The Man Behind Apple
Steve Jobs, one of the greatest inventors to ever live, was born in San Francisco on February 24th, 1955, and died on October 5th, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 56, just 68 days after he resigned as CEO of Apple.
Steve Jobs really fascinates me because he created the first iPhone and that really set the road for how we use technology today.
What is it about the iPhone, do you think, that has given it an almost sole proprietorship on phone technology for more than a decade?
If we look previous to the upsurge of the iPhone, it becomes noticeably understandable that the range of options for personal phone designs was vast, but then the iPhone took over the tech industry and skyrocketed in popularity over the years. But what is it about Jobs that allowed him to dominate in tech like this? And how come these days, either you have an Android or an iPhone? Who has a Motorola anymore, or a Siemens phone? Did you know that in the USA over 60% of all cell phone users are iPhone users? That is an insane market share, close to a monopoly.
As a fellow Californian, and also sharing the fact of being born in San Francisco, I personally admire Jobs.
Steve Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs and as a young boy, showed interest in electronics and technology. During college, Jobs met another guy that was also into computers as much as him named Steve Wozniak in 1971. SJ and SW’s very first partnership started later on after SW read an article called “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” (Esquire Magazine). This inspired SW to create his own blue box(s) which later allowed them to create long-distance phone calls at no cost because back then, they only had phone booths that you had to pay a few cents to use. Even Jobs said that if it had not been for Wozniak’s blue boxes, “there wouldn’t have been an Apple”.
Though he was in high school, and Jobs was in college they became great friends. Jobs dropped out of Reed College to pursue a career of computing.
Apple, founded in 1977 in his garage, was a very exciting company, the excitement coming from Jobs himself. He was, as Tim Barajin writes, “the visionary and spiritual leader” of the company, but those board members who were monitoring his leadership style had some fears that he did not have the maturity or stability needed, and they offered him a reduced role. Now, I know you are thinking, didn’t Jobs create Apple? How could he be treated this way?
When Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985, the future was unknown, and he later talked about that as being unsettling yet exciting.
After Jobs left, Apple took a lot of the credit for the computer market with the LaserWriter computer printer, and PageMaker or Adobe Systems. But Apple’s profits crashed after the introduction of IBM clones when PC computers began offering similar functions with a lower price.
After Jobs resigned from Apple he started a new tech company called NeXT that had only a little bit of success in the tech industry. Jobs, still immature as a leader, would yell at top executives in front of everybody, which led to NeXT’s unsuccessfulness.
However, during Job’s “NeXT period” he matured. And when he returned to Apple in 1997, he was a better leader than before, for having matured, and he was more modest and more fit to lead the $1,000,000,000 company that at the time, was in trouble and close to being bankrupt.
Jobs’ retaking his company is one of the greatest comeback stories in American business history. Just look at these numbers. In 1997, Apple Inc was losing $1.04 billion, due to the IBM clones; a year later he balanced the books and even turned a profit of over $300 million. How did Jobs do this?
After, Jobs had Apple start back from base one and only sell four products (two computers and two portable devices). Additionaly, Apple does had not tracked all their expense in a traditional way, an idea Jobs provided in 1997.
At his 2005 commencement at Stanford University, Jobs talked about how Reed college is almost expensive as Stanford. And how he later then dropped out. “The heaviness of success was being replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,” in reference to his time after being let go from Apple. Less sure about everything he entered the most creative period of his life.
As we go through life with our cell phones always in our pockets, or in front of us, or stuck to the dashboard of the car for mapping, one wonders how life could be navigable without these tools. Therefore, it makes sense to look into the years before this tool was introduced, to see how the human heart hungered for such a portable device. Let me give you a bit of a guided tour on the evolution of the portable phone.
If you want to look at the very first portable phone, then you would have to concede that almost 100 years ago, the German railways figured out a way to make calls from the rails: in 1926, the first mobile telephone service was given to first-class passengers on the Deutsche Reichsbahn going between Berlin and Hamburg. But for our modern sense, we can track back to the beginning of this century: in 2000, the Nokia 3310 was introduced.
It went on to sell 126 million units. In Japan, the first commercially available camera phone, the Sharp J-SH04, was put in motion in November 2000, in Japan.
But you could only use it in Japan. Europe would not get its first ever camera phone until the appearance of the Nokia 6750 in 2002. In 2003, the 3G standard began to be implemented around the world. Honk Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa owned Three brand, offered the first 3G network connection in the UK among other countries.
Three also released a trio of 3G handsets, namely: the Motorola A830, the NEC e606 and the NEC e808. In 2007, Steve Jobs made history when he revealed Apple’s first iPhone to the world. Not only did it have the best features that could possibly be put inside the hardware, but the iPhone completely revolutionized the meaning of what a mobile phone could be.
What made the iPhone special was what all other phones in the past didn’t have, which was many functions and features all in one device.
In 2011, Forbes magazine named Apple “the most valuable company in the world.” On October 5th of that year, Jobs died.