Biography of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs’ Early Life

Born in San Francisco in 1955, Jobs was was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Santa Clara, Calif. Jobs attended high school in Cupertino, Calif., the city where Apple is based. In 1972, he briefly attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., but dropped out after a semester. Jobs returned to California in 1974 and landed a job with Atari, where his friend and eventual business partner Steve Wozniak also worked.

Apple – Rise and Eventual Ouster

Jobs co-founded Apple, then known as Apple Computer, with Steve Wozniak to provide a circuit board for hobbyists who built their own computers. Despite that homebrew beginning, Apple helped usher in the age of the personal computer with the introduction of the Apple II line in 1976. Those machines soon gave way to a revolutionary change in desktop computing – the Macintosh. The Mac OS was the first commercially available and widely embraced system to use the graphical user interface that is common today and a mouse for interacting with the icons on the screen. The Mac was a giant success and rocketed Jobs and Apple into position as one of the world’s most important computer companies. The company made a huge splash with its 1984 Super Bowl commercial that introduced that Macintosh, which played on George Orwell’s novel 1984 and positioned IBM as Big Brother, while Apple represented heroic rebels struggling for freedom. By that time, Jobs had lured John Sculley, an experienced executive, away from PepsiCo to be Apple’s CEO. But, in 1985, amid a sales slump, Jobs lost a corporate power struggle to Sculley and the company’s board of directors, and left Apple.

NeXT – A New Challenge

Upon leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT Computer, a computer company that took the graphical lessons learned from the success of the Mac and married them to the computing power of Unix. The stylish and technologically advanced, but expensive, NeXT computers never caught on in the way that the Apple II or Mac lines did, though NeXT maintained a steady business from 1985-1997. And, come 1997, NeXT would take on a new, and much more central role -- at Apple.

Pixar – A Hobby Becomes a Powerhouse

While at NeXT, Jobs purchased a computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. in 1986 for $10 million. That division became Pixar Animation Studios, with Jobs as its CEO and majority shareholder.Though originally intended as a computer hardware company aiming high-end machines at Hollywood, when that business failed to take off, the company transformed into a maker of animated movies with a contract with Disney. Under Jobs’ leadership, Pixar became a dominant movie-making force in Hollywood, churning out a string of smash hits, including Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Wall-E, among others.In 2006, Jobs engineered the sale of Pixar to the Walt Disney Co., a deal which landed him a spot on Disney’s board and made him the company’s largest individual shareholder. After the conclusion of that deal, Fortune Magazine named Jobs its Most Powerful Businessman of 2007

The Return to Apple - Triumph

Jobs earned that title not only due to his role at Disney but also because, by that time, he had returned to Apple as its Chairman and CEO.In late 1996, Jobs had overseen the sale of NeXT to Apple and returned to a leadership position in the company he co-founded. The technology underlying NeXT’s hardware and software was acquired in a $429 million deal in 1996 and became the foundation of Apple’s next-generation Mac OS X operating system. When Apple CEO Gil Amelio was ousted by the company’s board of directors in 1997, Jobs returned to the company as its interim CEO. At that time, Apple was foundering under low marketshare, a confused licensing strategy, diffuse product line, and lack of focus, all of which led to much speculation in the press and online that the company would either merge with another or go under. In order to keep the company afloat, Jobs immediately began a series of sometimes-unpopular cuts, including paring from Apple’s product lines middlingly successful but passionately followed products like the Newton PDA. The first major hit product of Jobs’ second tenure at Apple was the iMac, an all-in-one computer introduced in 1998, which continues in production today. The iMac was followed by a string of hit laptop and desktop computers, though some failures - such as the Power Mac G4 cube - were mixed in. Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple returned from the brink of bankruptcy to again become a stable, successful company. But, thanks to the introduction of a small gadget, the company would soon skyrocket. In October 2001, Apple unveiled the first iPod. The cigarette-pack-sized digital music player offered 5GB of storage (enough for about 1,000 songs) and a simple interface. It was an instant hit. The development of the iPod had been ordered by Jobs – who disliked existing digital music players and their difficult interfaces – and was overseen by engineering head Jon Rubinstein and product designer Jonathan Ive. The iPod worked with Apple’s music management software, iTunes, which had been introduced in January 2001. The combination of the two, with their ease of use and powerful features, made the iPod a smash. Apple began a quick expansion of the iPod product line to include the Mini, nano, Shuffle, and later the touch, introducing new iPods roughly every six months. ITunes also evolved and added the iTunes Store for downloadable sales of music in 2003 and movies in 2005. With that move, Apple cemented its place in the music industry and made the iPod/iTunes combination the de facto standard for digital music consumption and playback. By 2008, Apple had become the world's largest retailer of music (online or offline), and record companies began to worry about Apple’s dominance in their business. In 2009, the iTunes Store sold its 6 billionth song.

The iPhone

In January 2007, Apple expanded on the success of the iPod, and positioned itself to revolutionize another market, when it announced the iPhone. That device was developed with Jobs’ oversight and involvement and was an instant hit upon its release. The first iPhone sold 270,000 units in its first 30 hours of availability, while its successor, the iPhone 3G, sold 1 million units in its first three days just a year later. By March 2009, Apple had sold over 17 million iPhones, and had surpassed quarterly sales of the previously dominant smartphone, the Blackberry. Following on the success of the iTunes Store, the iPhone got an App Store, offering third-party software, in July 2008. By January 2009, it had registered 500 million downloads, a mark it took the iTunes Store two years to reach. Apple had another hit on its hands.

Health Leave

Amidst this success, Jobs was dogged by questions about his health, especially after the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) appearance in 2006. In January 2009, Jobs issued a statement saying that his appearance was related to a hormonal imbalance that drained his body of necessary proteins. The statement added that his doctors thought they’d found a cause, that he’d seek treatment, and that he wouldn’t speak more on the topic, as he felt it was a personal matter. However, less than 10 days later it was announced that Jobs’ health problems were more serious than first realized and that he’d be taking a six-month leave of absence from the company. The company’s stock initially took a beating, but recovered to a level only a few points below the announcement within about a week. Tim Cook, the company’s chief operating officer, served as CEO in Jobs’ stead. Jobs returned to work at Apple in late June 2009, as scheduled. He has reportedly been deeply involved with Apple since his return.

Steve Jobs’ Legacy

Perhaps no other executive in modern memory, with the possible exception of Bill Gates, has been as closely tied to his company, and its success – or the public perception of that success, at least – as Jobs. Some, including Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper, have even compared Jobs and his legacy to those of legendary business figures like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. Others, however, have been less laudatory, placing him on a second tier of historical business figures due to his smaller accumulated wealth and charitable contributions. Despite any analysis that places Jobs in rare historical company, his management and personal styles have also been the subject of legend and anxiety. Jobs has been jokingly said to possess a “reality distortion field,” a term used by many to describe the force of his personality and presence, and his ability to convince people of the correctness of his positions. His personality has also led to criticism of a management style that included strong doses of both fear and secrecy. Under Jobs, Apple has been notorious for tightly protecting details of new products launches, going so far as to sue rumors websites and hold up deals with partners who leaked information. In the new millennium, Apple has become known for its desire to — and general success in doing so — control press coverage about it. Despite these criticisms, the Apple Jobs has built is strong, with over $24 billion in cash on hand, growing marketshare, and a deeply devoted customer base. Criticism notwithstanding, it’s clear that Steve Jobs is a technology visionary who has transformed at least two markets — computers and digital music — and might yet have a lasting impact on a third, cell phones.