Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who popularised the personal-computer industry , died on october 5th ,Wednesday at the age of 56.
Mr. Jobs battled with pancreatic cancer and in 2009 he underwent a liver transplant. In August, he stepped down as chief executive Apple.inc.
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," Mr. Cook the new CEO said in a letter to employees.
Mr. Jobs battled with pancreatic cancer and in 2009 he underwent a liver transplant. In August, he stepped down as chief executive Apple.inc.
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," Mr. Cook the new CEO said in a letter to employees.
Mr.BillGates said"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come,"
US President Barack Obama said that "there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."
Mr. Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene, and four children.Jobs married Laurene Powell a Staford MBA student on March 18, 1991 with the no-frills ceremony being conducted by the Zen Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa. The couple have a son and two daughters. Jobs also has a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (born 1978), from his relationship with Bay Area painter Chrisann Brennan.
He turned Apple into the world's most valuable company with a market value of $350 billion.Forbes estimated his net wealth at $8.3 billion in 2010, making him the 42nd wealthiest American.Jobs is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 338 US patents or patent applications related to a range of technologies.
Often he was critisized as being an amplifier, a conduit of others' originality. But he knew how to convert raw ideas into concrete technological marvells.He was a scientist,an an artistic innovator .
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Mr. Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005, almost a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.
Though Jobs co-founded Apple Computers in 1976, he was forced out as CEO in 1985. He returned to the position in 1997.
PERSONAL LIFE
The Jobs family
Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in the city of San Francisco. His biological mother was an under graduate student named Joanne Simpson, and his biological father was a mathematics professor, a native Syrian named Abdulfattah John Jandali.
Joanne his mother was college educated, and she insisted that the future parents of her boy whom she putup for adoption be just as well educated. But it ended up that Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle class couple in the Bay Area was destined to adopt the baby under the firm condition that they later send him to college.
Paul and Clara called their son Steven Paul. They moved to the Santa Clara county south of Sanfransisco,California , later to be known as Silicon Valley. They adopted another baby, a girl called Patti, three years later in 1958.
Childhood
Steve was quite a turbulent child. He really didn’t care about school for some time —Fret with frequent bullying from fellow kids,the Jobses moved to the city of Los Altos, so that young Steve could go to Cupertino Junior High.
As Steve was growing up in Los Altos, he became increasingly curious about the world of electronics that filled his neighbors’ garages.When Steve reached Homestead High School, he was enrolled in a popular electronics class.
At Homestead, his friend Bill Fernandez introduced him to Stephen Woznic(Woz) ,in 1969, when they were respectively 14 and 19. At the time, Woz was building a little computer board with Bill Fernandez that they called “the Cream Soda Computer”. Woz showed it to Steve, and expectedly Steve was interested.
After finishing schoolling he was admitted to the fancy Reed College, a private liberal arts college up in Oregon. The tuition at Reed was so expensive.Young Steve could not bear the hardship his parents have to endure ,he dropped out before Christmas.
It was at Reed that Steve started experimenting with Eastern mysticism. One of his best friends at Reed was Dan Kottke, who shared his interests in such philosophies.
The following year, in 1974, Steve desperately needed money, so he got a job at Atari, the first video game company. Atari's founder Nolan Bushnell was a great inspiration for him to start Apple.While at Atari, Steve and friend from Reed, Dan Kottke went to India in search for enlightenment. They came back pretty disappointed, especially after they met a famous guru, Kairolie Baba, who, unlike what they expected, was a con man.After coming back, he resumed his job at Atari.
While Steve had been away in India , his geek friend Woz had been hired by Hewlett-Packard : a company full of passionate engineers just like Woz, where he could work on products for other engineers. Woz joined a computer hobbyists association called the Homebrew Computer Club. While keeping his job at HP,Woz came up with a powerful computer which worked with a keyboard and screen, not one that flashed lights — and all with amazingly few chips.Woz showed his computer design to his friend Steve Jobs. Steve was impressed and suggested to sell them. He and Woz would assemble the computers themselves and sell the whole board at Homebrew meetings.Steve proposed that they would name their company Apple.Apple Computer was born.
The parts for the Apple cost $220.Steve and Woz also started selling the computer on their own on a retail price of $666.66 (a simple calculation — a 33% margin).Apple I computers had a $25 microprocessor, the MOS 6502.Those rudimentary computers are sold without a power supply, keyboard, display or case.
This was the start of Apple Computer and incorporated the company on April 1, 1976.
Steve and his friend Dan Kottke were trying to sell the Apple I from their Apple Computer booth, while Woz was working on finishing the Apple II.The new company got ready to show off their product at the West Coast Computer Faire, a conference held in San Francisco in April 1977.Apple Computer received 300 orders for the Apple II on the show alone, twice as much as the total number of Apple I’s ever sold! It was all over the media, and its sales skyrocketed throughout 1978, 1979 and 1980. Apple II’s success was on a piece of software called VisiCalc — the first spreadsheet ever brought to market. VisiCalc worked only on the Apple II. By the time of Apple's initial public offering in 1980 the company amassed $117 million in annual sales . The IPO instantly made Mr. Jobs a multimillionaire.
