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Steve Jobs
BornFebruary 24, 1955
San Francisco, CA
Occupation(s)CEO of Apple Computer
Board member of Disney

Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the CEO of Apple Computer and is a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. In 1976 he co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Jobs helped popularize the concept of the home computer with the Apple II, and was one of the first to see the commercial potential of the GUI and mouse. He oversaw the integration of these technologies into the Apple Macintosh. He also led Apple Computer through its recent iPod-powered resurgence.

Jobs has also been, since its inception, the Chairman and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, an independent film production company that has produced acclaimed animated shorts and features such as The Incredibles and Toy Story. The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock, a deal expected to close by the summer of 2006. The transaction will make Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder and will give him a seat on the company's board of directors.

Early years

Steve Jobs was born to Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian political science professor, and an American mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, in San Francisco, California on February 24, 1955. One week after birth, Jobs was put up for adoption by his unmarried mother. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California. They gave him the name Steven Paul Jobs. His biological parents later married and gave birth to Jobs' sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, whom Jobs did not meet until they were adults. The marriage of his biological parents ended in divorce years later. Jobs dislikes hearing the "adoptive parents" appelation applied to Paul and Clara Jobs and refers to them as his only parents.

Jobs attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Co. in Palo Alto, California. Soon, he was hired there and worked with Stephen Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but he dropped out after one semester. Years later, when speaking at a Stanford University graduation ceremony in 2005, Jobs said he remained at Reed attending classes, including one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the "Homebrew Computer Club" with Steve Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During this time, it was discovered that a slightly modified toy whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 Hz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed free long distance calls.

Jobs then went on his expedition to India. He returned with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. He also returned to his previous job at Atari, and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 to each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design, and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $500 (rather than $5000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $250.

Beginnings of Apple Computer

See also History of Apple Computer.
File:Originalapplelogo.jpg
The original Apple logo featuring Isaac Newton under the fabled apple tree.

On April 1, 1976, Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak, 26, founded Apple Computer Co. to market a computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use. Initially their plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, but when a local computer store ordered a batch of complete, assembled computers, they went into the computer business. The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced was called the Apple I. It sold for $666.66, in reference to the phone number of Wozniak's Dial-a-Joke machine, which ended in -6666. In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II, which became a huge success in the home market and made Apple an important player in the nascent personal computer industry. In December 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded corporation, and with the successful IPO, Jobs's stature rose further. That same year, Apple Computer released the Apple III, but it met much less success.

As Apple continued to grow, the company began looking for corporate management talent to help manage its expansion. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley, an executive with Pepsi-Cola, to serve as Apple's CEO, challenging him, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" That same year, Apple also released the technologically advanced but commercially unsuccessful Lisa.

1984 saw the introduction of the Macintosh, the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface. The development of the Mac was started by Jef Raskin, and the team was inspired by technology that had been developed at Xerox PARC, but not yet commercialized. Apple had paid a fee for use of the PARC technology. The success of the Macintosh led Apple to abandon the Apple II in favor of the Mac product line, which continues to this day.

Departure from Apple, creation of NeXT

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic evangelist for Apple, critics also claimed he was an erratic and tempestuous manager. In 1985, after an internal power struggle, Jobs was stripped of his duties by the board of directors and resigned from Apple. Jobs still remained chairman of Apple Computer at that time.

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like Apple's Lisa computer, the NeXT workstation (one of NeXT Computer's first products) was technologically advanced, but it never was able to break into the mainstream because of its high cost. Among those who could afford it, it did, however, garner a strong following due to its technical strengths, chief among them being its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products toward the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel, the DSP chip, and the built-in Ethernet port).

The NeXT Cube was described by Jobs as an "interpersonal" computer, which he believed was the next step after "personal" computing. That is, if computers could allow people to communicate and collaborate together in an easy way, it would solve a lot of the problems that "personal" computing had come up against. Jobs had been criticized for not including built-in networking features on the original Macintosh (calling it an "umbilical cord to the company"), and he was determined not to repeat the mistake. During a time when e-mail for most people was plain text, Jobs loved to demo the NeXT's e-mail system, NeXTMail, as an example of his "interpersonal" philosophy. NeXTMail was one of the first to support universally visible, clickable embedded graphics and audio within e-mail.

Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for perfection at any cost. This eye for detail ultimately destroyed NeXT's hardware division, but, on the other hand, it also showed the world that Jobs could design a Macintosh that was arguably better than the original. The NeXT Cube's magnesium case has popularly been cited as an example of the quest for perfection-at-any-cost.

Just as Jobs railed against IBM at Apple, Jobs railed against Sun Microsystems as the big opponent while at NeXT. Later, after NeXT's hardware division was dropped in 1993 having sold only 50,000 machines, Jobs and Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy introduced OPENSTEP together.

While Jobs' stint at NeXT is often glossed over in history books, the contributions of NeXT's engineers incidentally led to two unrelated events:

  1. The World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee developed the original World Wide Web system at CERN on a NeXT workstation. Jobs' insistence that average people should be able to write custom "mission-critical" applications formed the basis of Interface Builder, which Berners-Lee utilized to do just that — write a program entitled "WorldWideWeb 1.0".
  2. The Return of Apple Computer. Apple's reliance on ancient software and internal mismanagement, particularly its inability to release a major operating system upgrade, had brought it near bankruptcy in the mid 1990s. Jobs' progressive stance on Unix underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s, but his choice ultimately became an expandable, solid foundation for an operating system. Apple would later acquire this software and, under Jobs' leadership, experience a renaissance.

NeXT's technologies also helped the advancement of technologies such as object-oriented programming, Display PostScript, and magneto-optical devices.

Return to Apple

In 1997, Apple bought NeXT for $402 million, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded. In 1997 he became Apple's interim CEO after the directors lost confidence in and ousted then-CEO Gil Amelio. Upon returning to the leadership of Apple, Jobs used the title of "iCEO". In March of 1998, in order to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs immediately 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 Steve's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims is enough to terrorize a whole company." [1]

With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple products, notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs' guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac. Since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple.

In recent years, the company has branched out. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, the iTunes Music Store, the company is making forays into personal electronics and online music. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminds his employees that "real artists ship," by which he means that delivering working products on time is as important as innovation and killer design.

Jobs worked at Apple for several years with an annual salary of $1, and this earned him a listing in Guinness World Records as the "Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer". At the 2000 keynote speech of Macworld Expo in San Francisco, the company dropped the "interim" from his title. His current salary at Apple officially remains $1 per year, although he has traditionally been the recipient of a number of lucrative "executive gifts" from the board, including a $90 million jet in 1999, and just under 30 million shares of restricted stock in 2000-2002. As such, Jobs is well compensated for his efforts at Apple despite the nominal one-dollar salary.

Jobs is both admired and criticized for his consummate skills of persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the "reality distortion field" and is particularly evident during his keynote speeches at Macworld Expos. This "RDF" shield is an encapsulating term, also referring to Apple's sometimes non-competitive market pricing, such as the overly expensive G4 cube, or making decisions outside the desire of market demands, and also the elimination of Macintosh clones. Not all of his decisions have met with widespread approval. Apple's marketing efforts, for example, in the 1980s, while excellent from a technical standpoint, were alienating to corporate buyers. Corporate buyers consequently turned to IBM, resulting in a precipitous drop in market share. Microsoft further diminished Apple's lead by later developing its own GUI, Microsoft Windows, which eventually eclipsed and dominated over Apple's share.

In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of Apple's poor recycling programs for electronic waste (or e-waste) in the U.S. by lashing out at environmental and other advocates at Apple's Annual Meeting in Cupertino in April. When asked by a representative of a socially responsible investment fund why Apple's programs lagged behind Dell's and HP's, Jobs wound up his critic by calling the advocates' complaints "bullshit". However, a few weeks later, Apple announced it would take back iPods for free at its retail stores. The Computer TakeBack Campaign responded by flying a banner from a plane over the Stanford University graduation at which Jobs was the keynote speaker. The banner read "Steve - Don't be a mini-player recycle all e-waste."

