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INTRODUCTION
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INTRODUCTION Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs was an American entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor, who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields, transforming "one industry after another, from computers and smartphones to music and movies".Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. He also played a role in introducing the LaserWriter, one of the first widely available laser printers, to the market. After a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off as Pixar. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He served as CEO and majority shareholder until Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006. In 1996, after Apple had failed to deliver its operating system, Copland, Gil Amelio turned to NeXT Computer, and the NeXTSTEP platform became the foundation for the Mac OS X. Jobs returned to Apple as an advisor, and took control of the company as an interim CEO. Jobs brought Apple from near bankruptcy to profitability by 1998. As the new CEO of the company, Jobs oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and on the services side, the company's Apple Retail Stores, iTunes
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Store and the App Store. The success of these products and services provided several years of stable financial returns, and propelled Apple to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company in 2011. The reinvigoration of the company is regarded by many commentators as one of the greatest turnarounds in business history. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreas neuroendocrine tumor. Though it was initially treated, he reported a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and appeared progressively thinner as his health declined. On medical leave for most of 2011, Jobs resigned in August that year, and was elected Chairman of the Board. He died of respiratory arrest related to his tumor on October 5, 2011. Jobs received a number of honors and public recognition for his influence in the technology and music industries. He has been referred to as "legendary", a "futurist" or simply "visionary", and has been described as the "Father of the Digital Revolution", a "master of innovation", "the master evangelist of the digital age" and a "design perfectionist".
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OBJECTIVES
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OBJECTIVES To study the professional life of Steve Jobs. To study the history of Apple incorporation. To study the enterprenuere qualities of Steve Jobs. To study how Apple manage to became no. one brand in the world under the leadership of Steve Jobs. To study how Steve Jobs leadership qualities bring APPLE back from it’s deathbed.
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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY In everyday life human being has to face many problems viz. social, economical, financial problems. These problems in life call for acceptable and effective solutions and for this purpose, research is required and a methodology applied for the solutions can be found out.
Research was carried out on Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Incorporation.
DATA COLLECTION: Secondary Data: Data was collected from books, magazines, web sites, going through the records of the organisation, etc. It is the data which has been collected by individual or someone else for the purpose of other than those of our particular research study. Or in other words we can say that secondary data is the data used previously for the analysis and the results are undertaken for the next process.
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REVIEW OF LITERATUR
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THE LIFE OF STEVE JOBS Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24 th , 1955, to two unmarried graduate students who decided to give him up for adoption. During his high school years, he spent his free time at HewlettPackard in Silicon Valley California, where he met a fellow computer fan—Steve Wozniak (known as Woz). After graduating from high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. However, soon after, he stopped going to the classes he was enrolled in and started attending the classes he found interesting and he officially dropped out after one semester. He spent the next 18 months attending classes he found interesting, such as calligraphy, which influenced the way he later designed typefaces and space between fonts for the Mac. After dropping out he worked for Atari, Inc. for some time. In 1976, at the age of 21, together with Wozniak he founded Apple Computers in his parents’ garage in Los Altos, California. For the next nine years, Apple grew and Jobs and Wozniak invented different computers that changed the face of the computer industry—Apple I, Apple II (known as one of the first personal computers—PC—in the world) and the Macintosh (named after the McIntosh apple and intentionally misspelled).In 1985 Jobs was forced out of the company, after a power struggle with Apple’s CEO at the time—John Sculley. He then founded another computer company called NeXT, bought the then failing Pixar Studios (named The Graphics Group at the time), which under his management became one of the leading animation studios in the world. The next chapter in Jobs’s life started in 1996, when Apple was un-profitable and was facing possible bankruptcy. Apple decided to buy Jobs’s company NeXT, and brought him back as interim chief-executive (iCEO). In 2000 Jobs became the company’s permanent CEO. In the years that followed Apple not only got back on track, but also became one of the most profitable companies in the world.
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Jobs led Apple to success by focusing the company on a few core products (desktop computers and laptops) asopposed to many different ones and by creating groundbreaking products like the MacBook Air. Apple prided itself in its sleek, elegant and easy to use computers like the iMac, MacBook and MacBook Air. The creation of new digital devices such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, made Apple a house-hold name around the world. In 2003 Jobs discovered he had pancreatic cancer. After a struggle of eight years, he passed away on October 5,2011. His death was mourned by many around the world, and major TV networks in the United States and across the world interrupted scheduled programming to broadcast the news.
Several
key figures,
including the President of
the United States
Barack
Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Microsoft founder Bill Gates commented on his death. Many Apple enthusiasts and Jobs’s fans gathered in Apple stores around the world to pay their respects to Jobs. Below we explore the complex dynamic in which Steve Jobs enacted distance and proximity from Apple customers and wider audiences, in an attempt to uncover one of the processes that contributed to the strong bond that developed between Steve Jobs and Apple clients/fans.
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Apple Computer
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Apple Computer In 1976, Wozniak single-handedly invented the Apple I computer. After Wozniak showed it to Jobs, who suggested that they sell it, they and Ronald Wayne formed Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs's parents in order to sell it. Wayne stayed only a short time leaving Jobs and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company. They received funding from a then-semiretired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula. In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from PepsiCola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa. One year later, Apple employee Jef Raskin invented the Macintosh. The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial titled "1984". At Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as "pandemonium" . While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees from that time described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. Disappointing sales caused a deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley, which devolved into a power struggle
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between the two. Jobs kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7:00 am. Sculley learned that Jobs—who believed Sculley to be "bad for Apple" and the wrong person to lead the company—had been attempting to organize a boardroom coup, and on May 24, 1985, called a board meeting to resolve the matter. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley and removed Jobs from his managerial duties as head of the Macintosh division. With no duties and exiled from the rest of the company to an otherwise-empty building, Jobs stopped coming to work. After unsuccessfully applying to fly on the Space Shuttle as a civilian astronaut, and briefly considering starting a computer company in the Soviet Union, he resigned from Apple five months later. In a speech Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, he said being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him; "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." And he added, "I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it."
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NeXT Computer
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NeXT Computer Jobs founded NeXT Inc. in 1985 after his resignation with $7 million. A year later he was running out of money, and with no product on the horizon, he sought venture capital. Eventually, Jobs attracted the attention of billionaire Ross Perot who invested heavily in the company. NeXT workstations were first released in 1990, priced at $9,999. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive by the educational sector for which it was designed. The NeXT workstation was known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the financial, scientific, and academic community, highlighting its innovative, experimental new technologies, such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer at CERN. The revised, second-generation NeXTcube was released in 1990, also. Jobs touted it as the first "interpersonal" computer that would replace the personal computer. With its innovative NeXTMail multimedia email system, NeXTcube could share voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time. "Interpersonal computing is going to revolutionize human communications and group work", Jobs told reporters. Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the development of and attention to NeXTcube's magnesium case. This put considerable strain on NeXT's hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel. The company reported its first profit of $1.03 million in 1994. In 1996, NeXT Software, Inc. released WebObjects, a framework for Web application
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development. After NeXT was acquired by Apple Inc. in 1997, WebObjects was used to build and run the Apple Store, MobileMe services, and the iTunes Store.
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Pixar and Disney
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Pixar and Disney In 1986, Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for the price of $10 million, $5 million of which was given to the company as capital. The first film produced by the partnership, Toy Story (1995), with Jobs credited as executive producer, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released. Over the next 15 years, under Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter, the company produced box-office hits A Bug's Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding Nemo (2003); The Incredibles (2004); Cars(2006); Ratatouille (2007); WALL-E (2008); Up (2009); and Toy Story 3 (2010). Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3 each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001. In the years 2003 and 2004, as Pixar's contract with Disney was running out, Jobs and Disney chief executive Michael Eisner tried but failed to negotiate a new partnership, and in early 2004, Jobs announced that Pixar would seek a new partner to distribute its films after its contract with Disney expired. In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to mend relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. When the deal closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder with approximately seven percent of the company's stock. Jobs's holdings in Disney far exceeded those of Eisner, who holds 1.7 percent, and of Disney family member Roy E. Disney, who until his 2009 death held about one percent of the company's stock and whose criticisms of Eisner – especially that he
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soured Disney's relationship with Pixar – accelerated Eisner's ousting. Upon completion of the merger, Jobs received 7% of Disney shares, and joined the Board of Directors as the largest individual shareholder. Upon Jobs's death his shares in Disney were transferred to the Steven P. Jobs Trust led by Laurene Jobs.