Finally, on December 12 1980, Apple went public. It was the biggest public offering in American history since the Ford Motor Company in 1956! After the IPO, Steve Jobs was worth $217.5 million, $210 million more than the day before.
As Apple expanded, Mr. Jobs decided to bring in a more experienced manager to lead the company. He recruited John Sculley from PepsiCo Inc. to be Apple CEO in 1983,
Laurels came in Jobs way.
Jobs was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 with Steve Wozniak "
Jefferson Award for Public Service in the category "Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under" (also known as the Samuel S. Beard Award) in 1987
After Apple fell into a subsequent slump, a leadership struggle led to a board decision to back Mr. Sculley and fire Mr. Jobs two years later at the age of 30.
It is in Jan. 24, 1984, and a young Steve Jobs is standing at center stage, introducing to shareholders of Apple Computer Inc. the "insanely great" machine that he's certain will change the world: a beige plastic box called the Macintosh.
At first, the Mac was a huge hit. Throughout 1984, Macintosh stood as a cult for American college students. Jobs attention centered around it. But it was hell slow, as its processing power had difficulty handling the complex GUI. It was also a bit costly, selling for $2,500, a thousand more than the IBM PC it was supposed to compete with. But the biggest drawback was software: Macintosh being a brand new platform, almost no program could run on it when it was launched, whereas a ton of applications were already available on the IBM PC platform.The company was still alive thanks only to Apple II sales.
There was increasing resentment building up against Steve Jobs at Apple. Even Woz left the company in February 1985.On September 17, Jobs announced his resignation from Apple.
Pixar animations
So by early 1986, Jobs had more than $100 million at his disposal after selling his shares .He waited for opportunities to invest.Steve agreed to pay the $10 million to Lucasfilm , and on January 30, Pixar was incorporated. Pixar Animation Studios, went on to create a string of computer-animated film hits, such as "Toy Story."
NEXT computers
When Steve Jobs launched the NeXT Computer in 1988, the industry has changed radically. The years of 1991 to 1994 were the worst in Steve’s career.While Steve was fighting to make NeXT a viable business, a crucial event happened at his other company Pixar animations.
So Disney agreed to sign a contract with Pixar for a full feature film, made entirely with computers and in May 1991, the contract was signed. Steve negotiated for Pixar to make three movies and keep 12.5% of the revenues from ticket sales. Pixar was a way out for him.
Steve named himself President and CEO of Pixar in February 1995. When Toy Story finally came out on November 22, it exceeded all the hopes that Pixar and Disney had put into it. It made $28 million in the Thanksgiving 3-day weekend alone, and eventually reached $160 million in US box-office receipts.
On November 29, exactly one week after Toy Story had come out, Steve’s put Pixar public. The IPO benefited tremendously from the movie’s media coverage, and on opening day, the stock’s price jumped from $22 to $49. It became the biggest IPO of the year, beating even Netscape’s numbers. He was now a billionaire, worth almost $1.5 billion. It was ten times the money he had ever made at Apple in the early 1980s.
Return to Apple
Although Apple made healthy profits from 1986 to 1995, computers using Intel chips and Microsoft software became increasingly dominant , Apple felt threatened by an emerging super-power in the computer business: Microsoft.in 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95, which was the most successful GUI release in the history of personal computing. Almost every PC user upgraded and started using GUI en masse, while Apple lost its monopoly. Macintosh sales fell dramatically.The company was going downhill, failing to deliver new products on time and lagging behind in software development.
After his return Apple was set into motion. In November 1996, the company was looking for a new operating system for its future Macs.
In December 1996, Mr. Amelio was ousted and Mr. Jobs appointed interim CEO, a title that became permanent in January 2000. He convinced the board of using his NeXTSTEP technology and to buy his company as well. Apple agreed to pay more than $400 million for NeXT .For Steeve joining Apple has fulfilled the spiritual reasons for starting NeXT. As part of the deal, Steve got 1.5 million Apple shares that he could not sell for a year, and was appointed “informal adviser” to CEO Gil Amelio.In 1997 July, the board of directors asked Steve Jobs to become the company’s new chairman and CEO. He declined.He was concerned about being CEO of two public companies at the same time — Pixar and Apple.
By 1997, Apple had racked up nearly $2 billion in losses in two years, its shares were at record low.The total losses under Amelio the then CEO amounted to over $1 billion.
One of Steve’s first decisions was to make a deal with market leader Microsoft. The deal in August 1997 at Boston included the end of all patent lawsuits, a promise to keep releasing Mac versions of Microsoft Office for five years in exchange of making Internet Explorer the default Web browser on the Mac, and a $150 million investment in Apple from Microsoft, in the form of non-voting shares.
Steve started working like crazy in that second half of 1997 to put Apple back on track.
Steve had brought a number of NeXT executives who had remained faithful to him at Apple.
The first product lines to be renovated by Steve Jobs were the pro products, Power Mac and PowerBook, which he unveiled in November 1997, only eleven months after he came back.
