Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San
Francisco, California. His unwed biological parents, Joanne Schieble and
Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption. Steve was adopted by Paul and
Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, who moved to the suburban city of
Mountain View a couple of years later.
The Santa Clara county, south of the Bay Area, became known
as Silicon Valley in the early 1950s after the sprouting of a myriad of
semi-conductor companies. As a result, young Steve Jobs grew up in a
neighborhood of engineers working on electronics and other gizmos in their
garages on weekends. This shaped his interest in the field as he grew up. At
age 13, he met one the most important persons in his life: 18-year-old Stephen
Wozniak, an electronics wiz kid, and, like Steve, an incorrigible prankster.
Five years later, when Steve Jobs reached college age, he
told his parents he wanted to enroll in Reed College — an expensive liberal
arts college up in Oregon. Even though the tuition fees were astronomical for
the poor couple, they had promised their son's biological parents he would get
a college education, so they relented. Steve spent only one semester at Reed,
then dropped out, as he was more interested in eastern philosophy, fruitarian
diets, and LSD than in the classes he took. He moved to a hippie commune in
Oregon where his main activity was cultivating apples.
A few months later, Steve returned to California to look for
a job. He was hired at the young video game maker Atari, and used his wages to
make a trip to India with one of his college friends, in order to 'seek
enlightenment'. He came back a little disillusioned and started to take
interest in his friend Woz's new activities.
Woz, whose interest in electronics had grown stronger, was
regularly attending meetings of a group of early computer hobbyists called the
Homebrew Computer Club. They were the real pioneers of personal computing, a
collection of radio jammers, computer professionals and enlightened amateurs
who gathered to show off their latest prowess in building their own personal computer
or writing software. The club started to gain popularity after the Altair 8800
personal computer kit came out in 1975.
The knowledge that Woz gathered at the Homebrew meetings, as
well as his exceptional talent, allowed him to build his own computer board —
simply because he wanted a personal computer for himself. Steve Jobs took
interest, and he quickly understood that his friend's brilliant invention could
be sold to software hobbyists, who wanted to write software without the hassle
of assembling a computer kit. Jobs convinced Wozniak to start a company for
that purpose: Apple Computer was born on April 1, 1976.
The following months were spent assembling boards of Apple I
computers in the Jobses' garage, and selling them to independent computer dealers
in the area. However, Wozniak had started work on a much better computer, the
Apple II — an expandable, much more powerful system that supported color
graphics. Jobs and Wozniak knew deep down it could be hugely successful, and
therefore Jobs started to seek venture capital. He eventually convinced former
Intel executive turned business angel Mike Markkula to invest $250,000 in
Apple, in January 1977. Markkula was a big believer in the personal computing
revolution, and he said to the young founders that, thanks to the Apple II,
their company could be one of the Fortune 500 in less than two years.
Although Markkula was a bit too optimistic about Apple's
growth rate, he was right that the company quickly became an American success
story. Because of its beautiful package, ease of use, and nifty features, the
Apple II crushed most of its competition and its sales made the Apple founders
millionaires. The biggest surge in sales came after the introduction of
VisiCalc, the first commercially successful spreadsheet program: hundreds of
thousands of Americans, whether they be accountants, small business owners, or
just obsessed with money, bought Apple IIs to make calculations at home.
In the wake of Apple's success, its investors decided it was
time to go public. The IPO took place in December 1980, only four years after
the company was started. Steve Jobs's net worth increased to over $200 million,
at age 25.
Apple's success attracted the attention of the computer giant
IBM, which until then was still only selling mainframe computers to large
companies. A crash project was started and in August 1981, the IBM PC entered
the personal computer market. It was the biggest threat yet to Apple, whose
reputation was being put into question after the flop of the Apple III in 1980.
Most hopes rested on a business computer project, called the Lisa.
Steve Jobs was a big believer in the Lisa computer initially.
It was he who came up with the name. Indeed, in 1978, his ex-girlfriend from
high school Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a little girl, who she named Lisa.
Steve denied paternity, although it was ovious to everyone who knew him that he
was the father, given the on-and-off relationship he still had with Chrisann at
the time. Jobs refused to give any money to Chrisann, despite the millions he
had accumulated at Apple. While in denial, he came up with the name Lisa for
the new computer Apple was building.
