Steve Jobs: A Tribute

“Let’s Make A Dent In This Universe” - Steven Paul Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs or famously known as Steve Jobs was born on 24th February 1955 in San Francisco, California. He was adopted by Paul & Clara Jobs from unwed Joanne Simpson & Abdulfattah Jandali, a political science professor from Syria. Paul & Clara were from lower middle-class where Paul used to repair cars for living. Young Steve Jobs grew in part of California which was rapidly becoming the hub of computer technology and soon was to be known as the Silicon Valley. He was always fascinated by electronic devices, that marked his long friendship with the whiz kid Steve Wozniak who was famously known as Woz and was five years older to Steve.

When Steve Jobs grew up, he decided to go to Reed College in Oregon which was a premium college for arts. As part of a promise made to Steve’s biological mother, Paul & Clara took the responsibility of paying the high fees from their modest income. Steve was there for only one semester and dropped out after realizing that the education he seeks is coming at the cost of his parents well being. After Steve dropped out from the college, he stayed in the campus attending random lectures of his interest before the college realized that he is no more a fee paying student. Throughout his early days he spent a lot of time learning eastern culture and became an avid follower of the Iskcon principles and later became a zen devotee. He even traveled to India seeking enlightenment, at the age of 19.

Apple (1975-1981)

After Steve’s return back to the Silicon Valley, he concentrated on Woz’s work on the computer circuit board which was fabulous by any standard even in those days. Woz was inspired to build his first computer which was essentially a circuit board when he first attended the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve saw the potential in the technology and took the responsibility of selling the boards that marked the beginning of Apple computers.

The business of Apple then essentially comprised of assembling the boards in Steve’s garage and selling it to local computer stores. Steve went on pushing Woz to build a new improved computer which he wanted to promote as a stand alone computer. This was Apple II, finished in 1977 and was a combination of Jobs vision, Woz’s genius and Regis McKenna’s promotion capability. Woz and Steve knew that they had already went beyond anything the market was producing at that time. This marked the deal with Mike Markkula, a former Intel executive who eventually became rich when Intel went on public. He spent a handsome amount of $250,000 with an assurance that Apple will be in the Fortune 500 within two years. This marked an era that saw an uprising of Apple, crushing almost all the competitions due to Jobs out-of-the-box thinking and Woz’s prowess of building systems way ahead of its time.

Apple II became an instant success tripling the Apple I sale. It essentially featured a crammed up board holding sixty-two chips & IC’s with an unmanned workmanship of soldered connections and a coloured display. This was the time when Randy Wigginton started programming for Apple and Apple II featured a celebrated set of compatible softwares from which VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, was most successful. This was also the time when Apple saw the friction between the founding members, Jobs & Woz. December 1980 saw Steve Jobs net worth sky rocketing past the $200 million mark at an age of only 25 and Apple had grown to 1000 employees with plants in Texas, Ireland, Singapore & California.

After Apple III surpassed the success of Apple II, Steve started working on a new project, codenamed Lisa that was named after his ex-girlfriends daughter. This was the beginning of the Pirate era as Lisa was the first system featuring a Graphical User Interface that was pioneered by Xerox PARC and was taken over by Apple.

Macintosh (1981-1985)

Steve Jobs soon realised that he was slowly getting sidelined in the Lisa project due to his meglomaniac attitude and his emotional outbursts on his employees. As part of retribution he started working on a parallel project known as Macintosh which was initiated by Jef Raskin in 1979 and was suppose to be a far cheaper GUI “a computer as easy to use as a toaster”. Macintosh or Mac team (considered as “Pirates”) was driven by one of the best brains competing with the parent Apple company (considered as Navy).

With Lisa’s market failure it was becoming more likely that the controversial & rebellious project Mac, driven by Steve, would be the turning point for this company. In 1983, Steve hired John Sculley from Pepsi, to aid him in his mission. This was the time when he famously quoted to John Sculley “Do you want to sell sugar water the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”. Sculley, Apple’s new CEO, in 1984 launched Mac which was not that big a success. Also, Steve’s arrogance was making things worse that led Sculley reducing his role and depriving him from any managerial duties. Steve remained the chairman of the board till he was thrown out of Apple after a unanimous decision made by the board of directors. This led him to look for newer opportunities and finally invested in a small company of computer graphics experts which was owned by George Lucas then. Lucas sold the company to Steve for $10 million in 1986 and it was reinvented as Pixar.

