestrated by Jobs, Sculley removed Jobs from all managerial duties. Although Jobs remained chairman of the Board of Directors, he was effectively ousted as an innovative force in the company he co-founded.
Disillusioned, Jobs looked for further opportunities, and bought the graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. He incorporated the graphics company as Pixar, which he hoped would develop hardware and software for the graphics industry. Wanting to continue his career as a computer entrepreneur, however, Jobs announced to the Apple board that he wanted to start a new company using Mac’s best talent. The board objected, and in disgust, fury or spite, Jobs immediately sold his shares in Apple, and began NeXT. Whereas the NeXT Cube was a high quality computer, its price was consumer prohibitive, and the software developed for it was as useful as software developed for other operating systems. By 1993, NeXT had become a niche software development firm rather than a producer of high quality and popular hardware (as Jobs had envisioned it would be); despite these failures, Jobs later stated that his time at NeXT was one of the most creative periods of his career, and when he returned to Apple, it informed many of the ideas he was able to turn into major successes.
1995 marked another change in fortunes for Jobs: Pixar, despite its initial problems and the closing down of its hardware development section, had sold a script to Disney in 1993, which materialised in Toy Story. Toy Story was the first full length feature film made entirely by computer generated animation, and after the film’s massive box office achievements, Jobs went public with the company, which in turn made his net worth in the region of USD 1.5 million. Windows 95 had also been a major triumph for Microsoft, and in 1996, Apple was forced to purchase NeXTSTEP (NeXT’s operating system) from Jobs for USD 400 million. With the purchase, Jobs returned to Apple as an “informal advisor”. However, the company continued to haemorrhage capital, and in 1997 Jobs again attempted a coup to remove the CEO, and this time he was successful. The board installed him as interim CEO, and his first call of business was to conduct a massive spring-cleaning of the company, reducing hundreds of projects to a dozen. Due to the launch of the iMac in 1998 and a new, extensive marketing campaign, Apple once again turned a profit.
After 2000, when Jobs was officially appointed as CEO of Apple, he began to produce the consumer electronics that constituted his overarching vision of technology in the future: that personal computers would become a central hub in a lifestyle increasingly dependent on digital devices. After the phenomenal success of the iPod, Apple’s public image was boosted, and Jobs took the opportunity to grow his vision as much as was possible: between 2002 and 2010, Apple released increasingly better Mac’s, Mac’s that could run the Windows OS, an international iTunes store, the iPod mini, shuffle and nano, and Apple’s centre piece, the iPhone. Jobs’ digital hub strategy had become a reality, and Apple Inc. could be seen as the first major company to bring digital convergence to the market place. Those consumers who buy an Apple Mac often have this ease of convergence and interconnectivity in mind when making their purchase.
Job’s technology-entrepreneur career spanned 35 years, and during that time he experienced both success and failure: if there is a moral to be taken from his biography it is perhaps that he continued to innovate despite his failures, and in later life could use the lessons learnt during the difficult times to irrefutably earn his iconic status as an entrepreneurial genius.