Steve Jobs: How a Dreamer Changed the World
We are delivering today the iPad, the new on the iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air, iTunes. The Revolutionary.He was one of the most creative and daring CEOs. A global icon who shaped the world of technology and media for over 30 years. Computers, music, movies and mobile phones were transformed by Apple's Steve Jobs. He was a brilliant visionary. Few executives in history suffered such painful setbacks.
It looks like jobs were was washed up and was a total Has-Been or enjoyed as much success. Steve came back and began what I think is the greatest turnaround in the history of corporate America.
A very remarkable man, extremely smart, spellbinding, mesmerizing leader of people.
Jobs went from having nearly blown this amazing fortune and bankrupted himself to rising as a billionaire with a brilliant future.
Steve Jobs was a true son of Silicon Valley, born in 1955 in San Francisco. He was raised in its freewheeling culture of experimentation and innovation.
Alan Deutschman is an author who has written extensively about Jobs and Apple.
Steve Jobs, from going back to when he was a teenager, was very influenced by the 1960s, 1970s counterculture. He loved the Beatles. He loved Bob Dylan.
He enrolled in Oregon's Reed College but dropped out to travel.
After just one semester, Robert X. Cringely was Apple Computer employee number twelve. I met him. He was, I think, 19 years old. He had hair down to his waist and he only a fruit. And he was clearly a hippie. When Jobs returned to his childhood home in California, she became interested in what was then an entirely new concept. The personal computer.
He joined meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with a man who would become his partner in founding Apple Computer. Steve was NIAC.
People were getting up. These computers are going to revolutionize life. And I felt like, oh my God, I'm a part of this huge revolution that we're talking about. Everybody's gonna have a computer in the home and nobody in the outside world believes us. Projects that I would design and build very frequently. Steve would say he knew how to sell it.
Jobs and was NIAC took time off their day jobs to set up shop in the family garage in Los Altos.
We didn't have a telephone to phone the computer stores in the garage that was in Steve's bedroom.
The team's first computer, the Apple one. As the tech industry in Silicon Valley took off, jobs saw an opportunity.
The penalty for failure for going and trying to start a company in this valley is nonexistent. There really isn't a penalty for failure either psychologically or economically, in the sense that if you have a good idea and you guys go out to start your own company, even if you fail, you're generally considered worth more to the company you left because you've gained all this valuable experience and many disciplines to bring their ideas to life.
The Apple team needed capital jobs, convinced angel investor Mike Marcoola to invest around $90000 and a line of credit in the fledgling company. It was exactly what they needed to create their new computer, Apple too.
What was revolutionary about the Apple 2 was its use of color. The fact that had a built-in keyboard and it was the first one to look like a consumer device. And so it was a huge success. You know, it was an astounding success right from the beginning.
Steve came to me one day and he said, you realize our stock is worth more than our parents have made in their lifetime. I was stunned. What the heck? How can you have so much? And then six months later, you have ten times more.
They were the stars of Silicon Valley and the cover Boys for a New Industry.
Michael Moritz is a former Time magazine reporter and a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
There's always that sense of anxiety and tension associated with the question, how can we possibly follow this?
In 1979, in a stock deal reportedly worth $1 million, Steve Jobs was allowed access to Xerox PARC, the company's famed research and development laboratory jobs.
And his team saw the future here the way computers would be used, including the use of graphics and a small device that had not yet been revealed to the outside world. A mouse.
You'd see two programs at once, and I was stunned. Let's see three programs at once. Oh, my gosh. Once you have this machine, you're never going to want to go back. It's a one-way door. Computers are going to be this way. You'll never go back.
Leander Kahney is the editor of the blog Cult of Mac and the author of the book Inside Steve's Brain.
Xerox had invented the entire paradigm of modern computing, but they had no idea what they were sitting on.
But Jobs did. He wanted to bring the graphical user interface to Apple Computer. But first, he had to deal with a power shift going on inside Apple. The Apple board of directors wanted an experienced executive to be president of the company.