Pixar and Disney

In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics division from George Lucas for $10 million and named the new computer animation studio Pixar.[1] Jobs's new company, which was based in Emeryville, California, contracted with Disney to produce a number of computer-animated feature films, which Disney would co-finance and distribute.

The first film produced by that partnership, Toy Story, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released in 1995. Over the next ten years, under Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter, the company would produce the box-office hits A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004). Finding Nemo and The Incredibles each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award only first introduced in 2001.

Wikinews has related news:

In the years 2003 to 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 once its contract with Disney expired. Personal animosity between the two executives was largely blamed for the companies' failure to renew their partnership.

In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to patch up relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that their two companies would merge. Disney agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. Once the deal, which must still clear anti-trust regulators, closes, Jobs will become an important figure at the Walt Disney Company. He will not only be the largest single shareholder in Disney with approximately 7 percent of the company's stock, but will also have a seat on Disney's board of directors. Jobs' new Disney holdings will outpace those belonging to Eisner, who holds 1.7 percent, and Disney Director Emeritus Roy E. Disney, whose criticisms of Eisner included the soured Pixar relationship and accelerated his ouster, who holds about 1% of the corporation's shares.

Jobs will also help oversee Disney and Pixar's combined animation businesses with a seat on a special six-man steering committee. Many also expect Jobs to become a valuable advisor to Iger and Disney on technology matters.

Pixar's next film, Cars, will be released in June 2006.

For more information, see Pixar. Also: http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2006/jan/25disney.htm

Personal life

Jobs married Laurene Powell, nine years his junior, on March 18 1991 and has three children with her. He also has a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with Chris Brennan, a woman he did not marry. In The Second Coming of Steve Jobs author Alan Deutschman reports that Jobs once dated Joan Baez. Deutschman quotes Elizabeth Holmes, a friend of Jobs from his time at Reed College, as saying she "believed that Steve became the lover of Joan Baez in large measure because Baez had been the lover of (Bob) Dylan."

In iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon, the authors suggest that Jobs might have married Baez if not for the fact that her age at the time (41) could have cancelled out the possibility of having children. Baez and Jobs presumably remain friends, as evidenced by her mention of him in the acknowledgements of her 1987 memoir And A Voice To Sing With.

Jobs is a pescetarian (not a vegetarian or vegan as is often claimed) — although he does not eat mammalian meat, he reportedly eats fish from time to time.

In 1982, Jobs bought an apartment in The San Remo, where Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, daughter of Rita Hayworth, also had an apartment. It was a New York apartment building with a politically progressive reputation. With the help of I.M. Pei, Jobs spent years renovating his apartment in the top two floors of the building's north tower, only to sell it almost two decades later to U2 frontman Bono. Jobs had never moved in.

In 1984, Jobs purchased a 17,000 square foot, 14 bedroom, Spanish Colonial mansion, designed by George Washington Smith in Woodside, California. Although Jobs lived in the mansion for ten years, reportedly in an almost unfurnished state, and let Bill Clinton use it in 1998 while his daughter was studying nearby, the mansion was allowed to fall into a state of disrepair. Planning to demolish the house and build a smaller home on the property, he met complaints from local preservationists over his plans. In June 2004, the Woodside Town Council gave Jobs approval to demolish the mansion, on the condition that he advertise the property for a year to see if someone would move it to another location and restore it. A number of people showed interest, including attorney Richard Pivnicka, who has experience restoring old property [2].

On July 31, 2004, Jobs underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. He had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer, which is far less aggressive than the usual form of pancreatic cancer, and is known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. It did not require chemotherapy or radiation therapy. During his absence, Timothy D. Cook (AKA Tim Cook), head of worldwide sales and operations at Apple, ran the company.

In 2005, Steve Jobs banned all books published by John Wiley & Sons from the Apple retail stores in response to their publishing an unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey Young and William L. Simon.

In an interview in the book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, Steve Jobs talks about how taking LSD was "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life". Wishing to surround himself with people of a similar mindset, he would often ask interviewees how many times they have taken LSD.

