Steve Jobs

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

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Founding of Apple

Jobs was reared in Cupertino, California, which is now known as Silicon Valley, by adoptive parents. Although he was interested in engineering, his childhood loves were diverse. He dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, obtained a job as a video game designer at Atari Corporation in early 1974, and saved enough money for a Buddhist pilgrimage to India.

Jobs met with Stephen Wozniak, an old high school classmate who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company, when he returned to Silicon Valley in the fall of 1974. After Hewlett-Packard rejected Wozniak’s design for a computer logic board in 1976, Wozniak and Jobs went into business together. The Apple I, as the logic board was dubbed, was constructed in the Jobs’ family garage with funds derived from the sale of Jobs’ Volkswagen microbus and Wozniak’s programmed calculator.

Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to realise that the personal computer would appeal to a large audience, so long as it did not look like it belonged at a middle school science fair. With Jobs’s urging, Wozniak designed an enhanced variant, the Apple II, replete with a keyboard, and they arranged for a sleek, injection-moulded plastic shell to surround the device.

Even though Jobs had long, untidy hair and eschewed business attire, he was able to secure financing, distribution, and exposure for Apple Computer in 1977, the same year the Apple II was released. The machine was an instant hit and became linked with the proliferation of personal computers. In 1981, the company had a record-setting initial public offering, and in 1983, it became the fastest company to enter the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest corporations. In 1983, the business hired John Sculley, president of PepsiCo, Inc., as its chief executive officer (CEO) and, implicitly, Jobs’s mentor in the nuances of managing a huge corporation. Jobs persuaded Sculley to accept the role by posing the question, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water?” However, it also exposed Jobs’s own near-messianic conviction in the computer revolution.

Amazingly great

During the same time period, Jobs was in charge of the most significant project in Apple’s history. In 1979, Steve accompanied a small team of Apple engineers to a technology presentation at the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) of the Xerox Corporation to explore how the graphical user interface may make computers more user-friendly and efficient. Soon after, Jobs quit the engineering team designing Lisa, a business computer, to lead a smaller team developing a less expensive computer. Both computers were redesigned to take use of and refine PARC’s concepts, although Jobs openly favoured the Macintosh, or Mac, as the new computer became known. Jobs pampered his engineers and referred to them as artists, but his style was unyielding; he once requested a redesign of an internal circuit board because he deemed it unsightly. Later, he would be notorious for insisting that the Macintosh be “insanely great” rather than merely great. In January 1984, Jobs debuted the Macintosh in a masterfully staged display that was the focal point of an amazing public relations effort. It would become the prototypical example of “event marketing”

However, the initial Macs were underpowered, pricey, and lacked software applications, resulting in poor sales. Apple gradually enhanced the machine until it became the company’s lifeblood and the standard for subsequent computer interfaces. In 1985, Sculley persuaded Apple’s board of directors to remove the company’s famed cofounder due to Jobs’s apparent inability to rectify the problem.

Pixar and NeXT

Jobs rapidly founded a second company, NeXT Inc., which developed powerful workstation computers for the education market. His investment partners included the Texan businessman Ross Perot and the Japanese electronics giant Canon Inc. Although the engineering design of the NeXT computer was impressive, it was surpassed by less expensive computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Inc. Jobs concentrated the corporation on its breakthrough software system, NEXTSTEP, in the early 1990s.

In 1986, Jobs purchased a controlling stake in Pixar, a computer graphics company that had been created as a part of Lucasfilm Ltd., the film production company founded by Hollywood film director George Lucas. Over the next decade, Jobs transformed Pixar into a significant animation firm that, among other accomplishments, created the first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, in 1995. The public stock offering of Pixar that year made Jobs a billionaire for the first time. In 2006, he finally sold the studio to the Disney Company.