Jobs interview dozens of candidates before he focused on someone from outside the tech world. Pepsi CEO John Sculley.
Steve, in those days he had long black hair and very piercing palmetto berry eyes looked down at his running shoes. And then he looked up at me and he said, 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? And it was like someone just knocked the wind out of my stomach.
A few weeks later, I was working at Apple.
For Apple Computer to thrive, they also needed another successful product. Jobs thought he had it in a powerful business computer called the Lisa, but the Apple board of directors refused to give him the project.
Jobs threw himself into another project.
The Macintosh, he felt this would break open the market or rather to characterize Steve's brain properly, or rather, the market ought to break open.
If the market had any sense, he set up shop in an outline building in the Apple complex, and his intense drive began to take its toll on the Mac team.
People would bring his work to look at. It would be at one o'clock in the morning. Sometimes Steve's said, I'm not going to look at it. Neville Steve, I've worked on this thing for twenty-five hours. He said, I know, but it's not good enough. You know, go back and work on it some more.
Some of them just wound up just quitting in disgust. Some of them wound up saying they'd never work for Steve again. They just couldn't.
When the exhausted team finished, they had a revolutionary new computer.
Many of us have been working on Macintosh for over two years now, and it has turned out insanely great.
Guy Kawasaki was the software evangelist on the original Mac.
Like 60 seconds after I saw the demo of Macintosh. It was so cool. Angel started to sing and it was a beautiful experience.
This was supposed to be the computer that tamed the complexity of everything associated with the world of computing.
To make it available to Steve would say for me, Immortals with his intuitive marketing sense. Jobs unveiled the Mac with a spellbinding commercial aimed at IBM. The leader in computers.
It aired nationally only once on Super Bowl Sunday in January of 1984. But the impact was explosive.
We estimated we got 45 million dollars of free publicity of it being run over and over again by television networks all over the world because no one had ever seen a commercial like this before.
But the excitement surrounding the Mac launch didn't translate into sales and jobs. Is standing at Apple became a big question.
He ran amuck at Apple. He cost the company a lot of money. So Steve was considered to be wasteful. He was considered to be self-indulgent. He was the largest shareholder, but also kind of a brat. The thinking was, well, Macintosh had not penetrated business.
We need a more mature leadership, some adult supervision to run the company.
By nineteen eighty-five, tension at Apple rose as an internal power struggle threatened to tear the company apart.
I said, Steve, we're a public company and I have to tell the board where we are in terms of inventory, in terms of sales performance, and we're in trouble.
When it reached the point where he identified Sculley as a rival, he decided he had to take Sculley out. And much to Steve's surprise, the board sided with Sculley.
The knee jerk reaction of conventional people is to elbow what they see as disruptive forces side. And Steve, the co-founder of Apple, was on chivalrous sleep, ushered to the exit, being fired, almost destroyed, and they threw him out of his own company.
I mean, he thought it was unbelievable.
Jobs quickly regrouped, taking five top managers to start a computer company called Next.
There were all kinds of ideas. And it turns out that he wanted to go back and once again create the most insanely great computer, something that would help change the world.
Very modest ambitions.
The company struggled to find a market for its expensive new computer jobs, faced a tough choice to abandon the computer or face bankruptcy. It was a big deal.
When they realized that very few people were buying their hardware, but it turned out that their software was just breathtaking.
The decision ditched the highly designed computer and focus instead on selling what makes it run. The company's elegant operating system.
I think that the period during which he wandered in the wilderness was a period full of adversity.
And I think people come back from adversity. If they can return from adversity, they come back hard to sharp and far more geared for battle.
In a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Steve Jobs revealed for the first time some personal details about his early life.
My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student and she decided to put me up for adoption. My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start of my life.
He was raised by parents who adopted him. They were blue-collar, salt of the earth people. They were good parents. And but they weren't intellectuals. Later in life, he discovered that his biological parents were intellectuals and his biological sister. She turned out to be a brilliant novelist, Mona Simpson.
