Steve Jobs

Biografia de Steve Jobs

Que puedo decir Steve Jobs es una de las personas que mas admiro junto claro con Stive Wozniak y por eso me parece buena idea poner la biografía de Stive Jobs que fue la que encontré de una forma mas fácil por haci decirlo, y también por que recuerdo q el semestre pasado o bueno en tercer semestre en la Uni. haci me decian Stive Jobs, jejeje

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco. He was an orphan and was adopted by a local couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, who lived south of the Bay Area, in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

Steve discovered the world of electronics at age 11 with his friend Bill Fernandez. A few years later, Bill would introduce him to one of his other friends who was 5 years older and had already distinguished himself as an electronics wiz kid, Steve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz.

During his late teens, Steve would become more friendly with Woz, as he would persuade him to sell his so-called blue boxes, small pieces of hardware that could be used to make international calls for free.

As he entered college, Steve realized higher education would not give him what he expected from life. So after six months, he dropped out and started to immerse himself in the studies of Eastern mysticism. It was not until his 19th birthday that he got his first job at video-game manufacturer Atari.

The people at Atari agreed to fund Steve’s spiritual journey to India. He left for a full month with his best friend Dan Kottke looking for enlightenment but came back pretty disappointed.

After his return from India, Steve renewed his interest in electronics as he discovered the amazing work his friend Woz had achieved to complete: the design of a very compact personal computer. He had done so thanks to his talents and the skills he had got from the Homebrew Computer Club, a local computer enthusiasts group. Once again, Steve seized the potential of selling the computer his friend had built to other hobbyists. It was the official birth of Apple Computer, on April 1, 1976.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in 1976 (behind an Apple I)

Apple’s first sales came from a local retail computer store, the Byte shop. The owner of the shop bought 50 Apples, each for $500. The first computers were assembled in the garage of Steve’s parents in Los Altos, with a few friends willing to give a hand.
After Apple made its first public appearance at the Personal Computer Festival in Atlantic City, Steve Jobs understood the importance of the company’s image. He turned to PR adviser Regis McKenna to promote the fledging company. With the help of McKenna, he also got his first investor ever in the person of Mike Markkula. Markkula was a former Intel executive who had become a millionaire, and who was stunned by Woz’s prototype for a new computer, the Apple II.

The Apple II was introduced a year later at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977. It was the debut of what would become one of the most successful story in American business. Woz’s new design was a real breakthrough thanks to its compactness and performances, and as soon as a disk drive became available for the Apple II, it became an instant success. thousands of programmers started to write software for it and it quickly turned into the symbol of the personal computing revolution. What was left of the competition vanished when VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program ever, was released in late 1979 and ran only on Apple’s system.

... ... Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula in 1977 Steve in his first suite (1977)

After the success of Apple II, Steve started working on the next great project for the Cupertino-based company: Lisa. This computer’s main features were the mouse and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) - the metaphor of the desktop with windows, folders, point-&-click and cut-&-paste. They had all been invented at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), a very advanced research lab located on the Stanford campus. The heads of Xerox on the East Coast believed the personal computer that the scientists at the PARC had developed had no future. Steve was convinced of the opposite: he urged Apple’s own R&D department to dedicate all the company’s efforts to the creation of a GUI for Lisa.

However his tough managerial style and tensions with Apple’s President Mike Scott led to his exclusion from the Lisa project. Steve was named Chairman of the Board instead. He used this prominent position to promote Apple’s image in the national media before Apple went public on December 12, 1980. On that day, Steve’s value jumped from $7.5 million to $217.5 million. He became the youngest self-made centimillionaire in America and started to be known to the general public.

... ... Steve with the Apple II in '79 On the cover of Time in Feb. '82

However this is not the way he had envisioned his life. He wanted to be involved in the development of Apple’s future products and to do so, he took over a small R&D project called Macintosh. The project, instigated by Apple employee #31 Jef Raskin, called for a $300 dollar computer “as easy to use as a toaster”. Steve liked the idea of simplicity but he insisted that Macintosh become a smaller and cheaper Lisa, along with all its breakthrough graphical features. Raskin was evicted from the program, which quickly evolved into Steve’s very own pet project.