The following year, a tour of the computer research lab Xerox
PARC made a huge impression on him. The scientists who worked there had
invented a number of breakthrough technologies that would mark the industry for
the coming decades, including the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse,
Ethernet, laser printing and object oriented programming. Jobs became obsessed
with the GUI which was a lot easier to use than the command-line interfaces of
the day, which required any PC user to learn a computer language. He insisted
the Lisa had a GUI and a mouse, too.
However, because of his hot temper and his relative
inexperience in technology or management, Steve Jobs was thrown out of the Lisa
project. He felt absolutely crushed by this decision. As a revenge, he took
over a small project called Macintosh, a personal computer that was supposed to
be a cheap appliance, 'as easy to use as a toaster'. In 1981, Steve Jobs became
head of the Macintosh project, and decided to make it a smaller and cheaper
version of the Lisa, complete with a GUI of folders, icons and drop-down menus,
and a mouse.
The three years it took to develop Macintosh were some of the
most productive and intense for Steve Jobs. He formed a small group of
dedicated, young, brilliant engineers who stood fully behind his vision of a
computer 'for the rest of us'. They saw themselves as 'pirates' against the
rest of Apple, 'the Navy'. The team antagonized both the Apple II group and the
Lisa group, because the Mac was competitive of both. Yet in 1983, after it
became clear the Lisa was turning into another major flop for Apple, all of the
company's hope started to rest on the Macintosh. Steve was supported in his
mission by John Sculley, Apple's new CEO whom he hired in 1983 to help him run
the company and groom him into a future chief executive.
On January 24 1984, after Apple had run a very memorable TV
commercial for the SuperBowl ('1984'), Steve Jobs introduced Macintosh at the
company's annual shareholders meeting. The product was launched in great
fanfare and for the first few months, it was very successful.
However, by early 1985, sales were plummeting, but Steve Jobs
refused to acknowledge it and continued to behave as if he had saved Apple.
This created a lot of tension within the company, especially between Steve and
the CEO, John Sculley, who used to be very close but now stopped talking to one
another.
In May 1985, Steve Jobs started trying to convince some
directors and top executives at Apple that Sculley should go. Instead, many of
them talked to Sculley, who took the matter to the board of directors. The
board sided with Sculley and a few days later, announced a reorganization of
the company where Steve Jobs had no operational duties whatsoever — he was only
to remain chairman of the board.
Steve was aghast: Apple was his life, and he was effectively
kicked out of it. After four months spent traveling and trying out new ideas,
he came back in September with a plan: he would start a new computer company
aimed at higher education, with a small group of other ex-Apple employees. When
Apple learned of the plan, they declared they would sue him as he was taking
valuable information about the company to compete with it. As a result, Steve
Jobs resigned in September 1985, and sold all but one of his Apple shares, in
disgust. He went ahead with his plan anyway, and incorporated NeXT. Apple
dropped its lawsuit a few months later.
Steve aimed at the highest possible standards for his new
NeXT machine: he wanted the best hardware, built in the world's most automated
factory, and running the most advanced software possible. He decided that the
computer's operating system, NeXTSTEP, would be based on UNIX, the most robust
system in the world , used by the military and universities— but that it would
also be as easy to use as a Macintosh,with its own GUI. NeXTSTEP would allow
for object oriented programming, another breakthrough from Xerox PARC, that
made writing software much faster and more reliably. These ambitious plans put
off the release date of the computer — called the NeXT Cube — to October 1988.
When it came out, the NeXT Cube was indeed a great machine.
But it didn't sell — it was late, and way too overpriced: universities has
asked for a $3,000 computer, and Steve Jobs had built a $10,000 workstation.
After two years of very low sales, NeXT launched the cheaper NeXT Station, and
expanded its target to businesses, in addition to higher ed. It didn't work:
the number of NeXT computers sold each month remained in the hundreds. The
company was bleeding money and all its co-founders left one after the other, as
well as its most prominent investor, Texan billionaire Ross Perot. By 1993,
NeXT had to give up its entire hardware business to become a niche software
company. Steve Jobs had failed, and he was devastated. He started focusing less
on work, and more on his wife Laurene (who he married in 1991) and his newborn
son, Reed.