In 1991, at age 36, jobs started his own family. When he married Laurene Powell, they had three children in addition to his daughter from a previous relationship. Jobs called these years after Apple, his most creative and personally fulfilling his professional life was also changing dramatically.
Right after his ouster from Apple, Jobs bought a company from Lucasfilms that would become a household name.
This little animation company called Pixar, he hired John Lasseter, an animator from Disney.
Their goal was to create fully computer-animated feature films. And Hollywood was interested.
Pixar made a deal with Disney to work together to make Toy Story.
I actually made the deal with them at the time he came into the movie business. His instincts were impeccable, put his money up, his own personal money.
He was on the line in 1995. Jobs investment in Pixar was about to pay off in a big way.
I am Buzz Lightyear. I come in peace. Oh, I'm so glad you're not in Toy Story.
Pixar's first feature film was a blockbuster and became 1995's highest-grossing U.S. movie.
Pixar really created probably the most successful genre in the movie business today, which is CGI animation.
When Pixar went public, Steve Jobs became a billionaire.
It had been more than ten years since Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple, and the drama in turmoil at the company continued to get worse after Steve left the company.
It lost its compass, lost its mission. It lost its founding spirit. Its products got old and stale.
And during that whole period, Microsoft called gotten stronger and stronger.
Computers running windows accounted for nearly 80 percent of the market. Apple's market share could not break 11 percent. And their ousted co-founder was sitting on an operating system that could save them.
So they wanted Next's operating system.
In an ironic and stunning turn of events, Apple Computer bought next for over $400 million.
We're gonna be building our next-generation operating system on the next technology selling next to Apple.
That's sheer genius.
Teachers have to say, wow, Steve Jobs returned to the company he helped create and became interim CEO.
And so that began what I think is the greatest turnaround in the history of corporate America.
It was his finest hour. Really? And he hauled asin and brought things back together again around a cohesive vision because he came in as the rainmaker.
He called a big meeting in this big meeting room and he says, you know, what's wrong with this company? And everyone's too scared to answer. No one says anything because the products suck. They've got no sex, no.
The comeback included a remarkable announcement. Bill Gates, who had long been considered Jobs main rival, would invest in Apple Computer.
Microsoft invested a hundred fifty million dollars in Apple to help save the day. That must have been the low point for Apple.
I happen to have a special guest with me today via satellite downlink. And if we could get him up on the stage right now.
Very excited about the new release or building, this is called Mac Office 98.
Once back at Apple, job characteristic flair for marketing came back in full force. Ken Siegle worked with jobs on a breakthrough advertising campaign that defined their new direction.
Here's to the crazy ones. Misfits, the rebels. Troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
Think Different became the line that launched Apple's rebirth.
Steve was aware of every detail. I mean, literally every word, every image.
One of the reasons why I thought the words were so perfect is I think you literally could have hung a sign that said Think different in the garage when ouazzani ACCAN and Jobs created their company. It would have been appropriate then, as it is today.
But the company was still in trouble and needed a hit. It found it in a redesign of the bulky beige box.
There was a kind of a gasp from around the room because keep in mind that no computer had ever looked anything like that. It was transparent. You can see the guts of it looked like it came out the Jepsen's or something.
The iMac was an astounding success.
The thing was the biggest selling computer of all time. Six million units sold. And it really sort of set the stage for Apple's comeback.
If it had been a hit, Apple and Steve Jobs would be history. They gave them enough money and enough momentum to still coming out with other products.
Soon after he saw the future and it was not a personal computer.
This is the best thing I think we've ever done.
In October 2001, jobs unveiled something that even for Apple was groundbreaking. The iPod went from concept to market in about eight months, but the iPod itself was only one part of a much bigger plan. I think the genius of the iPod was iTunes, not iPod. Jobs was going after a music business under siege by piracy and file sharing. Larry Kenz, Will and other music executives were called up to Apple's Cupertino offices to negotiate terms that would define the future of the music industry.
