In his lifetime, Steve Jobs made an unparalleled impact as the entrepreneurial and driven inventor of the iPhone and the Macintosh and co-founder of Apple, Inc. Jobs would later underscore that, unlike his predecessor in Apple, he was not as much driven to make profit as to create products that are game-changers.
Born Steven Paul Jobs on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California under extraordinary circumstances to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption, Jobs showed early signs of his intelligence and innovativeness at a young age. In the popular biography Jobs commissioned, author Walter Isaacson recounted how the theme of Jobs’ abandonment at birth echoed throughout most of Jobs’ life even as he has reconciled with his biological sister and acknowledged his own daughter from a previous relationship (Isaacson, 2012). Isaacson would also talk about the fixations and drives of Jobs’ personality that made him exceptionally intense and roughly emotional in the way he connected to his work and to the people he dealt with. Jobs’ outstanding trait seemed to be perfectionism, which made him characteristically controlling and often impatient.
Having grown up in Mountain View, California which would later comprise the area known as Silicon Valley, Jobs was exposed to electronics through his adoptive father Paul who was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist by profession and who tinkered with cars as a professional hobby (Gizmodo, 2011). He would teach his son Steve how to take apart and reassemble electronics, a discipline which helped mold confidence and mechanical prowess in the young Jobs.
Jobs’ adoptive parents struggled with finances in his youth but they strove to provide him a good education, sensing his “special” abilities. After finishing high school, Jobs enrolled in expensive Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from which he would drop out after six months.
Jobs’ story, and the legend he created that is Apple, Inc., is one of great irony: co-founding Apple as an inventive innovative start-up in 1976, only to be ousted from the company in 1985 by the man he specifically recruited to handle the leadership reins, and returns to save it from bankruptcy more than a decade later in 1997.
Co-Founding Apple Computers
Viewed as “smart and directionless”, Jobs took on various pursuits before he got around with his friend and colleague Steve Wozniak, along with electronics industry worker Ronald Wayne, to found Apple Computers in 1976 in the Jobs’ family garage. It has been said that in order to fund their start-up entrepreneurial venture, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus for $1,500 (of which he received only half the payment because the engine conked out after the transaction) and Wozniak parted ways with his HP 65 scientific calculator for $520 (Lam, 2011). Apple Computers would receive funding as well from Jobs’ mentor Mike Markkula, a semi-retired product marketing manager and engineer from Intel.
The story of how Jobs came up with the graphical user interface for the Apple computer is classic. Having visited Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center where he saw the plans for a GUI-based computer and a mouse, he proceeded to enable the design of the Apple computer using GUI, but more intuitive and simpler with drag-and-drop documents and folders (HBR, 2012). Jobs found ways to cut the cost of his inventive design for a single-button mouse by going to a local industrial design company who gave in to his request. The mouse cost only $15 compared to Xerox’s 3-button model which went for $300.
Under Jobs’ guidance, Apple introduced to the market a series of revolutionary technologies that included the iPhone, iPod and the iPad (Biography.com, 2014). Jobs and Wozniak both were trailblazers in the computer industry and revolutionized it by opening up the technology and marketing it to the world. Apple made the machines user-friendly, cheaper, smaller and accessible to everyday consumers.
During the early days of Apple, Wozniak developed a series of user-friendly personal computers, which Apple initially marketed with Jobs overseeing the campaign for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned for the corporation around $774,000. With the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales grew by 700 percent within three years to $139 million.
While Wozniak is responsible for the design of the Apple I and II, Jobs’ contribution to its success had to do with making the appearance of the computers aesthetic for consumers in order to make sure that the Apple computer was a product people wanted to own (Lam, 2011). The advent of the Apple computers allowed ordinary consumers to get their hands on the personal computer. The user-friendly Apple II proved to be a huge commercial success with its color graphics and keyboard. Sales peaked $3 million on its first year in 1977 and grew to $200 million two years later.
