Biography Summaries Of Great People Part-1 (Steve Jobs)
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BIOGRAPHY SUMMARY OF STEVE JOBS (founder of Apple Inc.)
The Youth Age
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California. His unwed biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption. Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, who moved to the suburban city of Mountain View a couple of years later.
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.
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| Paul Jobs and his young Steve, age 2yrs 1957 |
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's Origin
Woz, whose interest in electronics had grown stronger, was regularly attending meetings of a group of early computer hobbyists called the Homebrew Computer Club. They were the real pioneers of personal computing, a collection of radio jammers, computer professionals and enlightened amateurs who gathered to show off their latest prowess in building their own personal computer or writing software. The club started to gain popularity after the Altair 8800 personal computer kit came out in 1975.
The knowledge that Woz gathered at the Homebrew meetings, as well as his exceptional talent, allowed him to build his own computer board — simply because he wanted a personal computer for himself. Steve Jobs took interest, and he quickly understood that his friend's brilliant invention could be sold to software hobbyists, who wanted to write software without the hassle of assembling a computer kit. Jobs convinced Wozniak to start a company for that purpose: Apple Computer was born on April 1, 1976.
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| Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with an Apple I, 1976 |
The following months were spent assembling boards of Apple I computers in the Jobses' garage, and selling them to independent computer dealers in the area. However, Wozniak had started work on a much better computer, the Apple II — an expandable, much more powerful system that supported color graphics. Jobs and Wozniak knew deep down it could be hugely successful, and therefore Jobs started to seek venture capital. He eventually convinced former Intel executive turned business angel Mike Markkula to invest $250,000 in Apple, in January 1977. Markkula was a big believer in the personal computing revolution, and he said to the young founders that, thanks to the Apple II, their company could be one of the Fortune 500 in less than two years.
Apple II Forever
Although Markkula was a bit too optimistic about Apple's growth rate, he was right that the company quickly became an American success story. Because of its beautiful package, ease of use, and nifty features, the Apple II crushed most of its competition and its sales made the Apple founders millionaires. The biggest surge in sales came after the introduction of VisiCalc, the first commercially successful spreadsheet program: hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether they be accountants, small business owners, or just obsessed with money, bought Apple IIs to make calculations at home.
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| Jobs posing with Apple II for an advertisement, 1980 |
In the wake of Apple's success, its investors decided it was time to go public. The IPO took place in December 1980, only four years after the company was started. Steve Jobs's net worth increased to over $200 million, at age 25.
Apple's success attracted the attention of the computer giant IBM, which until then was still only selling mainframe computers to large companies. A crash project was started and in August 1981, the IBM PC entered the personal computer market. It was the biggest threat yet to Apple, whose reputation was being put into question after the flop of the Apple III in 1980. Most hopes rested on a business computer project, called the Lisa.
Lisa and Xerox PARC
Steve Jobs was a big believer in the Lisa computer initially. It was he who came up with the name. Indeed, in 1978, his ex-girlfriend from high school Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a little girl, who she named Lisa. Steve denied paternity, although it was ovious to everyone who knew him that he was the father, given the on-and-off relationship he still had with Chrisann at the time. Jobs refused to give any money to Chrisann, despite the millions he had accumulated at Apple. While in denial, he came up with the name Lisa for the new computer Apple was building...
The following year, a tour of the computer research lab Xerox PARC made a huge impression on him. The scientists who worked there had invented a number of breakthrough technologies that would mark the industry for the coming decades, including the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse, Ethernet, laser printing and object oriented programming. Jobs became obsessed with the GUI which was a lot easier to use than the command-line interfaces of the day, which required any PC user to learn a computer language. He insisted the Lisa had a GUI and a mouse, too.
Macintosh
However, because of his hot temper and his relative inexperience in technology or management, Steve Jobs was thrown out of the Lisa project. He felt absolutely crushed by this decision. As a revenge, he took over a small project called Macintosh, a personal computer that was supposed to be a cheap appliance, 'as easy to use as a toaster'. In 1981, Steve Jobs became head of the Macintosh project, and decided to make it a smaller and cheaper version of the Lisa, complete with a GUI of folders, icons and drop-down menus, and a mouse.
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| Steve Jobs (right) and John Sculley (left) with Mac. |
Leaving Apple
On January 24 1984, after Apple had run a very memorable TV commercial for the SuperBowl ('1984'), Steve Jobs introduced Macintosh at the company's annual shareholders meeting. The product was launched in great fanfare and for the first few months, it was very successful.
However, by early 1985, sales were plummeting, but Steve Jobs refused to acknowledge it and continued to behave as if he had saved Apple. This created a lot of tension within the company, especially between Steve and the CEO, John Sculley, who used to be very close but now stopped talking to one another.
In May 1985, Steve Jobs started trying to convince some directors and top executives at Apple that Sculley should go. Instead, many of them talked to Sculley, who took the matter to the board of directors. The board sided with Sculley and a few days later, announced a reorganization of the company where Steve Jobs had no operational duties whatsoever — he was only to remain chairman of the board.
Steve was aghast: Apple was his life, and he was effectively kicked out of it. After four months spent traveling and trying out new ideas, he came back in September with a plan: he would start a new computer company aimed at higher education, with a small group of other ex-Apple employees. When Apple learned of the plan, they declared they would sue him as he was taking valuable information about the company to compete with it. As a result, Steve Jobs resigned in September 1985, and sold all but one of his Apple shares, in disgust. He went ahead with his plan anyway, and incorporated NeXT. Apple dropped its lawsuit a few months later.
The NeXT years
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| NeXT Cube introduction, 12 Oct 1988 |
When it came out, the NeXT Cube was indeed a great machine. But it didn't sell — it was late, and way too overpriced: universities has asked for a $3,000 computer, and Steve Jobs had built a $10,000 workstation. After two years of very low sales, NeXT launched the cheaper NeXT Station, and expanded its target to businesses, in addition to higher ed. It didn't work: the number of NeXT computers sold each month remained in the hundreds. The company was bleeding money and all its co-founders left one after the other, as well as its most prominent investor, Texan billionaire Ross Perot. By 1993, NeXT had to give up its entire hardware business to become a niche software company. Steve Jobs had failed, and he was devastated. He started focusing less on work, and more on his wife Laurene (who he married in 1991) and his newborn son, Reed.
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| Zen guru Kobun Chino as he weds Laurene Powell and Steve Jobs, 18 Mar 1991 |
Pixar
To understand how Steve Jobs got out of his nadir, let's go back eight years earlier, in late 1985. At the time, George Lucas, who was in the middle of an expensive divorce, was selling the computer graphics division of his Lucasfilm empire. Steve Jobs had millions in the bank, after having sold all his Apple stock, and was interested. In early 1986, he bought the small group of computer scientists, and incorporated it as Pixar. The founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, had gotten together in the late 1970s with a common vision of making films using computer animation only. But they also knew no computer was powerful enough at the time, and they would have to hold out for a couple decades before their dream could materialize.
For the first five years of Pixar, Steve Jobs set a goal for the company to sell high-end computer graphics workstations for institutions, such as hospitals or even the army. The animations group led by John Lasseter was very small at the time, and only survived because it provided good publicity for the power of the Pixar rendering software. Steve Jobs understood this when the studio won an Academy Award for its short movie 'Tin Toy' in 1989. However, just like NeXT's, sales of Pixar hardware were microscopic, and the company went software-only in 1990.
Pixar then became a software company, developing the RenderMan 3D rendering software. Its animation business was kept alive because it was the only one that brought some cash in, with various 3D TV commercials for consumer brands. However a decisive contract changed everything: in 1991, Disney signed with Pixar for making a full-feature computer-animated movie. The script had to be fully approved by both parties, and the very hands-on head of Disney animation Jeffrey Katzenberg halted the production several times out of creative disagreements with John Lasseter and his team. But in 1995, the movie was finally starting to take form, and Steve Jobs became increasingly enthused by it.
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| Steve poses with Disney CEO Michael Eisner (middle, dark suit) and Pixar's Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, 1995 |
Back To Apple
Business wasn't all sunshine and roses at Apple. In the decade following Steve's departure, the computer maker had milked all the cash it could from the Macintosh and its successors, surfing on the wave of the desktop publishing revolution that the Mac and the laser printer had made possible. But in 1995, after Microsoft had released Windows 95, which was a pale but working copy of the Mac OS, sales of Macintosh computers started plummeting.
A new CEO, Gil Amelio, arrived in early 1996 to save the company. He cut costs, got rid of a third of the workforce, and decided that instead of writing a new, modern operating system from scratch to compete with Window, it was better for Apple to acquire one. Eventually, Amelio chose to buy NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system — and Steve Jobs convinced him to buy the whole company, for a whopping $400 million. The deal was made in December 1996: Steve Jobs was back at the company he founded.
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| Jobs with Gil Amelio (left), Apple's CEO, 20 Dec 1996 |
The Amelio-Jobs cooperation didn't last long, though: Apple lost $700 million in the first quarter of 1997, and the board decided to get rid of its CEO. Jobs effectively organized a board coup with the complicity of his billionaire friend Larry Ellison, and after a tenure that lasted exactly 500 days, Amelio was gone. In August 1997, Jobs took the stage at Macworld Boston to explain his plan for Apple: he had gotten rid of the old board of directors, and made a deal with Microsoft to settle patent disputes and invest $150 million in the struggling Silicon Valley icon. One month later, on September 16, 1997, Jobs accepted to become Apple's interim CEO.
Wait for part-2 as next journey of Steve Jobs will be revealed soon...