NeXT (1985-1995)

NeXT was the beginning of Steve’s dark years. This was the time in his life which was marked by turmoil and financial crunch. His passion of making computers again drove him to build an advance computer for complex research. He sold most of his stocks in Apple and incorporated a new company NeXT. This company was backed by Ross Perot who recently sold of his stake in EDS and was looking for a quality investment. Steve’s drive of excellence pushed the NeXT team to build a machine with highest possible standards and best hardware. The machine was to run on an absolutely gorgeous operating system known as NeXTSTEP. The operating system was based on UNIX framework to handle the rigour of complex research applications. Also, NeXTSTEP marked the beginning of object-oriented programming that’s part of almost every single language & framework these days. The end products were christianed as NeXT Cube.

The problem with the system was that, Steve’s perfection had driven Cube to be one of the costliest system ever made, essentially missing the key softwares. As a result it struggled within few months of its release. Steve planned to bring the NeXT Station which was suppose to be a cheaper version of Cube targeted for business users. Still the sale was barely 100 systems a month, in contrast of any PC sale. Extreme financial crunch drove away investors, including Ross Perot who was the first to invest. Finally in 1993 Steve gave away the hardware business and focussed only on the software part which was getting far better reviews. Though this also ended up in disaster as it was turning into a software development business which was not his plan.

Pixar (1995-1997)

Steve’s investment in Pixar was mere expansion and intrigue. He was not earning much of a revenue from the company as the team was more inclined in creating computer driven animation then actually selling it for use. Due to his background in hardware, he tried to sell advanced graphic workstations which was aiming for a very niche segment needing such technology. This also went down soon and finally he closed down Pixar’s hardware operations in 1990. He went on focussing on development of an advanced 3D language called RenderMan that was created by John Lasseter (head of Pixar) and his team. The animations created were often used in commercials and were widely gaining popularity due to catchy scripts and amazing characters created by John Lasseter. This was the time when Steve signed a deal with then dying Disney in 1991, to make full length movies with Pixar animations but was soon cancelled in 1993 by Burbank leading to further downfall. The only good thing happening for him was his marriage with wife Laurene and birth of his young son Reed.

With Disney losing revenue due to their traditional and uninspiring animations, John Lasseter again pitched them with a new script of a full length feature film called Toy Story that was released in 1995 and was an instant success bagging an academy award. Pixar went public immediately after the success and gave hit after hit every year for Disney. Steve Jobs with 80% stake in the company saw his net worth soaring up to $1.5 billion. This was the beginning of a new era and finally he struck a new deal with Disney for an equal partnership in brand and merchandize for all the items sold by Disney with Pixar logo in every item.

Apple at the same time has seen its ups and was going down rapidly. Microsoft had clearly swept clean the Mac’s success by the launch of Windows 95 operating system that was system independent and the hottest commodity in the market. Gil Amelio the new Apple CEO was desperately looking for a new Mac OS to replace the already dying one. Steve found it an opportune time to make a re-entry in the already dead firm. He pitched NeXTSTEP operating system to replace the old Mac OS that was finally acquired by Apple for $400 million with Steve back as advisor to CEO of the firm.

With Apple at the brink of bankruptcy and constant failure of Amelio to turn back the firm, the board decided to bring back the former CEO of the company and the original visionary, Steve Jobs. His first act was to cut down the number of projects drastically closing down projects like Newton, a pen based personal organizer. He struck a deal with the old rival Microsoft for a favorable playing field, ending most of the patent disputes. The number of hardware was also reduced to four.

Apple Reboot (1998-2001)

Steve Jobs quickly turned back the company with new successful Mac products like PowerBook & Mac G3 and came up with a new slogan “Think Different”. His revolutionary marketing campaigns and his evangel persona both helped Apple to survive the worst and witin six months of his tenure, he made the company profitable. Apple was resurrected with the launch of iMac, a consumer desktop which truly was innovative after Apple’s first Mac in 1984. This was launched in 1998 May and featured a translucent design that was never seen before. The system was an instant hit taking over the already stagnant PC market by storm. Designers & developers started pouring in to try and test the new Mac platform. Steve backed by Apple kept on promoting innovation and stayed critical in design & simplicity. Apple’s first notebook revolutionised again the monotonous laptop market, with its colourful diaspora in 1999. Within three years Steve turned Apple to a brand that was now being looked upon as a cult. He inculcated extreme brand loyalty amongst his consumers which made them very hard to leave once they have used the Apple products. Steve was now leading two public companies at the same time as their CEO.