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Return to Apple
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Return to Apple
In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for $427 million. The deal was finalized in late 1996, bringing Jobs back to the company he co-founded. Jobs became de facto chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997. He was formally named interim chief executive in September. In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs terminated a number of projects, such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company." Jobs also changed the licensing program for Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making machines. With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple products, most notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs's guidance, the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new products; since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the "interim" modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO. Jobs quipped at the time that he would be using the title "iCEO".
The company subsequently branched out, introducing and improving upon other digital appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music
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software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and music distribution. On June 29, 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touchdisplay cell phone, which also included the features of an iPod and, with its own mobile browser, revolutionized the mobile browsing scene. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminded his employees that "real artists ship". Jobs was both admired and criticized for his consummate skill at persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the "reality distortion field" and was particularly evident during his keynote speeches (colloquially known as "Stevenotes") at Macworld Expos and at Apple Worldwide Developers Conferences. In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of Apple's poor recycling programs fore-waste in the US by lashing out at environmental and other advocates at Apple's Annual Meeting in Cupertino in April. A few weeks later, Apple announced it would take back iPods for free at its retail stores. The Computer Take Back Campaign responded by flying a banner from a plane over the Stanford University graduation at which Jobs was the commencement speaker. The banner read "Steve, don't be a mini-player—recycle all e-waste". In 2006, he further expanded Apple's recycling programs to any US customer who buys a new Mac. This program includes shipping and "environmentally friendly disposal" of their old systems.
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Resignation In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, but remained with the company as chairman of the company's board. Hours after the announcement, Apple Inc. (AAPL) shares dropped five percent in after-hours trading. This relatively small drop, when considering the importance of Jobs to Apple, was associated with the fact that his health had been in the news for several years, and he had been on medical leave since January 2011. It was believed, according to Forbes, that the impact would be felt in a negative way beyond Apple, including at The Walt Disney Company where Jobs served as director. In after-hours trading on the day of the announcement, Walt Disney Co. (DIS) shares dropped 1.5 percent.[113]
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DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRATATION
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Innovations and designs Jobs's design aesthetic was influenced by the modernist architectural style of Joseph Eichler, and the industrial designs of Braun's Dieter Rams. His design sense was also greatly influenced by the Buddhism which he experienced in India while on a seven-month spiritual journey. His sense of intuition was also influenced by the spiritual people with whom he studied. According to Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak, "Steve didn't ever code. He wasn't an engineer and he didn't do any original design..." Daniel Kottke, one of Apple's earliest employees and a college friend of Jobs', stated that "Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person." He is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 346 United States patents or patent applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages. Jobs's contributions to most of his patents were to "the look and feel of the product". His industrial design chief Jonathan Ive had his name along with him for 200 of the patents. Most of these are design patents (specific product designs; for example, Jobs listed as primary inventor in patents for both original and lampstyle iMacs, as well as PowerBook G4 Titanium) as opposed to utility patents (inventions). He has 43 issued US patents on inventions. The patent on the Mac OS X Dock user interface with "magnification" feature was issued the day before he died. Although Jobs had little involvement in the engineering and technical side of the original Apple computers, Jobs later used his CEO position to directly involve himself with product design.
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Even while terminally ill in the hospital, Jobs sketched new devices that would hold the iPad in a hospital bed. He also despised the oxygen monitor on his finger and suggested ways to revise the design for simplicity.
