S teven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Inc., who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural trans- formation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died on Wednesday. He was 56.
The death was announced by Apple, the company Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.
Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with cancer, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.
He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple's chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D.
Cook, the chief operating offi- cer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company's af- fairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.
Cook, the chief operating offi- cer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company's af- fairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.
“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my du- ties and expectations as Ap- ple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know,“ Jobs said in a letter released by the compa- ny. “Unfortunately, that day has come.“
By then, having mastered digital technology and capital- ized on his intuitive marketing sense, Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centred on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an esti- mated $8.3 billion.
Eight years after founding Apple, Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling- out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in
1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another--the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories such as music players and cellphones but also en- tire industries, like music and mobile communications.During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spin-off from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.
Starting with Toy Story in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form en- joyed by children and adults worldwide.
Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.
It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.
Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007.
To his understanding of technology he brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party.
His worldview was shaped by the 1960s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said “the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there“.
His worldview was shaped by the 1960s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said “the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there“.
After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Oregon, in 1972, Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a report- er that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics--even people who knew him well, including his wife--could never understand.
Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon Valley's lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the f same breath the invention of the e microchip and the Whole Earth e Catalog, a 1960s counterculture e publication.
t Coming on the scene just as - computing began to move beyond the walls of research labod raories and corporations in the 1970s, Jobs saw that computing - was becoming personal--that it r could do more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and a business problems--and that it - could even be a force for social e and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers , were boxy wooden affairs with t metal chassis, he designed the y Apple II as a sleek, low-slung - plastic package intended for the e den or the kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital - lifestyle.
s He put much stock in the notion of “taste“, a word he used e frequently. It was a sensibility - that shone in products that f looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he , said, were a triumph of taste, of - “trying to expose yourself to the g best things humans have done l and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing“.
t Regis McKenna, a long-time t Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Jobs turned in the d late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Jobs' genius lay in o his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to f strip away the excess layers of - business, design and innovation e until only the simple, elegant reality remained“.
, Jobs' own research and introduction, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market - research went into the iPad, he n said: “None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want.“ d . Early interests e Steven Paul Jobs was born in n San Francisco on 24 February e 1955 and put up for adoption by f his biological parents, Joanne n Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah n Jandali, a graduate student from e Syria who became a political science professor. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.
d Paul Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before re- n turning to his original trade as a l machinist, moved his family - down the San Francisco Peninsue la to Mountain View and then to t Los Altos in the 1960s.
e Jobs developed an early inter- est in electronics. He was mandatory by a neighbour, an elec- o tronics hobbyist, who built s Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics projects. He was brash from d an early age. As an eighth-grader, e after discovering that a crucial l part was missing from a frequen- e cy counter he was assembling, he - telephoned William Hewlett, the e co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.
n Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.
t Coming on the scene just as - computing began to move beyond the walls of research labod raories and corporations in the 1970s, Jobs saw that computing - was becoming personal--that it r could do more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and a business problems--and that it - could even be a force for social e and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers , were boxy wooden affairs with t metal chassis, he designed the y Apple II as a sleek, low-slung - plastic package intended for the e den or the kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital - lifestyle.
s He put much stock in the notion of “taste“, a word he used e frequently. It was a sensibility - that shone in products that f looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he , said, were a triumph of taste, of - “trying to expose yourself to the g best things humans have done l and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing“.
t Regis McKenna, a long-time t Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Jobs turned in the d late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Jobs' genius lay in o his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to f strip away the excess layers of - business, design and innovation e until only the simple, elegant reality remained“.
, Jobs' own research and introduction, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market - research went into the iPad, he n said: “None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want.“ d . Early interests e Steven Paul Jobs was born in n San Francisco on 24 February e 1955 and put up for adoption by f his biological parents, Joanne n Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah n Jandali, a graduate student from e Syria who became a political science professor. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.
d Paul Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before re- n turning to his original trade as a l machinist, moved his family - down the San Francisco Peninsue la to Mountain View and then to t Los Altos in the 1960s.
e Jobs developed an early inter- est in electronics. He was mandatory by a neighbour, an elec- o tronics hobbyist, who built s Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics projects. He was brash from d an early age. As an eighth-grader, e after discovering that a crucial l part was missing from a frequen- e cy counter he was assembling, he - telephoned William Hewlett, the e co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.
n Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.
Jobs met Wozniak while at- tending Homestead High School in neighbouring Cupertino. The two took an introductory elec- tronics class there.