In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its very first day of trading. The initial public offering made millionaires many times over out of Jobs and Wozniak. However, Apple faced stiff competition by this time and unimpressive sales from the Apple III and the Lisa computer, which caused the company to lose nearly half of its market to IBM. Jobs invited marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to help fill the role of Apple's president. He is said to lure in Sculley with the challenge to change the world or stay in Pepsi selling sugared water to children (Lam, 2011). Eased out of the Lisa computer management team, Jobs found his way to get involved in the development of the Macintosh. In 1984, the Apple Macintosh was introduced to the market, seen as a breakthrough product in terms of ease of use as it featured a graphical user interface (GUI) controlled by a mouse.
While superior, the marketing of the Macintosh did not go well as it was initially priced at $2,495, a price viewed as too expensive for the consumer market (Entrepreneur, 2014).
On a personal note, developing the Macintosh for three years while at Apple was one of the most productive and intense periods for Jobs. He gathered together a small group of brilliant and dedicated young engineers who stood by him to fulfill his vision of a computer for ordinary people. After hopes of a worthy product grew dim for the Lisa computer, the Macintosh project became the center for Apple’s effort to arrest sluggish sales. The entry of John Sculley at the invite of Jobs was seen as a step in this direction to reinvigorate Apple’s performance in the market (All About Steve Jobs, 2014).
Leaving Apple
Jobs’ hasty departure from the company he founded was ushered in by design flaws in the next several products developed by Apple, which resulted to product recalls and disappointed consumers. This allowed IBM to surge ahead to surpass Apple’s sales volume. Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated market. Apple released the Macintosh in 1984, marketing it as a counterculture lifestyle gadget that was not only functionally innovative but also youthful, romantic and creative.
However, the Macintosh proved incompatible with IBM computers even with its positive sales and superior performance. Sculley and Apple’s executives moved to ease out Jobs from the company in the belief that Jobs was hurting Apple’s business. Steve effectively stripped of his responsibilities in Apple except as Chairman of the Board. That is why; Jobs spent four months traveling and thinking of new ideas and returned to Apple with a plan to create a new company intended at higher education together with a small group of ex-Apple employees. Jobs laughed off the threat from Apple to sue him and decided instead to resign from the company and sell off all but one of his Apple shares. Some would say he retained one share out of sentimentality. Others would say he did so because he wanted to keep receiving annual reports. (All About Steve Jobs, 2014).
Following the smarting exit from the company he co-founded, Jobs began to get involved in a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT, Inc. He sought to build on the highest possible standards for the NeXT machine by building the best hardware in the world’s most automated factory and running the most advanced software (All About Steve Jobs, 2014). He envisioned NeXT to be running on Unix, used by US military as well as universities, and at the same time as easy to use as a Macintosh with its own GUI.
NeXT was an ambitious project that fell short of its inventor’s expectations and its products did not sell. Instead, its operating losses and the exit of its co-founders and most prominent investor, Texas billionaire Ross Perot, forced Jobs to focus the NeXT business model as a niche software company.
Soon after Jobs left Apple, he also acquired the animation company of George Lucas in 1985. Lucas needed money to settle his divorce arrangements. Jobs renamed the company as Pixar Animation Studio and invested $50 million to operationalize it as he planned it.
For the first five years of operations, Jobs was bent on selling high-end computer graphics workstations for institutions such as hospitals and the army. The animations group was initially maintained to provide publicity for the strength of the Pixar rendering software. After winning an Academy Award for the short movie “Tin Toy” in 1989, Jobs recognized the potential in software and reinvented Pixar as a software company in 1990 with its RenderMan 3D. The animation business struggled and survived because it brought cash in for Pixar due to various 3D TV brand commercials. All of that would change when Pixar inked a contract with Disney to make a full-feature computer-animated movie.
Pixar initially made a record success with the film, The Toy Story. Toy Story made a success of Pixar’s stocks on Wall Street when Jobs initiated a public stock offering after the release of the movie in 1995. Jobs’ net worth rose to over $1.5 coming from his 80% ownership in Pixar – a net worth valued to be five times what he made while he was with Apple in the 1980s (All About Steve Jobs, 2014). More box office successes followed such as “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” Estimates put Pixar’s film net profits to be $4 billion. In 2006, The Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar with a deal that allowed Jobs to emerge as Disney’s largest single shareholder.