In 2001, Steve incorporated the NeXTSTEP to build the now famous Mac OSX which was part of his Digital Hub strategy. According to him the PC will soon evolve to become a digital hub incorporating new ideas linked to imaging, gaming, music, phones and digital devices.this is the reason why the iApps concept was born bringing applications like iMovie in 1999, iTunes in 2001, iPhoto in 2002, GarageBand in 2004, iWeb in 2006 etc. Till today the iApps strategy is considered to be the greatest branding exercise ever been done to gain more market share on every technology linked with computing. Apple’s growing retail chains also helped extensively in building the brand identity.

iPod (2001-2006)

The greatest event that single-handedly changed the way music was perceived, was the advent of iPod. Steve soon realised that he needs to tap the extreme potential of digital music technology which was growing rapidly in popularity due to the rise of compressed music formats like MP3′s. In a record breaking time he launched Apple’s own first portable digital music player and christened it as iPod. He rejected many designs before finalizing on the amazing looking, click wheel driven white iPod device with 5 GB of hard-drive. The device surpassed all the expectations and broke all the sales record for technology based consumer product. Not even the earlier compatibility issues with Windows system could deter people from buying it and for the first time Mac were selling like hot cakes just to use the beautiful device that can hold hundreds of music CD’s.

Apple soon built a 2002 Windows compatible version of iPod with iTunes music store integration. ITunes revolutionized the buying of digital music content which was unheard of before. Andrew Lack, CEO of Sony Music Entertainment once said “I don’t think it was more than a fifteen second decision in my mind (to license music to Apple) once Steve started talking”. Every music company wanted to be part of iTunes, reason being that it was their only savior to earn any profit when digital music piracy was rampant and slowly eating away their margins.

By 2006, Apple increased the iPod portfolio by adding more products like iPod Mini (2004), iPod Shuffle & iPod Nano (2005) and increasing the digital music base, internationally. By 2006 the revenue from iPod’s were matching those made from selling computers. By the end of 2006, Apple had a market share close to 75% in digital music player.

Also, during this period the tension between Steve & Michael Eisner (CEO of Disney) increased. Eisner was soon replaced by Bob Iger in 2005 with whom Steve renewed his cooperation resulting in a Pixar-Disney merger in 2006. With ownership of half of Pixar stocks, Steve Jobs became the largest individual director with 7% of Disney stock. John Lasseter remained the CEO of Pixar and Ed Catmull was given critical position in the company.

Most Valuable Company (2006-Present)

With the continuous upgrades of Mac OSX and the Mac systems (iMac, Mac Mini, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air etc.) it became one of the most coveted brand in the world with the sales growing exponentially every year. In 2005, Steve announced its tie up with Intel for using the next gen chips in Apple devices. These new Macs were faster, cheaper and was Microsoft compatible, allowing Windows to be installed on it. Its retail chain of Apple stores became the fastest growing assets, further building up on the brand.

Due to the extreme popularity of Apple products lots of accessories started coming up, providing the consumers more options than they can ever dream of. In February 2006, the company released Apple Tv, but the turning point came when Steve launched the iPhone in Jan 2007 that unarguably changed everything. This was the beginning of a new era of portable handheld devices running on the new iOS. iPhone changed the way how a smartphone used to look and advent of capacitive touch, multi-touch screen, large display, iPod capabilities, accelerometer and much more, changed the game completely. Now, Apple was way ahead of its competition and only one phone a year was enough to destroy stacks of new product portfolios offered by leaders of phone industry that was already shaken to its core. In 2007, Apple Computers became Apple Inc. due to its enormous success in niche products and expansion of its innovative portfolio.

Steve was ailing for a long time and in 2003 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Since his tumour was not deadly, he was asked to have a surgery which would have cured him. But he suffered for nine long months before going for surgery in 2004. Steve started losing weight after his surgery and became very thin by 2008. He skipped the keynote of January 2009 and took six months off for a liver transplant. Due to the bond shared between Steve and Apple, every-time his health got affected, it was realized in wall-street. This resulted in lot of speculation on an Apple without Steve Jobs which was unthinkable.

In 2010, Steve Jobs was again back as a new man for the launch of the extremely innovative tablet known as iPad. This was the start of the post PC era, rendering them obsolete over years. Also, Apple became the first company to successfully launch over a million application for its iOS devices bagging a revenue of billion dollars alone on application sale.

Steve finally stepped down as the CEO of the company in August 2011 due to medical reasons making Tim Cook in-charge & new CEO. Finally on October 5th, a middle class kid with no college education but dreams in his eyes passed away peacefully. His act is the greatest first and second act in the history of business that will remain unparalleled for years to come. We will always remember him as a leader, a visionary, an evangelist and a one of a kind ever born.

Rest In Peace, Steve (1955-2011)

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” – Steve Jobs

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs