Toy story: Buzz and Woody to the rescue Ch. The second coming: what rough beast, its hour come round at last Ch. The restoration: the loser now will be later to win Ch.
Design principles: the studio of Jobs and Ive Ch. The iMac: hello again Ch. CEO: still crazy after all these years Ch. Apple stores: genius bars and siena sandstone Ch. The digital hub: from iTunes to the iPod Ch. Music man: the sound track of his life Ch. Pixar's friends and foes Ch. Twenty-first-century Macs: setting Apple apart Ch. Round one: Memento mori Ch.
The iPhone: three revolutionary products in one Ch. Round two: the cancer recurs Ch. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption. His mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Jobs was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson.
It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. Jobs was born on February 24, , in San Francisco, California. He lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage.
Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.
While Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school — a proposal that his parents declined. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes at the school.
Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography. In , Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. Back when Jobs was enrolled at Homestead High School, he was introduced to his future partner and co-founder of Apple Computer, Wozniak, who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.
In a interview with PC World , Wozniak spoke about why he and Jobs clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said. Steve was supported in his mission by John Sculley, Apple's new CEO whom he hired in to help him run the company and groom him into a future chief executive.
On January 24 , after Apple had run a very memorable TV commercial for the Super Bowl , 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 quite successful.
However, by early , as the whole PC industry fell into a slump, sales of the Mac started to plummet. Yes, Steve Jobs refused to acknowledge it and continued to behave as if he had saved Apple. While they used to be very close, they'd now stopped talking to one another.
In May , 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 from Apple 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. Steve aimed at the highest possible standards for his new NeXT machine: he wanted the best hardware, built in the world's most automated factory, and running the most advanced software possible. These ambitious plans put off the release date of the computer — called the NeXT Cube — to October When it came out, the NeXT Cube was indeed a great machine.
After two years of very low sales, the company launched the cheaper NeXTstation, and expanded its target to businesses, in addition to higher education. 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 , 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 and his newborn son, Reed. To understand how Steve Jobs got out of his nadir, let's go back eight years earlier, in late 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 , he bought the small group of computer scientists, and incorporated a new company: Pixar. The founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, had gotten together in the late s 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's life, 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 3D rendering software, RenderMan. However, just like NeXT's, sales of Pixar hardware were microscopic, and the company went software-only in Pixar then became a software company whose primary product was RenderMan.
Its animation business was kept alive because it was the only one that brought some cash in, by producing various TV commercials in 3D for brands. However, a decisive contract changed everything: in , Disney signed a contract with Pixar to make 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 , the movie was finally starting to take form, and Steve Jobs became increasingly enthused by it. Although he had used his personal money to fund Pixar for nine years, Jobs had never been implicated that much in the company, which was always more of a 'hobby' to him compared to NeXT. But by , NeXT had more or less tanked, whereas Pixar was obviously going to benefit widely from the Disney marketing machine and make a hit with its movie, Toy Story. Steve understood this new momentum full well: he planned to take Pixar public the week following the release of the movie, in November He was right, and Toy Story 's box-office success was only surpassed by the Pixar stock's success on Wall Street.
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. 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.
The deal was made in December Steve Jobs was back at the company he had founded. Jobs effectively organized a board coup with the complicity of his billionaire friend Larry Ellison, and after a tenure that lasted exactly days, Amelio was gone.
The few months after Steve Jobs came back at Apple were among the hardest-working in his life. He later told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he was so exhausted, he couldn't speak when he came home at night remember he was also running a thriving Pixar simultaneously. He reviewed every team at Apple and asked them to justify why they were important to the future of the company.
If they couldn't, their product would get canceled, and there was a high probability they'd have to leave, too. Jobs also brought with him his executive team from NeXT, and installed them in key positions. Critics started to believe in Steve Jobs's ability to run Apple when he unveiled his first great product, the iMac. Introduced in May , it was Apple's first truly innovative product since the original Macintosh of Its translucent design blew away the whole PC industry, which had failed to produce anything but black or beige boxes for over a decade.
Moreover, it was a hot seller, and put the company's finances back in the black. The iconic iMac also played a key role in bringing back tons of developers to the Mac platform. Monsters, Inc. Jobs returned to Apple as a part-time consultant to the chief executive officer CEO. The following year, in a surprising event, Apple entered into a partnership with its competitor Microsoft.
The two companies, according to the New York Times, "agreed to cooperate on several sales and technology fronts. In November Jobs announced Apple would sell computers directly to users over the Internet and by telephone.
The Apple Store became a runaway success. Within a week it was the third-largest e-commerce site on the Internet. In Jobs announced the release of the iMac, which featured powerful computing at an affordable price. The iBook was unveiled in July This is a clam-shaped laptop that is available in bright colors. It includes Apple's AirPort, a computer version of the cordless phone that would allow the user to surf the Internet wirelessly. In January Jobs unveiled Apple's new Internet strategy.
It included a group of Macintosh-only Internet-based applications. Jobs also announced that he was becoming the permanent CEO of Apple. In a February Time magazine article, Jobs said, "The thing that drives me and my colleagues … is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp.
And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence. He was instrumental in launching the age of the personal computer.
Steve Jobs is truly a computer industry visionary. Brashares, Ann. Steve Jobs: Think Different. Butcher, Lee. New York: Paragon House, Wilson, Suzan. Steve Jobs: Wizard of Apple Computer. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, Young, Jeffrey S. Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, Toggle navigation. Steve Jobs. College and travel After graduating from high school in , Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for two years.
Apple and the personal computer era Jobs had realized there was a huge gap in the computer market. The Macintosh In Apple introduced a revolutionary new model, the Macintosh.
For More Information Brashares, Ann. User Contributions: 1. Am realy impressed about the life of commitment to his vision and career. He refused to be discouraged despite the challenges he went through, but stayed dogged to his convictions until he rose back to the top of his career as Apple's CEO.
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