The small group of people who formed the Mac team was a bunch of iconoclastic yet brilliant engineers with a spirit of rebellion that Steve encouraged to prevent the division from being contaminated by Apple’s bureaucracy. They saw themselves as “Pirates”, and called the rest of the company “the Navy”.

Steve and the Mac team, with their pirate flag hanging on the wall

When, in 1981, IBM released its own personal computer -the IBM PC-, Apple had to face competition from what was at the time the most trusted name in technology, especially among corporate America. Eventhough the PC was inferior to the Apple II in all respects, the logo it sported was sufficient to make Apple II sales start to erode.

The company then released the Apple III and the Lisa, both of which turned out to be failures. The Lisa, despite its revolutionary GUI, failed because it was way too costly for businesses, with an original price tag of $10,000. So all of the company’s hopes were turned to Steve and his renegade Mac team.

Macintosh was finally introduced in great fanfare on January 24, 1984. It brought maximum media exposure to Steve and the former Pepsi executive he had appointed as Apple’s new CEO the year before, John Sculley.

... ... The first issue of Macworld Steve Jobs with John Sculley in 1984

But despite this hype and the technological breakthroughs it featured, sales of Macintosh were disappointing. It was a little too slow, and almost no software useful to businesses could run on it. In fact, it only encountered success on US campuses, where it quickly became a cult icon. The disillusionment with Macintosh were the start of increasing tensions between Steve and CEO John Sculley, which final outcome was the removal of Steve from the Mac & Lisa divisions.

Steve had become an unappreciated pariah at Apple. He was moved to a remote office which he dubbed Siberia. So he decided to leave and found a new company. The success of Macintosh on campus and talks he had had with many Ivy League hotshots had convinced him to create a computer aimed exclusively at the higher education market. to do so, he took with him five people from the former Macintosh team and created NeXT Computer, Inc.

When John Sculley and the Apple board saw the list of NeXT’s founders, they decided to sue the little startup. This was a legal nightmare for tiny NeXT but it showed that it had a huge potential of development: how could a multi-billion dollar business be afraid of just 6 people?

This was the beginning of the myth of NeXT. The company was enormously attractive for young talents and Steve’s fame and chutzpah was a lure for the best people in Silicon Valley. Steve aimed at building a perfect company: he rented first-class offices on Stanford campus and spent $100,000 for a logo design from renowned Yale professor Paul Rand. Then, in 1986, NeXT got his first major investment from Texan billionaire Ross Perot, who valued the company at $100 million, while it had yet to release a single product! But such was the aura of Steve Jobs. Because of the very strict secrecy policy, everybody wondered what the wunderkind was up to.

... ... Steve Jobs and Ross Perot in 1987 The Paul-Rand logo

They got an answer some two years earlier when, on October 12, 1988, the NeXT Cube was finally released. It was strikingly elegant and featured revolutionary features like a magneto-optical drive and a DSP (digital signal processor), yet it was way too expensive for the average education buyer. Universities had asked for a $3,000 computer, and the Cube cost $6,500! Such a high price was due to Steve’s drive for perfection, and his will to build his computer in an all-automated state-of-the-art factory a few miles from NeXT’s own headquarters.

... ... Steve Jobs unveils the NeXT Cube on October 12, 1988 The NeXT Cube on the cover of Byte magazine

The sales of NeXT Cubes were extremely low, and Steve decided to change the company’s strategy. He extended sales to non-educational market with a partnership with computer retailer Businessland and started work on a new machine, the NeXT Station. The NeXT Station was a huge improvement over the Cube as it was much more compact and especially a lot cheaper: it sold for $5,000 (with the monochrome display). It was released in September 1990.