Return to Apple, Inc.
Next, Inc. did not achieve as much success as Pixar. Next was not able to penetrate mainstream America with its specialized operating system. Apple bought the company in 1996 for $429 million, working on the idea that instead of Apple developing a new operating system from scratch, it was better to buy one. Apple’s new CEO, Gil Amelio, chose to buy the NeXTSTEP operating system, a move that eventually led to Jobs’ selling the NeXT company lock, stock and barrel for $400 million.
Jobs brought focus to Apple at a time when the company was randomly producing a wide range of computers and peripherals, including a dozen of different versions of the Macintosh. Jobs sought to simplify Apple’s business process by directing his team to focus on four great products each for desktop and portable computers aimed to attract the consumer market and the professional market. Filtering Apple’s business processes relentlessly became Jobs’ back-breaking habit. He was known to be hard-driving.
Backed by a new management team, altered stock options and a salary cap of $1 a year, Jobs went to work to reclaim Apple’s dominant position in the computer industry. This was made possible by ingenious products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns and stylish designs that won over consumers.
It is said that critics believe that the iMac launched in May 1998 was Apple’s first truly innovative product since the Macintosh. The iMac is touted as Jobs’ first great product that is all his own, even as biography writers would point to how Jobs was inclined to balk at ideas presented to him and later knowingly or unknowingly claim these very ideas to be his own. Trendy and upbeat, the iMac’s translucent design was a refreshing change from the black or beige models that was customary for over a decade. Continued innovations such as colored iMacs and iBook pushed Apple revenues up and drove back developers to the Macintosh platform. Apple followed through with revolutionary products such as the Macbook Air, iPod and iPhone which popularly dictated technology trends worldwide. The iPod and iTunes in particular were phenomenal successes that translated popularity and steep revenues for Apple. Jobs began a secret development to create a tablet but recognized that such technology they developed which included the revolutionary touch-screen technology could be used in a phone rather than on a tablet.
After two years in development, the iPhone was launched in 2007.
Apple also had much success with its adoption of the distribution strategy that called for the establishment of Apple retail stores, the landmark store would be inaugurated by Jobs at 5th Avenue in New York City facing the Central Park. Another bold strategic move that contributed to Apple’s stellar rise on Jobs’ return was its shift to the power-efficient Intel platform. This allowed Macs to be more efficient and made headway for the arrival of super-slim MacBook Air notebooks as well as capture new customers for Apple. Intel Macs were able to run both the Mac OS X and Windows and soon became the choice platform for most developers.
In 20017, translating its financial success in the computer industry, Apple’s quarterly financial performance improved significantly with stocks priced at a record of $199.99 a share and a stellar profit performance that reached $1.58 billion on top of $18 billion surplus in the bank and clean debt (Biography.com, 2014).
Jobs spearheaded Apple Inc.’s position as the world’s third-largest mobile phone maker after Samsung and Nokia. Fortune magazine named the company as the most admired American company in 2008, and the most admired company in the world from 2008-2012. Even then, Apple took the brunt of widespread criticism over its contractors’ labor practices as well as for its environmental and business practices.
Final Days
Jobs died peacefully on October 5, 2011 from a lingering bout with pancreatic cancer. He was 56. His relatively early passing away is the final turning point that impacts on the way Apple Inc. has transformed the connectivity of lives of hundreds of millions of people in the world. As it has been demonstrated, Jobs himself has tried to downplay the role of his sickness so that it would not create an adverse effect on the company that he has successfully founded and seen fall in shambles and again successfully rehabilitated in his mature years to be the world’s most valuable company. Even as Apple Inc. tries to preserve its value and distances its value as a company with the persona of its visionary co-founder in the person of Steve Jobs, the mark of Jobs’ controlling personality which shows in the push he gave to Apple and all of Apple’s products and endeavors will probably be etched in the memory of millions of captive users of Apple products. The challenge for Apple is to outlive the stellar reputation of the visionary who has been the driving force of its unique successes.
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