To understand how Steve Jobs got out of his nadir, let's go
back eight years earlier, in late 1985. At the time, George Lucas, who was in
the middle of an expensive divorce, was selling the computer graphics division
of his Lucasfilm empire. Steve Jobs had millions in the bank, after having sold
all his Apple stock, and was interested. In early 1986, he bought the small
group of computer scientists, and incorporated it as Pixar. The founders of
Pixar, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, had gotten together in the late 1970s
with a common vision of making films using computer animation only. But they
also knew no computer was powerful enough at the time, and they would have to
hold out for a couple decades before their dream could materialize.
For the first five years of Pixar, Steve Jobs set a goal for
the company to sell high-end computer graphics workstations for institutions,
such as hospitals or even the army. The animations group led by John Lasseter
was very small at the time, and only survived because it provided good
publicity for the power of the Pixar rendering software. Steve Jobs understood
this when the studio won an Academy Award for its short movie 'Tin Toy' in
1989. However, just like NeXT's, sales of Pixar hardware were microscopic, and
the company went software-only in 1990.
Pixar then became a software company, developing the
RenderMan 3D rendering software. Its animation business was kept alive because
it was the only one that brought some cash in, with various 3D TV commercials
for consumer brands. However a decisive contract changed everything: in 1991,
Disney signed with Pixar for making a full-feature computer-animated movie. The
script had to be fully approved by both parties, and the very hands-on head of
Disney animation Jeffrey Katzenberg halted the production several times out of
creative disagreements with John Lasseter and his team. But in 1995, the movie
was finally starting to take form, and Steve Jobs became increasingly enthused
by it.
Although he had used his personal money to fund Pixar for
nine years, Jobs had never been implicated that much in the company, which was
always more of a 'hobby' to him compared to NeXT. But by 1995, NeXT had more or
less tanked, whereas Pixar was obviously going to benefit widely from the
Disney marketing machine and make a hit with Toy Story. Steve understood this
new momentum full well: he planned to take Pixar public the week following the
release of the movie, in November 1995. He was right, and Toy Story's
box-office success was only surpassed by the Pixar stock's success on Wall
Street. Steve Jobs, who owned 80% of the company, saw his net worth rise to
over $1.5 billion — five times the money he had ever made at Apple in the 1980s!
Business wasn't all sunshine and roses at Apple. In the
decade following Steve's departure, the computer maker had milked all the cash
it could from the Macintosh and its successors, surfing on the wave of the
desktop publishing revolution that the Mac and the laser printer had made
possible. But in 1995, after Microsoft had released Windows 95, which was a
pale but working copy of the Mac OS, sales of Macintosh computers started
plummeting.
A new CEO, Gil Amelio, arrived in early 1996 to save the
company. He cut costs, got rid of a third of the workforce, and decided that
instead of writing a new, modern operating system from scratch to compete with
Window, it was better for Apple to acquire one. Eventually, Amelio chose to buy
NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system — and Steve Jobs convinced him to buy the
whole company, for a whopping $400 million. The deal was made in December 1996:
Steve Jobs was back at the company he founded.
The Amelio-Jobs cooperation didn't last long, though: Apple
lost $700 million in the first quarter of 1997, and the board decided to get
rid of its CEO. Jobs effectively organized a board coup with the complicity of
his billionaire friend Larry Ellison, and after a tenure that lasted exactly
500 days, Amelio was gone. In August 1997, Jobs took the stage at Macworld
Boston to explain his plan for Apple: he had gotten rid of the old board of
directors, and made a deal with Microsoft to settle patent disputes and invest
$150 million in the struggling Silicon Valley icon. One month later, on
September 16, 1997, Jobs accepted to become Apple's interim CEO.
The few months after Steve Jobs came back at Apple were among
the hardest-working in his life. He later told his biographer Walter Isaacson
that he was so exhausted, he couldn't speak when he came home at night
(remember he was also running a thriving Pixar simultaneously). He reviewed
every team at Apple and asked them to justify why they were important to the
future of the company. If they couldn't, their product would get canceled, and
there was a high probability they'd have to leave, too. Jobs also brought with
him his executive team from NeXT, and installed them in key positions.
