UNIT-4 STEVE JOBS

Introduction of the author

Steve Jobs, in full Steven Paul Jobs, (born February 24, 1955, San
Francisco, California, U.S.—died October 5, 2011, Palo Alto, California), cofounder of
Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), and a charismatic pioneer of the personal
computer era.

Short introduction of the lesson

Steve Jobs is the authorized self-titled biography of Steve Jobs. The book was written at the request of
Jobs by Walter Isaacson, a former executive at CNN and TIME who has written best-selling biographies
of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

The saga of Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley is the creation myth at large. Launching a startup in the parents
garage and building it into one of the world’s most valuable companies. He didn’t invent everything
outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art and technologies in ways that invented the
future.

THE OUTLINE OF THE LESSON OR SUMMARY

The saga of Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley is the creation myth at large. Launching a startup in the
parents garage and building it into one of the world’s most valuable companies. He didn’t invent
everything outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art and technologies in ways
that invented the future.

Steve Jobs from an early age knew he was special. He was teased at school, the bullies said “so
does this mean your real parents didn’t want you?”, but his parents had a different narrative “we
specifically picked you out”. The concepts became a part of how Jobs regarded himself. Chosen.
Abandoned. Special.  

Even before school, Steve could already read. He was bored for the first few years so he
occupied himself by getting into trouble. It came clear it was in his nature to not accept authority
“I encountered authority of a different kind that I had never encountered before, and I did not
like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to beating any curiosity out of me”. Jobs
also quickly became bored of college, he used to complain “they are making me take all of these
courses”. Jobs refused to go to classes he was assigned to, and instead he went to the ones he
wanted – such as dance class, where he could enjoy creativity and meet girls. He refused to
accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.  

He recounted in his famous Stanford Commencement address: “I had no idea what I wanted to
do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was
spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and just
trust it would work out OK”. There were all kind of movements at the time: Zen and Hinduism,
meditation and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation. The fusion of flower power,
enlightenment and technology was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings and
dropped in Physics classes in day, worked nights at Atari, and dreamt of starting his own
business. “There’s something going on here” he said, looking back on the time in history    

The first serious venture between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak was to build and sell printed
circuit boards. Jobs sold his calculator for $500 and Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus for $1500.
They now had with their own savings, $1300 in working capital, the design of a product and a
plan. They had started their own computer company. In 1977 Jobs and Woz valued their
company at $5307. Four years later they decided to take it public. By the end of 1980, Apple was
valued at $1.79 billion. In the process it would make 300 people millionaires and at the age of
25, Jobs was worth $256 million.  

Founding of Apple

Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California, located in what is now known
as Silicon Valley. Though he was interested in engineering, his passions of youth varied. He
dropped out of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video
game designer in early 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to
experience Buddhism.

Back in Silicon Valley in the autumn of 1974, Jobs reconnected with Stephen Wozniak, a
former high school friend who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company. When Wozniak
told Jobs of his progress in designing his own computer logic board, Jobs suggested that they go
into business together, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak’s
design in 1976. The Apple I, as they called the logic board, was built in the Jobses’ family
garage with money they obtained by selling Jobs’s Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s
programmable calculator.

Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to
a broad audience, at least if it did not appear to belong in a junior high school science fair. With
Jobs’s encouragement, Wozniak designed an improved model, the Apple II, complete with a
keyboard, and they arranged to have a sleek, molded plastic case manufactured to enclose the
unit.

Though Jobs had long, unkempt hair and eschewed business garb, he managed to obtain
financing, distribution, and publicity for the company, Apple Computer, incorporated in 1977—
the same year that the Apple II was completed. The machine was an immediate success,
becoming synonymous with the boom in personal computers. In 1981 the company had a record-
setting public stock offering, and in 1983 it made the quickest entrance (to that time) into
the Fortune 500 list of America’s top companies. In 1983 the company recruited PepsiCo, Inc.,
president John Sculley to be its chief executive officer (CEO) and, implicitly, Jobs’s mentor in
the fine points of running a large corporation. Jobs had convinced Sculley to accept the position
by challenging him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” The line was
shrewdly effective, but it also revealed Jobs’s own near-messianic belief in the computer
revolution.
Insanely great

During that same period, Jobs was heading the most important project in the company’s history.
In 1979 he led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology demonstration at the Xerox
Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to see how the graphical user interface could
make computers easier to use and more efficient. Soon afterward, Jobs left the engineering team
that was designing Lisa, a business computer, to head a smaller group building a lower-cost
computer. Both computers were redesigned to exploit and refine the PARC ideas, but Jobs was
explicit in favouring the Macintosh, or Mac, as the new computer became known. Jobs coddled
his engineers and referred to them as artists, but his style was uncompromising; at one point he
demanded a redesign of an internal circuit board simply because he considered it unattractive. He
would later be renowned for his insistence that the Macintosh be not merely great but “insanely
great.” In January 1984 Jobs himself introduced the Macintosh in a brilliantly choreographed
demonstration that was the centrepiece of an extraordinary publicity campaign. It would later be
pointed to as the archetype of “event marketing.”

However, the first Macs were underpowered and expensive, and they had
few software applications—all of which resulted in disappointing sales. Apple steadily improved
the machine, so that it eventually became the company’s lifeblood as well as the model for all
subsequent computer interfaces. But Jobs’s apparent failure to correct the problem quickly led to
tensions in the company, and in 1985 Sculley convinced Apple’s board of directors to remove
the company’s famous cofounder.
NeXT and Pixar

Jobs quickly started another firm, NeXT Inc., designing powerful workstation computers for the
education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc.,
a Japanese electronics company. Although the NeXT computer was notable for its engineering
design, it was eclipsed by less costly computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems,
Inc. In the early 1990s Jobs focused the company on its innovative software
system, NEXTSTEP.

Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs acquired a controlling interest in Pixar, a computer graphics firm that
had been founded as a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company of Hollywood movie
director George Lucas. Over the following decade Jobs built Pixar into a major animation studio
that, among other achievements, produced the first full-length feature film to be completely
computer-animated, Toy Story, in 1995. Pixar’s public stock offering that year made Jobs, for the
first time, a billionaire. He eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.
Saving Apple

In late 1996 Apple, saddled by huge financial losses and on the verge of collapse, hired a
new chief executive, semiconductor executive Gilbert Amelio. When Amelio learned that
the company, following intense and prolonged research efforts, had failed to develop an
acceptable replacement for the Macintosh’s aging operating system (OS), he chose
NEXTSTEP, buying Jobs’s company for more than $400 million—and bringing Jobs back
to Apple as a consultant. However, Apple’s board of directors soon became disenchanted
with Amelio’s inability to turn the company’s finances around and in June 1997 requested
Apple’s prodigal cofounder to lead the company once again. Jobs quickly forged an
alliance with Apple’s erstwhile foe, the Microsoft Corporation, scrapped Amelio’s Mac-
clone agreements, and simplified the company’s product line. He also engineered an award-
winning advertising campaign that urged potential customers to “think different” and buy
Macintoshes. Just as important is what he did not do: he resisted the temptation to make
machines that ran Microsoft’s Windows OS; nor did he, as some urged, spin off Apple as a
software-only company. Jobs believed that Apple, as the only major personal
computer maker with its own operating system, was in a unique position to innovate.

Innovate he did. In 1998, Jobs introduced the iMac, an egg-shaped, one-piece computer that
offered high-speed processing at a relatively modest price and initiated a trend of high-fashion
computers. (Subsequent models sported five different bright colours.) By the end of the year, the
iMac was the nation’s highest-selling personal computer, and Jobs was able to announce
consistent profits for the once-moribund company. The following year, he triumphed once more
with the stylish iBook, a laptop computer built with students in mind, and the G4, a desktop
computer sufficiently powerful that (so Apple boasted) it could not be exported under certain
circumstances because it qualified as a supercomputer. Though Apple did not regain the industry
dominance it once had, Steve Jobs had saved his company, and in the process reestablished
himself as a master high-technology marketer and visionary.

Reinventing Apple

In 2001 Jobs started reinventing Apple for the 21st century. That was the year that Apple
introduced iTunes, a computer program for playing music and for converting music to the
compact MP3 digital format commonly used in computers and other digital devices. Later the
same year, Apple began selling the iPod, a portable MP3 player, which quickly became the
market leader. In 2003 Apple began selling downloadable copies of major record company songs
in MP3 format over the Internet. By 2006 more than one billion songs and videos had been sold
through Apple’s online iTunes Store. In recognition of the growing shift in the company’s
business, Jobs officially changed the name of the company to Apple Inc. on January 9, 2007.
Steve Jobs.

Courtesy of Apple
In 2007 Jobs took the company into the telecommunications business with the introduction of the
touch-screen iPhone, a mobile telephone with capabilities for playing MP3s and videos and for
accessing the Internet. Later that year, Apple introduced the iPod Touch, a portable MP3 and
gaming device that included built-in Wi-Fi and an iPhone-like touch screen. Bolstered by the use
of the iTunes Store to sell Apple and third-party software, the iPhone and iPod Touch soon
boasted more games than any other portable gaming system. Jobs announced in 2008 that future
releases of the iPhone and iPod Touch would offer improved game functionality. In
an ironic development, Apple, which had not supported game developers in its early years out of
fear of its computers not being taken seriously as business machines, was now staking a claim to
a greater role in the gaming business to go along with its move into telecommunications.
Health issues

In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He put off surgery for about
nine months while he tried alternative medicine approaches. In 2004 he underwent a major
reconstructive surgery known as the Whipple operation. During the procedure, part of
the pancreas, a portion of the bile duct, the gallbladder, and the duodenum were removed, after
which what was left of the pancreas, the bile duct, and the intestine were reconnected to direct
the gastrointestinal secretions back into the stomach. Following a short recovery, Jobs returned
to running Apple.

Steve Jobs with an iPad

Steve Jobs introducing the iPad at an Apple event, San Francisco, 2010.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News
Throughout 2008 Jobs lost significant weight, which produced considerable speculation that
his cancer was back. (The average survival rate for patients who underwent Whipple operations
was only 20 percent at five years.) Perhaps more than those of any other large corporation,
Apple’s stock market shares were tied to the health of its CEO, which led to demands by
investors for full disclosure of his health—especially as the first reasons given for his weight loss
seemed insufficient to explain his sickly appearance. On January 9, 2009, Jobs released a
statement that he was suffering from a hormonal imbalance for which he was being treated and
that he would continue his corporate duties. Less than a week later, however, he announced that
he was taking an immediate leave of absence through the end of June in order to recover his
health. Having removed himself, at least temporarily, from the corporate structure, Jobs resumed
his previous stance that his health was a private matter and refused to disclose any more details.

In June 2009 the Wall Street Journal reported that Jobs had received a liver transplant the
previous April. Not disclosed was whether the pancreatic cancer he had been treated for
previously had spread to his liver. The operation was performed in Tennessee, where the average
waiting period for a liver transplant was 48 days, as opposed to the national average of 306 days.
Jobs came back to work on June 29, 2009, fulfilling his pledge to return before the end of June.
In January 2011, however, Jobs took another medical leave of absence. In August he resigned as
CEO but became chairman. He died two months later.