Controversy

The aggressive and demanding personality of Steve Jobs has been much talked and written about in a number of unauthorized biographies, such as The Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz, Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward by Jeffrey S. Young, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman and iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon.

In iCon: Steve Jobs the authors point out that Paul Jobs, his father by adoption, was also known for his aggressive side: "Paul was soon hired as a kind of strongarm man by a finance company that sought help collecting on auto loans—an early repo man. Both his bulk and his aggressive personality were well suited to this somewhat dangerous pursuit, and his mechanical bent enabled him to pick the locks of the cars he had to repossess and hot-wire them if necessary."

In the documentary Triumph of the Nerds, reaction to Jobs' famous firing from Apple Computer by CEO John Sculley and the Apple Board of Directors was talked about by various people:

  • Chris Espinosa: "The grandiose plans of what Macintosh was gonna be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing. And the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible, it was salvageable. But the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something, and that somebody was John Sculley."
  • John Sculley: "The board had to make a choice and I said look, it's Steve's company, I was brought in here to help. If you want him to run it, that's fine by me. But we gotta at least decide what we're gonna do and everybody's got to get behind it ... and ultimately after the board talked with Steve and talked with me, the decision was that we would go forward with my plans and Steve left."
  • Steve Jobs: "What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for; starting with me, but that wasn't the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I wanted it to."
  • Larry Tesler: "People in the company had very mixed feelings about it, everyone had been terrorized by Steve Jobs at some point or another, and so there was a certain relief that the terrorist would be gone. And on the other hand I think there was incredible respect for Steve Jobs by the very same people, and we were all very worried what would happen to this company without the visionary, without the founder, without the charisma."
  • Andy Hertzfeld: "He took it as a personal attack, started attacking Sculley, in which, you know, backed himself into a corner. Because he was sure that the board would support him and not Sculley ... Apple never recovered from losing Steve; Steve was the heart and soul and driving force; it would be quite a different place today; they lost their soul."

Trivia

  • Steve Jobs is usually seen wearing a black non-collar sweat shirt at keynote conferences and magazine covers

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The once and future Steve Jobs
  2. ^ friends of the jackling house

References

  • Young, Jeffrey S. and William L. Simon (2005). iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, Wiley, Trade Cloth
  • Hertzfeld, Andy. (2004). Revolution in The Valley. O'Reilly, Sebastopol, CA. ISBN 0596007191
  • Kahney, Leander. (2004).The Cult of Mac. No Starch Press, Inc., San Francisco, CA. ISBN 1886411832
  • Deutschman, Alan (2001). The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Broadway. ISBN 0767904338.
  • Freiberger, Paul; & Swaine, Michael (1999). Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer McGraw-Hill Trade. ISBN 0071358927.
  • Malone, Michael S. (1999) Infinite Loop ISBN 1854106384 (Aurum Press Ltd, London), ISBN 0385486847 (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group)
  • Cringely, Robert X (1996). Accidental Empires. HarperBusiness. ISBN 0887308554.
  • Levy, Steven. (1994). Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, Penguin Books, New York, NY. ISBN 0670852449.
  • Stross, Randall E. (1993) Steve Jobs and The NeXT Big Thing, Atheneum Books, NY. ISBN 0689121350.
  • Denning, Peter J. and Karen A. Frenkel. A Conversation with Steve Jobs, Comm. ACM, Vol. 32 (1989), No. 4, pp. 437-443.
  • Young, Jeffrey S. (1988). Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward, Scott, Foresman and Co., Glenview IL.
  • Slater, Robert. (1987). Portraits in Silicon, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, Chapter 28.
  • Caddes, Carolyn. (1986). Portraits of Success: Impressions of Silicon Valley Pioneers, Tioga Publishing Co., Palo Alto CA.
  • Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, NY. ISBN 0385191952.
  • Markoff, John. (2005). What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, Viking Adult, New York, NY. ISBN 0670033820.
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Preceded by Apple CEO
1997–present 		Succeeded by
Incumbent
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