The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Wozniak's mother. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of Cal- ifornia, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine.
The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box“, by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobby- ist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illic- itly exploring the nation's phone system.
The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box“, by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobby- ist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illic- itly exploring the nation's phone system.
Wozniak shared the article with Jobs, and the two set out to track down an elusive figure identified in the article as Cap- tain Crunch. The man had taken the name from his discovery that a whistle that came in boxes of Cap`n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possi- ble to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whis- tle next to a phone handset.
Captain Crunch was John Draper, a former air force elec- tronic technician, and finding him took several weeks. Learning that the two young hobbyists were searching for him, Draper appeared one day in Wozniak's Berkeley dormitory room. Jobs, who was still in high school, had travelled to Berkeley for the meeting. When Draper arrived, he entered the room saying sim- ply, “It is I!“ Based on information they gleaned from Draper, Wozniak and Jobs later collaborated on building and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely used for making free--and illegal--phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort.
After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Jobs left after one semes- ter, but remained in Portland for another 18 months auditing clas- ses. In a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005, he said he had decided to leave college as it was consuming all of his par- ents' savings.
He returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job there as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. Still search- ing for his calling, he left after several months and travelled to India with a college friend,Daniel Kottke, who would later become an early Apple employee. Jobs re- turned to Atari that autumn. In 1975, he and Wozniak, then working as an engineer at HP, be- gan attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Cen- ter in California. Personal com- puting had been pioneered at re- search laboratories adjacent to Stanford, and it was spreading to the outside world.
“What I remember is how in- tense he looked,“ said Lee Felsenstein, a computer designer who was a Homebrew member.
“He was everywhere, and he seemed to be trying to hear ev- erything people had to say.“
“He was everywhere, and he seemed to be trying to hear ev- erything people had to say.“
Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Home- brew. It was Jobs who had the in- spiration that it could be a com- mercial product.
In early 1976, he and Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel execu- tive, A.C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000. Wozniak would be the technical half and Jobs the marketing half of the original Ap- ple I Computer. Starting out in the Jobs family garage in Los Al- tos, they moved the company to a small office in Cupertino short- ly thereafter.
In April 1977, Jobs and Wozni- ak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensa- tion. Faced with a gaggle of small and large competitors in the emerging computer market, Ap- ple, with its Apple II, had figured out a way to straddle the busi- ness and consumer markets by building a computer that could be customized for specific appli- cations.
Sales skyrocketed, from $2 mil- lion in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.
The Apple III, introduced in May 1980, was intended to domi- nate the desktop computer mar- ket. IBM would not introduce its original personal computer until 1981. But the Apple III had a host of technical problems, and Jobs shifted his focus to a new and ul- timately short-lived project, an office workstation computer code-named Lisa.
An apocalyptic moment By then Jobs had made his much-chronicled 1979 visit to Xerox research centre in Palo Alto, where he saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer system that foreshadowed mod- ern desktop computing. The Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of the first com- puters to employ a graphical vid- eo display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the met- aphor of an office desktop.
An apocalyptic moment By then Jobs had made his much-chronicled 1979 visit to Xerox research centre in Palo Alto, where he saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer system that foreshadowed mod- ern desktop computing. The Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of the first com- puters to employ a graphical vid- eo display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the met- aphor of an office desktop.
“It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments,“ Jobs said of his visit in a 1995 oral history interview for the Smithsonian In- stitution. “I remember within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't re- quire tremendous intellect. It was so clear.“
In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple engineers pursu- ing a separate project, a lower- cost system code-named Macin- tosh. The machine was intro- duced in January 1984 and trum- peted during the Super Bowl tel- ecast by a 60-second commer- cial, directed by Ridley Scott, that linked IBM, by then the domi- nant PC maker, with Orwell's Big Brother.
A year earlier Jobs had lured Sculley to Apple to be its chief ex- ecutive. A former PepsiCo. presi- dent, Sculley was impressed by Jobs' pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?“ He went on to help Jobs intro- duce a number of new computer models, including an advanced version of the Apple II and later the Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers. Through them Jobs popularized the graphical user interface, which, based on a mouse pointing device, would become the standard way to con- trol computers.
But when the Lisa failed com- mercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued, and Jobs lost control of the Lisa proj- ect. The board ultimately stripped him of his operational role, taking control of the Lisa project away from, and 1,200 Ap- ple employees were laid off. He left Apple in 1985.
