Celebrities Business Icons Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (born Steven Paul Jobs on February 24, 1955) is the Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of LucasFilms Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He remained its CEO and majority shareholder until its acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006. Jobs is currently the Walt Disney Company’s largest individual shareholder and a member of its Board of Directors. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. Steve Jobs was listed as Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Businessman of 2007, beating out 25 other business leaders.

Jobs’ history in business has contributed greatly to the myths of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design while understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.

Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, helped popularize the personal computer in the late ‘70s. In the early ‘80s, still at Apple, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven GUI.After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. NeXT’s subsequent 1997 buyout by Apple Inc brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he has served as its CEO ever since. Jobs was born in San Francisco and was adopted by Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California who named him Steven Paul. His biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali — a graduate student from Syria who became a political science professor— later married and gave birth to Jobs’ sister, the novelist Mona Simpson.

Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts,” he said.

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.

Jobs then backpacked around India with a Reed College friend (and, later, first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of philosophical enlightenment. He came back with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs experimented with LSD, calling these experiences “one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.” He has stated that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not understand certain aspects of his thinking.

He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them US$600 (instead of the actual US$5000) and that Wozniak’s share was thus US$300.

• Beginnings of Apple Computer* See also: History of Apple When twenty year old Jobs saw a computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use, he persuaded Wozniak to assist him and started a company to market the computer. Apple Computer Co. was founded as a partnership on April 1, 1976. Though their initial plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, Jobs and Wozniak ended up creating a batch of completely assembled computers and thus entered the personal computer business. The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced, the Apple I, sold for US$666.66, a number Wozniak came up with because he liked repeating digits. Its successor, the Apple II, was introduced the following year and became a huge success, turning Apple into an important player in the nascent personal computer industry. In December 1980, with a successful IPO, Apple Computer became a publicly traded corporation, making Jobs a multi-millionaire.

As Apple continued to expand, the company began looking for an experienced executive to help manage its expansion. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola, to serve as Apple’s CEO, challenging him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” The following year, Apple set out to do just that, starting with a Super Bowl television commercial titled, “1984.” Two days later at Apple’s annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as “pandemonium.” The Macintosh became the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface, although it was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC. The development of the Mac was started by Jef Raskin, and eventually taken over by Jobs.

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic evangelist for Apple, some of his employees from that time had described him as an erratic and tempestuous manager. An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused a deterioration in Jobs’ working relationship with Sculley, and at the end of May 1985 – following an internal power struggle and an announcement of significant layoffs – Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties as head of the Macintosh division.

• NeXT* In 1986, finding himself sidelined by the company he had founded, Jobs sold all but one of his shares in Apple. The single share may have been for symbolic and sentimental reasons or to ensure that he would receive regular stock reports (as some biography books have stated) and attend shareholder meetings.

Around the same time, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was never able to break into the mainstream mainly owing to its high cost. Among those who could afford it, however, the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port).

The NeXT Cube was described by Jobs as an “interpersonal” computer, which he believed was the next step after “personal” computing. That is, if computers could allow people to communicate and collaborate together in an easy way, it would solve a lot of the problems that “personal” computing had come up against. During a time when e-mail for most people was plain text, Jobs loved to demo the NeXT’s e-mail system, NeXTMail, as an example of his “interpersonal” philosophy. NeXTMail was one of the first to support universally visible, clickable embedded graphics and audio within e-mail.

Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by such things as the NeXTcube’s magnesium case. This put considerable strain on NeXT’s hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel.

NeXT technology played a large role in catalyzing three unrelated events:

The World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee developed the original World Wide Web system at CERN on a NeXT workstation. Jean-Marie Hullot’s ‘SOS Interface’ became the basic for Interface Builder which Hullot built for NeXT and which Berners-Lee also used in his project the program ‘WorldWideWeb’. NeXT computers were used in the development of the computer game Doom. The return of Apple Computer. Apple’s reliance on outdated software and internal mismanagement, particularly its inability to release a major operating system upgrade, had brought it near bankruptcy in the early-to-mid 1990s. Jobs’ progressive stance on Unix and open source underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s but ultimately became an expandable solid foundation for an operating system. Apple would later acquire this software and under Jobs’ leadership experience a renaissance.

Return to Apple

Steve Jobs on stage at Macworld Conference & Expo, San Francisco, 11 January 2005.See also: “1998 to 2005: New beginnings” in Apple Inc. In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for US$429 million. The deal was finalized in late 1996, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded. He soon became Apple’s interim CEO after the directors lost confidence in and ousted then-CEO Gil Amelio in a boardroom coup. In March of 1998, in order to concentrate Apple’s efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs immediately terminated a number of projects such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, “afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs’s summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company.”

With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company’s technology found its way into Apple products, notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs’s guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new products; since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the “interim” modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO.

In recent years, the company has branched out, introducing and improving upon other digital appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and music distribution. In 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, iPod, and internet device. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminds his employees that “real artists ship”, by which he means that delivering working products on time is as important as innovation and attractive design.