However the hopes brought by the NeXT Station as well a new retail strategy via boutique dealers and the extension to European and Japanese markets quickly turned out to be illusional. NeXT kept on losing money, more than ever. In 1993, Steve was forced to abandon NeXT’s hardware operations to concentrate solely on the company’s true gem, the breakthrough object-oriented software that ran on its computers, NeXTSTEP. It was terrible news for him because he loved to design and manufacture beautiful boxes. In addition, 4 of the 5 NeXT cofounders had abandoned him, and he had been betrayed by a COO he had personally designated as his successor, just like he had been 8 years earlier by John Sculley at Apple. It was the nadir of his career. He started to fade out of public life and rarely showed up at NeXT, spending time with his newborn son and young wife Laurene Powell (whom he had married on March 18, 1991).

... ... The NeXT Station Laurene Powell-Jobs

However an investment he had made almost a decade earlier was soon to get him out of his morass. In 1986, he had bought the computer division of George Lucas’ Industrial Lights & Magic for $10 million, and had incorporated it as Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar was made of a small group of brilliant refugees from academia, lead by engineers Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith and former Disney animator John Lasseter, who believed in the dream of computer animation. Its only product was the Pixar Image computer, a $135,000 graphic workstation that could run its cutting-edge animation software Renderman. Way too expensive, this computer didn’t sell well, but Pixar managed to get money from making TV commercials. However, what really prevented Steve from shutting down Pixar was its nomination at the Academy awards in 1986 for Best animated short film with Luxo Jr. (the little lamp eventually became Pixar’s logo) and its 1989 Oscar for Tin Toy.

In 1991, Steve signed in the name of Pixar a deal with Disney for creating a computer-animated feature film, that would later become Toy Story. He did not realize how important this movie would be for his career until 4 years later when, in January 1995, he saw all the preparation around the marketing of the movie. That’s when he decided what would turn out to be one of his best career move, to take Pixar public. He expected the media hype and Hollywood glamour to play a huge role in the IPO’s success, so he planned it for November 29, 1995, a couple of weeks after the Thanksgiving release of Toy Story. It worked even better than expected: after 30 minutes of trading, Steve Jobs’ $420 million worth of Pixar shares were valued at $1.5 billion. Steve was back in business.

... ... Toy Story Steve sitting under Pixar's symbol, Luxo Jr.

It just so happens, Apple Computer was at its lowest point in history at the time. Although it had lived off the revenues from Macintosh sales, which remained the only GUI computer for years, it was now facing competition from an ever-bigger adversary: Microsoft. A little software company that had written programs for the Mac, Microsoft had become a billion-dollar corporation by selling the IBM-compatible operating system MS-DOS to PC cloners. “Inspired” by the Mac OS, it had then started to sell a GUI-facade to DOS, Windows. But in 1995, with the release of Windows 95, the first combination of DOS and Windows, it became the PC industry’s only standard. Apple’s marketshare was down to around 5%.

Apple’s CEO, Amelio, was desperately looking for a way to save the company. One of his projects was to release an object-oriented OS to compete with Windows NT. His original plan was to buy BeOS, a system manufactured by a little software company, Be, that had been created by former Apple France president Jean-Louis Gassée. But on December 20, 1996, he unveiled that Apple had eventually chosen to buy NeXT Software Inc. instead, and had welcomed back his founder to the company as “informal adviser”.

Gil Amelio and Steve Jobs on December 20, 1996

After two consecutive disastrous quarters for Amelio however, the informal adviser managed to overthrow Amelio and become Apple’s interim CEO. Steve purged the Board of Directors and started to take drastic measures. He canceled dozens of R&D projects and made spending cuts wherever he could. On August 6, 1997, at MacWorld Boston, he also unveiled an unprecedented partnership with industry mogul Bill Gates, who invested $150 million in Apple and promised to release all future versions of Office on the Mac platform. After this series of measures, Steve announced in early 1998 that Apple had, for the first time in years, achieved profitability.

The biggest coup Steve would achieve was yet to come: on May 6, 1998, he unveiled the iMac, a colorful and elegant all-in-one computer whose design boldness evoked that of the original Macintosh. The iMac was a stunning success, and Apple was once again regarded as the industry’s most innovative company. It even become a design cult object after it was declined in 5 colors seven months later.

Steve’s leadership of Apple had proven efficient and on January 5, 2000, he took over as Apple’s CEO.