Apple was back to profitability and by last quarter of 1997 , it had made a $45 million profit.
iMac
Steve unveiled the iMac on May 6 1998, at the Flint Center auditorium in Cupertino. It was the first mainstream computer with a radical design to offer USB connectivity, a technology developed by Intel that was almost inexistent in the PC space. The iMac was also the first personal computer to have a CD-ROM drive . Steve hated floppies.
The iMac proved one of Apple’s biggest hits, selling two million units in its first two years. But of course Steve Jobs didn’t stop there.
in July 1999, Steve unveiled the iBook at Macworld New York.During that same show, Apple also unveiled its first Wi-Fi product, the AirPort base station. Wireless connectivity was typical of an Apple innovation.AirPort clearly set the standard for the future of WiFi.
After two years as interim CEO, Steve Jobs completely turned Apple around. He restored the company’s public image, implemented a successful and focused new strategy, attracted software developers, and launched highly innovative and awe-inspiring products on the marketplace.
First, after a little over three years of managing Apple, he became the company’s full-time CEO.Pixar was well managed by Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, and had released two successful movies sinceToy Story, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. Jobes main role at Pixar was negotiating with Disney, which left him plenty of time to run Apple
Bac OS X
Mac OCX ,Apples new operating system ,innovated from neXTStep was unvieled on March 24,2001.
iPod
But big hits followed. In 2001, Apple introduced the iPod, which transformed digital music players. Apple has more than 70% market share in the market.iPod was shipped in late October 2001.It had a hard drive which could store up to 5GB, or “a thousand songs in your pocket”, which was Apple’s tag-line for the new product.iPod is connected to Mac via FireWire, which was 30 times faster than typical USB MP3 player.
iPod was acknowledged as “the walkman of the digital age”, as even Windows users either hacked it or moved to the Mac just so that they could use it.
On October 16 2003, Steve Jobs introduced the company’s second app for Windows after iTunes, “the best Windows app ever written”. As of January 2004, iPod was enjoying a 30% market share (by units sold), making it the leader of the portable music players market.
In 2004, Mr. Jobs had a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas.In mid-2004, Jobs announced to his employees that he had been diagnosed with a canceroustumor in his pancreas.
at Macworld in January 2004, Steve unveiled the iPod mini, a smaller version of the iPod which came in colors and soon became the best selling MP3 player in the world. Exactly one year later, he introduced the iPod shuffle, a cheap, Flash version of the iPod.As of early 2006, Apple’s market share in the music player space was around 70% — it still is today. The company improved its product line every year, introducing the iPod nano in September 2005, and the iPod video the following month. Every year after that, the iPod line was refreshed every September.
iPhone
In June 2007, Mr. Jobs made another splash when Apple introduced the iPhone.
The iPhone project started in 2003 — although rumors about such a product had circulated even before that, with the much-hyped Apple PDA, the ultimate digital device that would combine a phone, PDA, and iPod. Work on the iPhone really intensified by early 2006. Apple unveiled the iPhone to the world in 2007.
On November 27, 2007, Jobs was named the most powerful person in business byFortune Magazine.
On August 28, 2008, Bloomberg mistakenly published a 2500-word obituary of Jobs in its corporate news service.On January 14, 2009 Jobes announced a six-month leave of absence until the end of June 2009 to allow him to better focus on his health. Tim Cook, who had previously acted as CEO in Jobs' absence, became acting CEO of Apple, with Jobs still involved with "major strategic decisions.
In April 2009, Jobs underwent a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tennessee.
On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune Magazine. In December 2010, the Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010.
iPad
Then came the iPad, released in 2010, which changed the way people read newspapers and books, took notes, surfed the Internet, called each other on Skype and dealt with everyday practical problems thanks to hundreds of savvy applications.
iPad was a great success. Apple sold 7.5 million of them as of September 2010, representing close to 8% of its 2010 fiscal-year revenues (iPods amounted for 13%).
News of his death came a day after Apple unveiled its newest device, the iPhone 4S.
Apple and Indian market
Apple had a poor show in indian market.
Apple shipped 62,043 iPhones to India in the quarter ending June 30, far fewer than to Norway, Belgium or Israel, according to estimates by Framingham, Mass.-based researcher IDC.
Apple accounted for 2.6 per cent of India’s smartphone shipments in the quarter ended June 30, trailing RIM’s 15 per cent, Samsung Electronics’s 21 per cent and Nokia’s 46 per cent, IDC estimates.
The world’s largest maker of tablet computers also shipped about 21,150 iPads to India in the same period, or 0.2 per cent of its global total, according to IDC.
ADVERTISEMENT AND JOBS
"Think Different" ad campaign was made right after the return of Steve Jobs in 1997. The one-minute commercial featured black-and-white footage of 17 iconic men of the 20th century.
They were: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon (with Yoko Ono), Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog), Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso.
The commercial ends with an image of a young girl opening her closed eyes, as if making a wish.
An Apple Ad:
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Jobs told Playboy Magazine in 1985, that ad campaigns were only necessary because of competition.
“IBM's ads are everywhere,” he said in the interview. “But good PR educates people; that's all it is. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves."
"It's really hard to design products by focus groups,” Jobs told Businessweek in a 1998 interview. “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