Jobs works at Apple for an annual salary of US$1, and this earned him a listing in Guinness World Records as the “Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer.” His current salary at Apple officially remains US$1 per year, although he has traditionally been the recipient of a number of lucrative “executive gifts” from the board, including a US$46 million jet in 1999 and just under 30 million shares of restricted stock in 2000–2002. As such, Jobs is well compensated for his efforts at Apple despite the nominal one-dollar salary. This approach reduces his personal tax liability because, under current U.S. tax law, salary income is taxed at a significantly higher rate (currently up to 35%) than the capital gains tax (currently a maximum of 15%) applied to profits arising from the sale of stock grants. Obtaining remuneration through stock instead of salary is a common extrinsic rewarding technique which ties management performance to financial benefits. Furthermore, it acts as a tax minimization strategy.

Jobs is both admired and criticized for his consummate skill at persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the “reality distortion field” and is particularly evident during his keynote speeches (colloquially known as “Stevenotes”) at Macworld Expos and at Apple’s own World Wide Developers Conferences.

In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of Apple’s poor recycling programs for e-waste in the U.S. by lashing out at environmental and other advocates at Apple’s Annual Meeting in Cupertino in April. However, a few weeks later, Apple announced it would take back iPods for free at its retail stores. The Computer TakeBack Campaign responded by flying a banner from a plane over the Stanford University graduation at which Jobs was the commencement speaker. The banner read “Steve — Don’t be a mini-player recycle all e-waste”. In 2006 he further expanded Apple’s recycling programs to any U.S. customer who buys a new Mac. This program includes shipping and “environmentally friendly disposal” of their old systems.

Jobs began 2007 with Macworld Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. He began the episodic keynote address by reviewing Apple’s music business through iTunes music and video highlights, mentioning that rumors of the decline in Internet music business were false. Highlights included the long-awaited iPhone mobile device as well as the rebranding and official introduction of Apple TV. After the long-awaited introduction of these two products, Jobs announced on January 9, 2007 that “Apple Computer, Inc” would be now known as “Apple Inc.”

Jobs was also involved in 2007 in an attempt to persuade former Vice President of the United States Al Gore, a member of Apple’s board of directors, to run for President in 2008.

Pixar and Disney In 1986, Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division for the price of US$10 million, US$5 million of which was given to the company as capital. .

The new company, which was originally based in San Rafael, California, has since relocated to Emeryville, California, contracted with Disney to produce a number of computer-animated feature films, which Disney would co-finance and distribute.

In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to patch up relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth US$7.4 billion. Once the deal closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company’s largest single shareholder with approximately 7% of the company’s stock. Jobs’ holdings in Disney far exceed those of Eisner, who holds 1.7%, and Disney family member Roy E. Disney, who holds about 1% of the company’s stock and whose criticisms of Eisner included the soured Pixar relationship and accelerated his ousting. Jobs joined the company’s board of directors upon completion of the merger. Disney buys PixarJobs also helps oversee Disney and Pixar’s combined animation businesses with a seat on a special six-man steering committee. One of the committee’s first decisions was to discontinue the production of so-called “cheapquels” (cheap direct-to-video sequels). Many also see Jobs as a valuable and influential advisor to Iger and Disney on technology matters.

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Managerial style Much has been made of Jobs’s aggressive and demanding personality. Fortune noted that he “is considered one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs.” Commentaries on his temperamental style can be found in Mike Moritz’s The Little Kingdom, one of the few authorized biographies of Jobs; Jeffrey S. Young’s unauthorized Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward; The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman; and iCon: Steve Jobs, by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon.

In iCon: Steve Jobs the authors point out that Paul Jobs, his father by adoption, was also known for his aggressive side: “Paul was soon hired as a kind of strongarm man by a finance company that sought help collecting on auto loans — an early repo man. Both his bulk and his aggressive personality were well suited to this somewhat dangerous pursuit, and his mechanical bent enabled him to pick the locks of the cars he had to repossess and hot-wire them if necessary.”

In the 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds, the reaction to Jobs’ famous firing from Apple by CEO John Sculley and the Apple Board of Directors was discussed by various people:

“ The grandiose plans of what Macintosh was gonna be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing. And the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible, it was salvageable. But the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something, and that somebody was John Sculley. ” —Chris Espinoza

“ The board had to make a choice and I said look, it’s Steve’s company, I was brought in here to help. If you want him to run it, that’s fine by me. But we gotta at least decide what we’re gonna do and everybody’s got to get behind it … and ultimately after the board talked with Steve and talked with me, the decision was that we would go forward with my plans and Steve left. ” —John Sculley

“ What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for; starting with me, but that wasn’t the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I wanted it to. ” —Steve Jobs

“ People in the company had very mixed feelings about it, everyone had been terrorized by Steve Jobs at some point or another, and so there was a certain relief that the terrorist would be gone. And on the other hand I think there was incredible respect for Steve Jobs by the very same people, and we were all very worried what would happen to this company without the visionary, without the founder, without the charisma. ” —Larry Tesler

“ He took it as a personal attack, started attacking Sculley, in which, you know, backed himself into a corner. Because he was sure that the board would support him and not Sculley … Apple never recovered from losing Steve; Steve was the heart and soul and driving force; it would be quite a different place today; they lost their soul. ” —Andy Hertzfeld

Jobs has always aspired to position Apple and its products at the forefront of the information technology industry by foreseeing and setting trends, at least in terms of innovation and style. He summed up that self-concept nicely at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007 by quoting ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky:

“ There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.” ”