... ... Steve Jobs and the iMac Taking over on January 5, 2000

In 2001, Apple made two major announcements that would play a major role in its upcoming history. On March 24, it released Mac OS X 10.0, the first version of its next-generation operating system. Mac OS X was built on the bases of NeXTSTEP and thus enjoys a very solid UNIX foundation. In addition, it features a revolutionary user interface called Aqua. Then, on October 23, 2001, Apple unveiled iPod.

... ... Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah"

The development of Mac OS X using NeXT’s software technology allowed Apple to write new applications for its own platform, the so-called iApps. they were built to let people organize and share their digital iLife, according to Apple’s digital hub strategy. This concept was elaborated in 1998: it claimed that after the two great ages of personal computing: the productivity era in the 80s and the Internet era in the 90s, the 2000s would be the years of a third era - that of the digital lifestyle. People would use their new digital devices like digital cameras, camcorders and music players, and plug them in to a central hub, the digital hub, i.e. the computer. To help people take full advantage of these devices, Apple created iMovie (to edit movies), iDVD (to burn DVDs), iPhoto (to organize photos) and iTunes (to... wait a minute, you don’t know iTunes?)

Nevertheless, what Steve had not anticipated was the burst of digital music, with the Napster phenomenon. He thought the next big thing was going to be desktop video editing. When he realized he had been wrong, he launched an ad campaign “Rip. Mix. Burn” to promote its music software iTunes and started work on the iPod.

When the cigarette-box-sized white MP3 player was released, it was an instant success. It was so successful that Apple made it available for PCs in 2002. Then, in April 2003, Steve introduced the iTunes Music Store. This online music store, the first to be supported by all five major music labels, allowed you to buy thousands of songs in digital format at the standard price point of $0.99 (and albums for $9.99). Six months after its introduction, the iTunes store was so successful that it was considered the only legal alternative to online music piracy. So the labels agreed to let Apple make it available to the Windows world. Since then, iPod and iTunes have become the uncontested symbols of the digital music revolution and both enjoy a marketshare that’s above 75%.

... ... Steve Jobs and the original iPod Steve with the video iPod some 4 years later

Apple is now the leader of legal music downloading and portable music players, and considered the computer industry’s main innovator thanks to its awe-inspiring personal computers and the world’s most advanced operating system, Mac OS X.

But what about Pixar? Well, when the end of the 5-picture deal it had with Disney started to get closer, Steve, strong of the tremendous success of his movies A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, came to re-negotiate the contract. However the tensions between him and Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner put an end to the negotiations in 2004. Pixar, which was about to release The Incredibles, went officially looking for another partner.

But in 2005, Michael Eisner was replaced by Bob Iger as the head of the Walt Disney Corporation. The new boss of the Magic Kingdom started talks with Steve to let him sell Disney-owned ABC’s TV shows on thee iTunes video store (which opened in October 2005). This appeasement would lead to a surprise announcement on January 24, 2006: Disney bought Pixar Animation Studios and made Steve Jobs its single largest shareholder, as well as a member of his Board of Directors.

Steve Jobs shakes hands with Disney CEO Bob Iger

Steve Jobs had managed his way back to the top. He had faced terrible difficulties: he had been humiliated, betrayed by his closest collaborators, and had even faced death when, in 2004, he had to endure surgery to cure him from a very rare form of pancreatic cancer (the common form would have killed him in a few months). Yet he is now regarded as one of the most prominent figure in technology, the visionary leader of iconic Apple and a key player of entertainment colossus Disney.

And the story continues as on January 9, 2007, Steve introduced the iPhone, Apple's state-of-the-art mobile phone. With now the iPod and its accessories, the Apple TV (that lets you enjour your digital media on your TV), and the iPhone, it is clear that Apple is not a mere computer company anymore (but has it ever been?) — hence the dropping of the "Computer" in its official name, announced by Steve on that same day. As Apple Computer Inc. becomes Apple Inc., yet another passionating page of Steve Jobs' career is about to be written...

Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone at Macworld 2007

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Si alguien quiere leer la biografia larga o ver alguna otra cosa mas sobre Stive Jobs aqui les dejo la liga de la web. http://www.romain-moisescot.com/steve/home/home.html