Steve Jobs, Renowned for insisting the Macintosh (Mac) be not merely great but “Insanely Great”

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, business magnate, industrial designer and a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era. He was the co-founder and first CEO of Apple Inc (now Apple Inc.). Steve was the CEO of Pixar Animation Studios until The Walt Disney Company bought it.

Background

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California. Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali were his unwed biological parents who put Steve for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs then adapted him into a lower-middle-class couple. Steve grew up in a neighbourhood with engineers working on electronics and gadgets in their garage on weekends. This shaped little Steve’s interest in this field. One day 13 year old met one of the most influential people in his life. That person is 18-year-old Stephen Wozniak, an electronics whiz kid and an inveterate prankster, much like Steven.

Origin of Apple

In 1974 he was hired at Atari Corporations as a video game designer and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism. After returning to Silicon Valley, Jobs reconnected with Stephen Wozniak, who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company. They were the real pioneers of personal computing, a collection of radio jammers, computer professionals and enlightened amateurs who gathered to show off their latest abilities in building their personal computers or writing software. One fine day, when Wozniak told Jobs of his progress in designing his computer logic board, Jobs suggested him to go into business together, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak’s design in 1976. Apple Computer was born on April 1, 1976: The Apple I called the logic board was built in the Jobs family’s garage with money they obtained by selling Jobs’ Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s programmable computer. One of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to a broad audience was Steves. Apple Computer was incorporated in 1977– the same year Apple II was completed. This was an immediate success, becoming synonymous with the boom in personal computers. The Apple II crushed most of its competition, and its sale made the Apple founders millionaires because of its beautiful package, ease of use and nifty features. The enormous surge in sales came after the introduction of VisiCalc, the first commercially successful spreadsheet program: Thousand of Americans, whether they be accountants, small business owners, or just obsessed with money, bought Apple IIs. The company had a record-setting public stock offering in just four years. In 1983 their company made it into the Fortune 500 list of America’s top countries. In the same year company recruited its CEO and indirectly Job’s mentor in the finer parts of managing a huge organization, Mr John Sculley, president of PepsiCo, Inc., in 1983. Sculley had been persuaded by Jobs to take the job by challenging him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” The line was deftly delivered, but it also showed Job’s optimistic faith in the computer revolution.  Xerox Corporation’s PARC

In 1979 Job led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology demonstration at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to show how the graphical user interface could make computers easier to use and more efficient. Soon after this, Steve left the engineering team that was designing Lisa, a business computer, to head a smaller group building a lower-cost computer. Both computers underwent redesigns to utilize better and implement PARC concepts, but Steve made it clear that he preferred the Macintosh, or Mac, as the new device came to be called. He 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 later be renowned for insisting that the Macintosh (Mac) be not merely great but “insanely great”. Steve debuted the Macintosh in January 1984 in a masterfully staged demonstration that served as the centrepiece of an incredible publicity campaign. Later, it would be cited as the model for “event marketing”

The first Macs, however, had a few issues like being pricey, underpowered and having a limited number of software programmes, which led to dismal sales. Apple steadily improved the machine, eventually becoming the company’s lifeblood and the model for all subsequent computer interfaces. However, the company’s apparent inability to resolve the issue quickly caused difficulties, and in 1985 Sculley succeeded in convincing Apple’s board of directors to fire the prominent co-founder.

Another firm NeXT

With no time, he started another firm, NeXT Inc., designing powerful workstation computers for the education market.

Pixar

In 1986 Jobs bought a majority stake in Pixar, a computer graphics company. That had been founded as a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company of Hollywood movie director George Lucas. Jobs transformed Pixar into a significant animation firm that produced the first full-length feature film to be entirely computer-animated, Toy Story, in 1995. That year, Pixar’s public stock offering made Steve a billionaire for the first time. He eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.Reinventing Apple for the 21st century

In 2001, Apple introduced iTunes, a computer program for playing music and 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 became the market player quickly. In 2003 Apple began selling downloadable copies of significant record company songs in MP3 format over the Internet. Through Apple’s online iTunes Store, more than one billion songs and videos were sold by the year 2006. On January 9, 2007, Jobs formally changed the company’s name to Apple Inc. to acknowledge the expanding shift in the industry.

Steve took the company into the telecommunications business by introducing the touch-screen iPhone, a mobile telephone with capabilities for playing MP3s and videos and accessing the Internet. Later that year, Apple introduced the iPod Touch, a portable MP3 and gaming device with 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 iPhone and iPod Touch releases would offer improved game functionality.

Steve Job’s Yacht

In 2009, he started giving interviews to writer Walter Isaacson to prepare for his first and only authorized biography, sharing with him his perspective on his life and career. Additionally, he spent his last days designing a yacht for his family, which he intended to use for global travel. Unfortunately, he passed away on October 5, 2011, peacefully at home and in his family’s company.