“I don't wear the right kind of pants to run this company,“ he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left, accord- ing to a member of the original Macintosh development team.
He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans.
He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans.
That September he announced a new venture, NeXT Inc. The aim was to build a workstation computer for the higher-educa- tion market. The next year, Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot invest- ed $20 million in the effort. But it did not achieve Jobs' goals.
Jobs also established a person- al philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple, but soon had a change of heart, deciding instead to spend much of his for- tune--$10 million--on acquiring Pixar.
The purchase was a significant gamble; there was little market at the time for computer-animated movies. But that changed in 1995, when the company, with Walt Disney Pictures, released Toy Story. That film's box-office receipts ultimately reached $362 million, and when Pixar went public in a record-breaking offer- ing, Jobs emerged a billionaire.
In 2006, the Walt Disney Co.
agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. The sale made Jobs Dis- ney's largest single shareholder, with about 7% of the company's stock.
In 2006, the Walt Disney Co.
agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. The sale made Jobs Dis- ney's largest single shareholder, with about 7% of the company's stock.
His personal life also became more public.
He had a number of well-pub- licized romantic relationships, including one with the folk singer Joan Baez, before marrying Lau- rene Powell. In 1996, a sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, threw a spotlight on her relationship with Jobs in the novel A Regular Guy.
The two did not meet until they were adults. The novel centred on a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bore a close resemblance to Jobs. It was not an entirely flat- tering portrait. Jobs said about a quarter of it was accurate.
The two did not meet until they were adults. The novel centred on a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bore a close resemblance to Jobs. It was not an entirely flat- tering portrait. Jobs said about a quarter of it was accurate.
His wife and Simpson survive him, as do his three children with Powell, his daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed; another daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relation- ship with Chrisann Brennan; and another sister, Patti Jobs.
Return to Apple Beginning in 1993, Jobs refo- cused NeXT from the education to the business market and dropped the hardware part of the company, deciding to sell just an operating system. Although NeXT never became a significant computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young program- mer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics re- search center CERN in 1990.
Return to Apple Beginning in 1993, Jobs refo- cused NeXT from the education to the business market and dropped the hardware part of the company, deciding to sell just an operating system. Although NeXT never became a significant computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young program- mer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics re- search center CERN in 1990.
In 1996, after unsuccessful ef- forts to develop next-generation operating systems, Apple, with Gilbert Amelio now in com- mand, acquired NeXT for $430 million. The next year, Jobs re- turned to Apple as an adviser. He became CEO again in 2000.
Shortly after returning, Jobs publicly ended Apple's long feud with its archival Microsoft, which agreed to continue developing its Office software for the Macintosh and invested $150 million in Ap- ple.
Once in control of Apple again, Jobs set out to reshape the con- sumer electronics industry. He pushed the company into the digital music business, introduc- ing first iTunes and then the iPod MP3 player. The music arm grew rapidly, reaching almost 50% of the firm's revenue by June 2008.
In 2005, Jobs announced that he would end Apple's business relationship with IBM and Moto- rola and build Macintosh com- puters based on Intel microproc- essors.
By then his fight with cancer was publicly known. Apple had announced in 2004 that Jobs had a rare but curable form of pan- creatic cancer and that he had undergone successful surgery.
Four years later, questions about his health returned when he ap- peared at a company event look- ing gaunt. Afterwards, he said he had suffered from a “common bug“. Privately, he said his can- cer surgery had created digestive problems but insisted they were not life-threatening.
Four years later, questions about his health returned when he ap- peared at a company event look- ing gaunt. Afterwards, he said he had suffered from a “common bug“. Privately, he said his can- cer surgery had created digestive problems but insisted they were not life-threatening.
Apple began selling the iPhone in June 2007. Jobs' goal was to sell 10 million of them in 2008, equivalent to 1% of the global cellphone market. The company sold 11.6 million.
As the gravity of his illness be- came known, and particularly af- ter he announced he was step- ping down, he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, mi- croelectronic components, in- dustrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.
If he had a motto, it may have come from the Whole Earth Cat- alog, which he said had deeply influenced him as a young man.
The book, he said in his com- mencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with the admoni- tion “Stay hungry, stay foolish.“
“I have always wished that for myself,“ he said.The book, he said in his com- mencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with the admoni- tion “Stay hungry, stay foolish.“
(Source-:mintlive.com)