Saving Apple

Gilbert Amelio, an expert in the semiconductor industry, was chosen as Apple’s new chief executive towards the tail end of 1996, when the company was on the approach of insolvency and suffering from enormous financial losses. Amelio chose NEXTSTEP, purchasing Jobs’s firm for more than $400 million — and bringing Jobs back to Apple as a consultant — after discovering that the company had failed to build a suitable replacement for the Macintosh’s outdated operating system (OS). In June 1997, Apple’s board of directors became unhappy with Amelio’s inability to turn the company’s finances around and asked for the return of Apple’s wayward cofounder. Jobs swiftly created a partnership with Apple’s former adversary, Microsoft, cancelled Amelio’s Mac-clone deals, and streamlined the company’s product line. In addition, he devised an award-winning advertising strategy that encouraged prospective customers to “think differently” and purchase Macintoshes. As essential as what he achieved was what he did not do: he resisted the temptation to create computers that run Microsoft’s Windows OS, and he did not spin out Apple as a software-only firm, as some advised. Jobs argued that as the only major manufacturer of personal computers with its own operating system, Apple was in a unique position to innovate.

He did. In 1998, Jobs released the iMac, an egg-shaped, all-in-one computer that offered high-speed processing at a relatively affordable price and ushered in a trend of fashionable PCs. (Subsequent models included five distinct vibrant hues.) By year’s end, the iMac was the best-selling personal computer in the country, and Jobs was able to report continuous profits for the once-struggling corporation. The next year, he won again with the fashionable iBook, a laptop computer designed with students in mind, and the G4, a desktop computer so powerful that, according to Apple, it could not be exported under certain conditions since it qualified as a supercomputer. Steve Jobs had saved his firm and restored himself as a master high-technology marketer and visionary, despite the fact that Apple did not regain its former industry supremacy.

Innovating Apple

Jobs began revamping Apple for the 21st century in 2001. In that year, Apple introduced iTunes, a computer programme for playing music and converting it to the MP3 digital format utilised by computers and other digital devices. Later that same year, Apple launched sales of the iPod, a portable MP3 player that immediately dominated the market. In 2003, Apple began selling MP3 downloads of songs from major record labels via the Internet. Through Apple’s online iTunes Store, over one billion songs and films were sold by 2006. On January 9, 2007, in acknowledgement of the major shift in the company’s operations, Jobs officially changed the company’s name to Apple Inc.

Jobs entered the telecommunications industry in 2007 with the release of the touch-screen iPhone, a mobile phone with the capacity to play MP3s and films and access the Internet. Apple debuted the iPod Touch, a handheld MP3 and gaming gadget with built-in Wi-Fi and an iPhone-like touch screen, later the same year. The iPhone and iPod Touch had more games than any other portable gaming system as a result of the iTunes Store’s ability to offer Apple and third-party apps. Jobs announced in 2008 that future iPhone and iPod Touch versions would feature enhanced game features. In an amusing turn of events, Apple, which had not supported game creators in its early years for concern that its computers would not be regarded seriously as business tools, was now staking a claim to a larger position in the gaming industry to complement its entry into the telecoms industry.

Health problems

Jobs was diagnosed with a rare type of pancreatic cancer in 2003. He delayed surgery for around nine months as he experimented with alternative treatment. In 2004, he underwent the Whipple operation, a major reconstructive procedure. During the procedure, a section of the pancreas, the bile duct, the gallbladder, and the duodenum were removed, and then the remaining pancreas, the bile duct, and the intestine were rejoined to reroute the digestive secretions back into the stomach. Following a brief recuperation, Jobs resumed his position as Apple’s CEO.

Throughout 2008, Jobs lost a substantial amount of weight, leading to widespread rumours that his cancer had returned. At five years, the average survival rate for patients who underwent Whipple surgeries was barely 20%. Apple’s stock market shares were related to the health of its CEO, maybe more than those of any other significant firm. As a result, investors demanded complete disclosure of his health, as the initial explanations for his weight loss seemed insufficient to explain his sickly appearance. On January 9, 2009, Jobs made a statement explaining that he was being treated for a hormone imbalance and will continue his corporate obligations. However, he stated less than a week later that he would be taking an urgent leave of absence through the end of June in order to recover his health. Jobs, having removed himself, at least temporarily, from the business structure, reverted to his earlier position that his health was a private matter and refused to share any additional information.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2009 that Jobs had gotten a liver transplant in April 2008. Not disclosed was whether his previously treated pancreatic cancer had migrated to his liver. The operation was performed in Tennessee, where the average wait time for a liver transplant was 48 days, compared to 306 days nationwide. Jobs returned to work on June 29, 2009, keeping his promise to do so by the end of June. Jobs took another medical leave of absence in January 2011. He quit as CEO in August but was promoted to chairman. He passed away two months afterwards

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