INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE - STEVE JOBS
Hello Friends, it gives me great pleasure a new section to my blog - INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE. This part will contain articles about interesting people from all walks of life who have made our lives better with their contribution to mankind.
STEVE JOBS
STEVE JOBS
Inventor (1955–2011)
Steven Paul
"Steve" Jobs was an American entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor,
who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc.
SYNOPSIS
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco,
California, on February 24, 1955, to two University of Wisconsin graduate
students who gave him up for adoption. Smart but directionless, Jobs
experimented with different pursuits before starting Apple Computers with Steve
Wozniak in 1976. Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone
and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology. He died
in 2011, following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
The Santa Clara county,
south of the Bay Area, became known as Silicon Valley in the early 1950s after
the sprouting of a myriad of semi-conductor companies. As a result, young Steve
Jobs grew up in a neighborhood of engineers working on electronics and other
gizmos in their garages on weekends. This shaped his interest in the field as
he grew up. At age 13, he met one the most important persons in his life:
18-year-old Stephen Wozniak, an electronics wiz kid, and, like Steve, an
incorrigible prankster.
Five years later, when
Steve Jobs reached college age, he told his parents he wanted to enroll in Reed
College — an expensive liberal arts college up in Oregon. Even though the
tuition fees were astronomical for the poor couple, they had promised their
son's biological parents he would get a college education, so they relented.
Steve spent only one semester at Reed, then dropped out, as he was more
interested in eastern philosophy, fruitarian diets, and LSD than in the classes
he took. He moved to a hippie commune in Oregon where his main activity was
cultivating apples.
A few months later, Steve
returned to California to look for a job. He was hired at the young video game
maker Atari, and used his wages to make a trip to India with one of his college
friends, in order to 'seek enlightenment'. He came back a little disillusioned
and started to take interest in his friend Woz's new activities.
APPLE COMPUTERS
In 1974, Jobs took a position as a
video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left Atari to find
spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling the continent and experimenting
with psychedelic drugs. In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started
Apple Computer. The duo started in the Jobs family garage, and funded their
entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling
his beloved scientific calculator.
Jobs and Wozniak are credited with
revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and
making the machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers.
Wozniak conceived a series of user-friendly personal computers, and—with Jobs
in charge of marketing—Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each.
The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the
release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by
700 percent, to $139 million. 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. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to help
fill the role of Apple's president.
However, the next several products from
Apple suffered significant design flaws, resulting in recalls and consumer
disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete
with an IBM/PC-dominated business world. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh,
marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic,
youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to
IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible. Sculley believed Jobs
was hurting Apple, and the company's executives began to phase him out.
Not actually having had an official
position with the company he co-founded, Jobs left Apple in 1985 to begin a new
hardware and software enterprise called NeXT, Inc. The following year Jobs purchased
an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation
Studios. Believing in Pixar's potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of
his own money in the company. Pixar Studios went on to produce wildly popular
animation films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The
Incredibles. Pixar's films have netted $4 billion. The studio merged with
Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs Disney's largest shareholder.
Despite Pixar's success, NeXT, Inc.
floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to
mainstream America. Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429
million. The following year, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO.
Just as Steve Jobs instigated Apple's
success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the
1990s. With a new management team, altered stock options and a self-imposed
annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. His ingenious
products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns and stylish designs
caught the attention of consumers once again. In 2003, Jobs discovered that he
had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. In
2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form,
in subsequent years Jobs disclosed little about his health.
Apple introduced such revolutionary
products as the Macbook Air, iPod and iPhone, all of which have dictated the
evolution of modern technology. Almost immediately after Apple releases a new
product, competitors scramble to produce comparable technologies. Apple's
quarterly reports improved significantly in 2007: Stocks were worth $199.99 a
share—a record-breaking number at that time—and the company boasted a
staggering $1.58 billion profit, an $18 billion surplus in the bank and zero
debt.
In 2008, iTunes became the
second-biggest music retailer in America—second only to Wal-Mart. Half of
Apple's current revenue comes from iTunes and iPod sales, with 200 million
iPods sold and 6 billion songs downloaded. For these reasons, Apple has been
ranked No. 1 on Fortune magazine's list of "America's
Most Admired Companies," as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for
returns to shareholders.
Early in 2009, reports circulated about
Jobs' weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which
included a liver transplant. Jobs had responded to these concerns by stating he
was dealing with a hormone imbalance. After nearly a year out of the spotlight,
Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event September
9, 2009.
In respect to his personal life, Steve
Jobs remained a private man who rarely discloses information about his family.
What is known is Jobs fathered a daughter with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when
he was 23. Jobs denied paternity of his daughter Lisa in court documents,
claiming he was sterile. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter
until she was 7, but when she was a teenager she came to live with her father.
In the early 1990s, Jobs met Laurene
Powell at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They
married on March 18, 1991, and lived together in Palo Alto, California, with
their three children.
On October 5, 2011, Apple Inc.
announced that its co-founder had passed away. After battling pancreatic cancer
for nearly a decade, Steve Jobs died in Palo Alto. He was 56 years old.
His whole life has been an inspiration for
many young people all over the world and will be remembered forever y the name
of innovative technology.
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