Steve Jobs – A Tribute to a Visionary
“We started out to get a computer in the hands of everyday people, and we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
- Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computer Inc., 1976.
The death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, stunned the world. Many say that Jobs will be placed in the top 10 most influential people of our time. Here is some information about Steve Jobs:
Steve Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, Joanne Simpson, and Syrian father. Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California, then adopted him. His father, Abdulfattah Jandal, Syria was a professor of political science and his mother, Joanne Simpson, was a speech therapist. Shortly thereafter, Steve was put up for adoption, her biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs.
Steven Paul was an orphan adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California in February 1955. In 1960 the family moved to Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley growth. As a boy Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to disassemble and rebuild the electronics, hobby that instilled confidence, perseverance, and the mechanical performance of a young worker.
While still in high school, Jobs interest in electronics led him to call William Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard to ask some parts for the school project. Hewlett, supplied parts and then made an offer to work as an intern at Hewlett-Packard in the summer. There, he met Steve Jobs Wozniak, a talented and knowledgeable engineer five years older than Jobs. Jobs spent his free time Hewlett-Packard. There he befriended computer club guru Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was a brilliant engineer, and two developed great respect for each other.
In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Jobs dropped out of Reed College after one semester and went to work for Atari games design. He dropped out after six months and spent the next 18 months into the creative classes. Jobs later told how one course in calligraphy developed his love for typography. He carefully saved the money he earned working at Atari, so it might take a trip to India and sat in the burgeoning interest in Eastern spiritualism. In 1972, graduate employment Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Steve Jobs had a deep interest in technology, so he took a job at Atari Inc., a leading manufacturer of video games. After several months of work, he saved enough money for an adventure of a trip to India. Jobs traveled to India to visit Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Dan Kottke, a friend from Reed College in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics calling his LSD experiences “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He later said that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.
In the fall of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of Wozniak’s “Homebrew Computer Club.” In 1976, when he was only 21 years old, Jobs and Wozniak first computer together, called Apple I and sold it in 1976 at a price of $ 666. The Apple I was the first single-board computer with built-in video interface, and on-board ROM, which told the machine to load other programs from an external source. Jobs and Wozniak managed to earn $ 774 000 from the sale of I. The following year, Apple, Jobs and Wozniak developed the general purpose Apple II. The Apple I sold modestly, but well enough to go to work on the Apple II.
From Apple II to compete against IBM, Jobs needs better marketing skills. To increase the marketing edge, he pulled-in Regis McKenna and Nolan Bushnell, into the company. McKenna was the leading man in Silicon Valley PR. Apple with an investment estimated at between $ 91,000 and $ 250,000, Markkula became president of the company in May 1977. The following month, Michael Scott, who was director of the production of semiconductor Inc., became president of Apple. With Markkula, Apple built a line of credit with Bank of America and $ 600 000 in venture capital from the Rockefeller Foundation and Arthur Roch.
However, in addition to the Apple III and his successor, LISA will not sell as hoped, and significantly increased levels of competition in computer sales, 1980 saw the Apple lost almost half of its sales to IBM. Things got worse for employment in 1983, when a fight with the directors kicked him off the board by CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had hired. Quickly set the standard for personal computers, the Apple II was the gain of $ 139 million in three years, an increase of 700 percent. Impressed with that growth, and a trend indicating an additional worth of 35 to 40 percent, the cautious underwriting firm of Hambrecht & Quist in cooperation with Wall Street’s prestigious Morgan Stanley, Inc., took Apple public in 1980.
However, following that a number of Apple products have undergone a major design errors that prompted recall and ultimately resulted in disappointed consumers. IBM suddenly surpassed sales by Apple, and Apple has had to compete with IBM / PC-dominated world of business. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, the piece of marketing lifestyle against the computer culture: romantic, young, creative. But despite the positive sales and performance of the IBM PC, Macintosh, was not IBM compatible. Scully believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and executives began to phase him out.
In 1984, as a reaction to the sharp drop in sales Jobs released the Apple Macintosh, which introduced the world to the point-and-click simplicity of a mouse. Marketing for the Mac has been poorly managed and with a price of $ 2500, it was not to find their way into the house as it was designed. Jobs tried to reorganize the Mac as a computer company, but the functions of a hard drive or network, not to mention only a small memory capacity, the companies were not interested. In 1985, with no power in his own company, Jobs sold his shares in Apple and resigned.
Jobs sold over 20 million shares of Apple, went biking along the beach, feeling sad and lost, on tour in Paris, and then went to Italy. It was not until late August he began to catch his breath. Later, in 1985, Jobs started NeXt Computer Co. with the money he earned by selling his shares in Apple. He had planned to build a computer to change the way research is conducted. The NeXT computer, though complete with processing speeds previously unseen, unmatched graphics, and an optical disk drive, at $9,950 each, sold poorly.
Apple was in trouble, has failed to design a new Macintosh operating system, and there were only 5% of the PC market. Jobs returned to his original company after Apple bought NeXT in 1996. Steve Jobs also started Pixar. Despite the success of Pixar, NeXT, Inc. floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system for middle America. Apple finally bought the company in 1997 to 429 million dollars. That same year Jobs returned as CEO of Apple.
Apple also turned its energies toward producing an inexpensive desktop, the iMac, that was another hit for the company. With Jobs once again in control, Apple was able to quickly turn itself around, and by the end of 1998, was bringing in $5.9 billion in sales. Jobs had returned to his first love, a little older and a little wiser. He had made Apple healthy again and returned it to a place where it was contribting new and innovative technologies to the computer world.
Steve Jobs introduces Apple’s new Board and a peace treaty with Microsoft at Macworld. Apple is profitable again. Much like Steve Jobs instigated Apple’s success in the 1970s; he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s. With a new management team, altered stock options, and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. His ingenious products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.
In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pescovegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options. For nine months Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple’s board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stocks if word got out that their CEO was ill. But in the end, Job’s confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure. In 2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, in subsequent years Jobs disclosed little about his health.
Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod, and iPhone, all of which have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Stocks were worth a record-breaking $199.99 a share, and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion dollar profit, an $18 billion dollar surplus in the bank, and zero debt. Apple has been rated No. 1 in America’s Most Admired Companies, and No. 1 amongst Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.
Jobs resigned from Apple’s CEO, August 24, 2011 and subsequently assumed the role of Chairman of the Board.
Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011.
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