Press Release
Steven P. Jobs Passes Away at 56
CUPERTINO, California – October 5, 2011 – Steven P. Jobs, who co-founded and served as the chief executive officer of Apple, has died at the age of 56.
We at Apple are deeply saddened to announce his passing. Steve's brilliance, drive and devotion brought too many innovations into the world to name here, and all of them have brought richness to our lives. Steve leaves the world a significantly better place behind him.
In August, Steve had left the position of chief executive officer, transitioning to chairman of the company because he could no longer carry out his duties at the extremely high level to which he had become accustomed.
There are few companies that owe so much to one person – and few companies that have become so successful. While he was primarily remembered in early years because of the Apple line of computers, culminating in the Macintosh, the next generation knows Steve as the innovator of the entire music industry, through the various incarnations of the iPod; the consumption of media content, with the iPad; and cellular communications, through the iPhone. His instincts for what people wanted turned out to be right – time after time. When he returned to the company in 1996, it was to lead it to a position of immense prominence.
While Steve's family does appreciate its privacy during this time of grieving, Apple welcomes all expressions of remembrance for Steve. An interface has been established on the Apple website where the public can post their comments; we look forward to reading all of the warm thoughts from all of you.
The best way to honor the passing of our chairman, though, is to press on toward all of your own dreams and goals, holding fast to them and making them real.
Press Contacts:
Simon Pope
Apple
(408) 974-0457
Natalie Kerris
Apple
(408) 974-6877
News Article
Remembering Steve Jobs
The ironic thing about it all was that Steve Jobs had no training in computer engineering or industrial design. He also didn’t start any new industries: the inventions that he transformed, ranging from the computer to the smart phone, had already been created by other people. Apple entered all of these industries well after the pioneers.
But instead of creating new industries, he overhauled existing ones and left them barely recognizable. People have been listening to music since the first string vibrated, and record players date back to the dusty laboratory of Thomas Edison. Computers had been around since the 1940’s. But when he reinvented something, he changed it forever. And the more industries he transformed, the faster he would go.
In the aftermath of his death, many are singing his praises as a business leader. However, if you read many of the tomes out there about “best practices,” you wouldn’t find very much in them that he did. For example, his marketing did not include a single focus group. Not a one. He followed his instincts.
And these instincts didn’t always serve him well. Remember – Apple showed him the door in 1985. Until the development of the iPod, his only association with success was with Pixar – a movie studio. Fortunately, things turned around.
Steven Paul Jobs was born in 1955 and grew up in – and with – Silicon Valley. He and Steve Wozniak, of course, started Apple when he was 21, yes on April 1, 1976, after knocking around Portland’s Reed College for a semester of real attendance and three more of wandering around campus and working briefly at Atari and HP.
Even early on, Jobs’ instincts pushed him towards style and usability. The Apple II didn’t look like any of the stodgy boxes that dominated the computing industry, and it wasn’t too long before Jobs saw a mouse in the PARC lab inside Xerox – and wanted one. In 1984, the Macintosh appeared, the first personal computer to use that interface. Because of the fact that it only offered 128K in memory, though, it was doomed. This combination of genius and flaw marked much of Jobs’ career path – he was known for bringing out inventions that no one had ever seen and bringing people to need things they didn’t even know they wanted, while at the same time forgetting to include things that people knew they would need – in the case of the first Mac, enough memory. And it was these flaws that sent him out the door, kicked out by the board of Apple and president John Sculley.
However, by the time of the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone, many of these lessons had been learned. By doing some more thinking about what people would truly need, Jobs came forward with a music player that was unbeatable – and kept updating the iPod with later models that did even more, adding video and other forms of interactivity, culminating in the iTouch, that bridged the gap between music player and phone. Apple was still different from the competition – rather than decentralizing, as many of its competitors, who specialized in computers or MP3 players or music software, Apple did all of it – and did it all well. By outsourcing the actual manufacturing and focusing on the marketing and the organization, Apple began to trounce its competition in ways that the creators of the first Mac had only dreamed of.
Ultimately, it was still Steve Jobs’ instincts that ended up serving him effectively – keeping him focused on the mission at hand. He kept preaching the doctrine that the limits we have in life made hard work and independent thought two vital disciplines – ones he practiced until the very end.
Research Statement
One of the interesting elements of the life of Steve Jobs is that he didn’t actually invent anything (McCracken, 2011). He is credited with coming up with so many different concepts, but the reality is that the personal computer, the music player and the cellular phone were all invented by other people. Jobs took these things and made them much more like what people wanted, though.
With regard to the reputation of Steve Jobs, it is clear that his name arouses strong opinions, one way or another. The moving piece on his life by Harry McCracken (2011), that appeared in Time in October, captures many of the different forces at work in Jobs’ life, as he went from wifty gamer to nutty inventor to bow-tie nerd to Zenlike force in the workplace, over the course of decades. An overriding theme in Jobs’ life, for better and for worse, appears to have been a push for greatness, not just for himself, but from others as well (Wingfield, 2011). This led to friction on a number of fronts, as every breakthrough and reinvention of existing paradigms ended up rubbing some people the wrong way, while delighting others. He, of course, is known for pioneering so many of the things that we use each day, from the personal computer to the device we use to listen to music (Griggs, 2011). The upside of that sort of existence is that he brought powerful change to so many people, on an individual level; the downside is, of course, left littered with the people whose inventions he overhauled. When he referred to the first Macintosh as “absolutely great” (McCracken, 2011), he looked arrogant, as did his “Big Brother” line of ads promoting the computer when it came out, pitting the tiny Apple against the then-gargantuan computing machine known as IBM. However, he roared back with the lessons he learned at Pixar and NeXT (McCracken, 2011), and the wildly successful sales of the iPad and the ongoing dominance of the iPod and iTouch in the music device market, along with the growing prevalence of iTunes as a marketplace for sound files, has helped him to finish a leader in several industries.
The history books that have not yet been written will have a lot of information to pore through about Steve Jobs. One wonders how long Apple will continue after his passing; the iPad, iPod and iPhone show no signs of slowing down, and because the manufacturing element of Apple was all outsourced, all that his successors have to do is maintain the brand – and maintain the powerful instinct that led the company in the right direction so many times. Indeed, with his writings and speeches, he left behind a message of pushing towards greatness and not sacrificing a single minute of one’s lifetime, because every life has limits to it. He urged pursuing one’s vision wholeheartedly – and based on the research, he certainly seems to have done that. He irritated people both inside and outside Apple (McCracken, 2011) because of his certitude about following his own instincts, and for a long time it seemed that the way of Bill Gates would prevail. While Microsoft has certainly done amazingly well, it has not shifted paradigms about the individual and content in the way that the trio of iPod, iPhone and iPad have, as we head further into the 21st century (Griggs, 2011). The legacy of Steve Jobs is one of innovation without compromise. Fortunately for him, it ended up being successful innovation at last. His vision is one that should last well into the 21st century.
Works Cited
Griggs, B., 2011. Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies. CNN 5 October 2011. Web.
Retrieved 12 January 2012 from http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-05/us/us_obit-
steve-jobs_1_jobs-and-wozniak-iphone-apple-founder?_s=PM:US
McCracken, H., 2011. Steve Jobs, 1955-2011: Mourning technology’s great reinventor.
Time 5 October 2011. Web. Retrieved 12 January 2012 from
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2096251,00.html
Wingfield, N., 2011. Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead. New York Times 5
October 2011. Web. Retrieved 12 January 2012 from
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/jobs-apple-co-founder-is-dead/