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The Macintosh Computer The Macintosh was introduced in January 1984. The computer had no "Mac" name on the front, but rather just the Apple logo. Apple co-founder and former Apple engineer, Steve Wozniak, has said that the Macintosh failed under Steve Jobs, and that it wasn't until Jobs left that it became a success.
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The NeXT Computer After Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, he started a company that built workstation computers. The NeXT Computer was introduced in 1989. Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first web browser on the NeXT Computer. The NeXT Computer was the basis for today'sMacintosh OS X and iPhone operating system (iOS).
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iMac Apple iMac was introduced in 1998 and its innovative design was directly the result of Jobs's return to Apple. Apple boasted "the back of our computer looks better than the front of anyone else's". Described as "cartoonlike", the first iMac, clad in Bondi Blue plastic, was unlike any personal computer that came before. In 1999, Apple introduced the Graphite gray Apple iMac and since has varied the shape, colour and size considerably while maintaining the all-in-one design. Design ideas were intended to create a connection with the user such as the handle and a breathing light effect when the computer went to sleep. The Apple iMac sold for $1,299 at that time. There were some technical revolutions for iMac too. The USB ports being the only device inputs on the iMac. So the iMac's success helped popularize the interface among third party peripheral makers, which is evidenced by the fact that many early USB peripherals were made of translucent plastic to match the iMac design.
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iPod The first generation of iPod was released October 23, 2001. The major innovation of the iPod was its small size achieved by using a 1.8" hard drive compared to the 2.5" drives common to players at that time. The capacity of the first generation iPod ranged from 5G to 10 Gigabytes. The iPod sold for US$399 and more than 100,000 iPods were sold before the end of 2001. The introduction of the iPod resulted in Apple becoming a major player in the music industry. Also, the iPod's success prepared the way for the iTunes music store and the iPhone. After the 1st generation of iPod, Apple released the hard drive-based iPod classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, video-capable iPod Nano, screenless iPod Shuffle in the following years.
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iPhone Apple began work on the first iPhone in 2005 and the first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. The iPhone created such a sensation that a survey indicated six out of ten Americans were aware of its release. Time magazine declared it "Invention of the Year" for 2007. The Apple iPhone is a small device with multimedia capabilities and functions as a quad-band touch screen smartphone. A year later, the iPhone 3G was released in July 2008 with three key features: support for GPS, 3G data and tri-band UMTS/HSDPA. In June 2009, the iPhone 3GS, added voice control, a better camera, and a faster processor was introduced by Phil Schiller. iPhone 4 was thinner than previous models, had a five megapixel camera which can record videos in 720p HD, and added a secondary front facing camera for video calls. A major feature of the iPhone 4S, introduced in October 2011, was Siri, which is a virtual assistant that is capable of voice recognition.
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ipad The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., which runs Apple's iOS. The first iPad was released on April 3, 2010; An iPad can shoot video, take photos, play music, and perform Internet functions such as web-browsing and emailing. Other functions—games, reference, GPS navigation, social networking, etc.—can be enabled by downloading and installing apps. As of June 2013, the App Store has more than 900,000 apps by Apple and third parties. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said in a 1983 speech that Apple's, ...strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes ... And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything and you’re in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.