The negotiation was classic Steve Jobs.
He simply said, if I can't sell for 99 cents on my store, I am not selling it. That's it.
No discussion in business, you're used to a lot of given take. That's not apples way apples. The way is they get what they want.
When I tune became available on Windows as well as Macs.
The music industry realized just who had a gold record, a complete monopoly of retail online. Both Apple in the music business has come out ahead because of Apple's entry. But Apple has made a whole lot more money because they're selling hardware for hundreds of dollars and their music business is selling 99-cent products.
Over 350 million iPods have been sold since its release in October of 2001.
The company's product launches became huge events, anticipation and speculation grew to a fever pitch with every new product. Welcome to Macworld.
We went into the holiday quarter with the best lineup of music players on the planet. We believe that the personal computer is undergoing a rapid evolution to be the center of our digital lives and we have never been more excited about this.
Jobs signature approach is known as the reality distortion field, the reality distortion field is where he says and it only costs eighteen hundred dollars and people apply when they get home, they say, Yeah, but the computer that I have now cost nine hundred dollars. Why is it good that it only cost eighteen hundred dollars? And worse still, why did I buy one on the way out? You're not talking about numbers. You're not talking about anything rational. You're talking about emotion in the summer of 2004.
Apple Computer was thriving, but its leader was not.
Jobs revealed in an employee email that he had been diagnosed with what he said was a treatable form of pancreatic cancer.
He wrote that he underwent successful surgery for the deadly disease and expected a full recovery.
In 2007, after a frightening health scare, Steve Jobs was back on stage for one of the most important launches and Apple's history.
It was a product. Apple had been secretly developing for years. He's a revolutionary.
There was so much buzz about that. There was estimated to be worth 400 million dollars. That's all you can read about from October 28th through to January. But there wasn't a goat farmer in Afghanistan that hadn't heard about the iPhone.
It was far more than a phone. This is handheld computing.
A year later, at an iPhone event in June of 2008, jobs were noticeably thinner and frail.
Speculation spread that cancer he was treated for four years earlier had returned.
Jobs jokingly shrugged off the rumors. But after missing his first Macworld since his return, he finally disclosed that his health problems were more complex and announced a medical leave of absence. Day to day operations was turned over to Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, after a liver transplant in September 2009, jobs returned in his trademark outfit to his familiar mark onstage.
So I now have the liver of a mid 20's person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs. And I wouldn't be here without such generosity.
I'm vertical. I'm back at Apple, loving every day of it.
The next year, he revealed yet another extraordinary device with his typically less than a subtle script.
It's phenomenal. Fantastic. The best device I've ever seen. And we like to show it to you today for the first time. And we call it the iPod.
It was another giant success for jobs, but the celebration was short-lived. In January 2011, with Apple surging to all-time highs, Steve Jobs announced his third and final medical leave.
He finally encountered a foe he could not outrun. True to form, Jobs had anticipated this moment at Stanford in 2005 and what some now consider one of the best commencement addresses of all time.
Don't let the noise of other's opinions drowned out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Ever a child of the 60s, he signed off with words from a favorite source.
The Whole Earth Catalog.
Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you all very much.
That song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going.
Steve Jobs died on October 5th, 2011 at his home in Palo Alto. He was 56 at the time of his death. Apple Inc. Was the most valuable company in the world. Crown of creation.
So you could say, what's the big deal?
Anybody could have done the Macintosh. Anybody could be done with the iPhone. Anybody could have built-in seedy robs of the computers. Anybody could have FireWire. Anybody could have done any of this. The reality is, nobody else did it. And so that's the genius of Steve Jobs said they on jail tomorrow.
I think visionary is one of those words that gets abused and particularly in Silicon Valley when anyone wearing spectacles can be called a visionary. Steve is one of the very few people, I think that probably only a handful of people in Silicon Valley since World War 2. Maybe you can count them on the fingers of one hand who deserve that moniker. Steve is one of them.
* This article was originally published here