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Management style Jobs was a demanding perfectionist who always aspired to position his businesses and their products at the forefront of the information technology industry by foreseeing and setting trends, at least in innovation and style. He summed up that self-concept at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007, by quoting ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will. Ever a stickler for quality, Jobs once famously quoted: Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Steve Jobs announcing the transition to Intel processors in 2005. Much was made of Jobs's aggressive and demanding personality. Fortune wrote that he was "considered one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs".Commentaries on his
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temperamental style can be found in Michael Moritz's The Little Kingdom, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman; and iCon: Steve Jobs, by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon. In 1993, Jobs made Fortune's list of America's Toughest Bosses in regard to his leadership of NeXT. NeXT Cofounder Dan'l Lewin was quoted in Fortune as saying of that period, "The highs were unbelievable ... But the lows were unimaginable", to which Jobs's office replied that his personality had changed since then. Apple CEO Tim Cook noted, "More so than any person I ever met in my life, [Jobs] had the ability to change his mind, much more so than anyone I’ve ever met... Maybe the most underappreciated thing about Steve was that he had the courage to change his mind." In 2005, Jobs banned all books published by John Wiley & Sons from Apple Stores in response to their publishing an unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs. In its 2010 annual earnings report, Wiley said it had "closed a deal ... to make its titles available for the iPad." Jef Raskin, a former colleague, once said that Jobs "would have made an excellent king of France", alluding to Jobs's compelling and larger-than-life persona. Floyd Norman said that at Pixar, Jobs was a "mature, mellow individual" and never interfered with the creative process of the filmmakers. Jobs had a public war of words with Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, starting in 1987 when Jobs first criticized Dell for making "un-innovative beige boxes". On October 6, 1997, in a Gartner Symposium, when Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he ran thentroubled Apple Computer, he said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." In 2006, Jobs sent an email to all employees when Apple's market capitalization rose above Dell's. The email read:
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Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.
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Findings His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. Steve and the Apple design team have created a lot more than computers. The iPod has made a huge impact on the developed world. The iPod is created by something Apple calls ―Generations‖. The iPod first generation was the first iPod ever made they have created more than 10 versions of the iPod, even a morph of a phone and an iPod. In 1984, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and others co-invented the Apple Macintosh computer, the first successful home computer with a mouse-driven graphical user. Steve jobs is one of the most influential business personality of this era. He used to love his products like his own kids. He was the firm beliver that he going to change the world and he did it.
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CONCLUSSION
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Conclusion So here’s where we are today. Apple, on the verge of bankruptcy a decade ago, is now one of the most powerful and influential high-tech company in the world. It is the most innovative brand in the computer industry, a leader in the music and phone businesses, and a likely consumer electronics powerhouse for decades to come. As for Pixar, it is the single most successful movie studio in the history of Hollywood, having yet to release a dud after more than twenty years of existence. It has defined the future of animation and is now at the center of this industry after it s merger with Disney. The founder of both these companies, Steve Jobs is now routinely voted one of the world’s most important business leaders, after having been called a one-time fluke for years. Now that we have followed together the most important events in Steve’s life — especially his career of course — it is time to step back and try and look at the big picture.
I am going to get personal here: it is hard for me to put into words how much admiration and huge respect I have for Steve Jobs, and how much inspiration I draw from him. Let’s face it, business history has seen many another genius entrepreneur, inspirational leader, or industry visionary. But among them, who has had as big an impact as Steve Jobs on the rest of humanity? Who has faced greater glory and worse shames, all in one life? Here we are talking about a man who has dedicated his life to giving the power of technology to the masses. He has democratized computers with the Apple II. He has made them human and even friendly with Macintosh. He has almost single-handedly made possible the desktop publishing revolution. Here is a man whose company, Apple, is so innovative its products inspire the whole high-tech world, whose corporate culture is so powerful, it has millions of fans worldwide whose following is akin to
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that of a cult. Here is a man who has changed the way we all listen to music with iPod, who has shaken the music business with iTunes and the phone business with iPhone. Here is a man without whom 3D animation might have never taken off, or certainly would not have taken off the way it did thanks to Pixar. Here is a man who has made millions of lives so much easier by making technology seamless, intuitive, exciting and beautiful, instead of complicated, arcane, dull and ugly.
The question remains open to me: which business figure can claim so many achievements? Whose influence has been greater? That’s why I struggled for so long to find appropriate words to summarize the essence of Steve Jobs, a genius, but also a man, an icon with flaws, full of paradoxes, a visionary who has sometimes proven dead wrong. I thought hard — until I realized Steve himself had found these words. So let me conclude with the voice from Apple’s Think Different commercial: Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
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