Critics started to believe in Steve Jobs's ability to run
Apple when he unveiled his first great product, the iMac. Introduced in May
1998, it was Apple's first truly innovative product since the original
Macintosh of 1984. Its translucent design blew away the whole PC industry,
which had failed to produce anything but black or beige boxes for over a
decade. Moreover, it was a hot seller, and played a key role in bringing back
tons of developers to the Mac platform. Design innovations continued throughout
1998 and 1999 with the colored iMacs and the iBook, Apple's consumer notebook.
After three years in charge, Steve Jobs had brought Apple back to its status of
cool tech icon.
At Macworld in January 2000, Steve Jobs made two significant
announcements: first, he demoed Aqua, the graphics-intensive user interface
that Apple would use in its next-generation operating system derived from
NeXTSTEP, Mac OS X. Second, he announced he had accepted the Apple board's
offer, and became the company's CEO, dropping the 'interim' from his title. It
was not an obvious choice because he remained CEO of Pixar, too. Mac OS X had
not shipped yet, though, and would take another year to ship.
The simple fact that such a massive OS transition happened is
a technical feat in itself. The Mac OS X team worked very hard and released six
major version of the system every year or so, between 2001 and 2007, each time
with more stability, rapidity, and features. Although Steve Jobs buried Mac OS
9 on stage in 2002, most observers acknowledge that the transition from the old
Mac OS to OS X was really finished only in 2005, with the release of Mac OS X
10.4 Tiger. The continuous improvement of Mac OS X and the powerful core
technologies and development tools it provided proved key in the Digital Hub
strategy that Steve Jobs described in January 2001.
Once Apple had been resurrected by the iMac, Steve Jobs
started focusing on ways to make the company's shrinking marketshare (around 5%
of PCs) grow. He decided to use Apple's unique knowledge of making both the
hardware and the software to do just that: not only would Macs be very powerful
and attractive machines, but they would also run software that no Windows PCs
could. His first move was to bet on what he called 'desktop video', the ability
to shoot and edit personal movies on your Mac. He was convinced that desktop
video would be as big a deal as desktop publishing had been in the 1980s, and
in 1999, he introduced the iMac DV and a digital movie editing software,
iMovie, to pioneer that concept.
The iMac DV was a hit, but desktop video failed to catch on
as Jobs had hoped. After a much introspection, in 2000, the Apple executive
team came up with a new paradigm for the Mac that would set the company's
destinies for the coming decade. They took the idea of desktop video and
decided to expand it to the other consumer digital devices that were rapidly
becoming mainstream at the time. Apple would write software for the Mac to edit
and store all the new digital content that consumers created — and these apps
would be so powerful, delightful and easy to use, that they would entice PC
users to switch to the Mac. The Digital Hub strategy was born. Steve Jobs
explained it to the Apple community at Macworld in January 2001, the same day
he unveiled the 2nd and 3rd of the iApps: iDVD, to shares iMovies with family
and friends on DVDs; and iTunes, a digital jukebox software. Other iApps would
follow: iPhoto in 2002, GarageBand in 2004, and iWeb in 2006.
In many ways, the juggernaut that Apple became was shaped by
very smart decisions that Jobs and his executive team took in the crucial
2000-2001 timeframe. We've talked of Mac OS X and the Digital Hub strategy, a
crucial product and a crucial strategy that were both unveiled in January 2001.
A third key decision was taken in 2000 and unveiled in
mid-2001: that of creating a fully-owned retail channel, the famous Apple
retail stores. Although it is easy to approve of this strategy in retrospect,
it was far from an obvious choice back in May 2001, when the first two retail
stores were inaugurated. PC maker Gateway was shutting down its own retail
stores one after the other, and the analysts consensus at the time was that
niche player Apple would burn precious money in this economic downturn on a
foolish and dated idea. On the other hand, Steve Jobs explained that only in an
environment fully controlled by Apple, with Apple-trained staff and only
Apple-compatible products, could the superiority of Macs be fully appreciated
by consumers.
Finally, it was in 2000 that Jobs started realizing his
mistake of betting only on digital movies, and reoriented the company's efforts
to another media: music. Digital music file-sharing service Napster was at the
peak of its popularity, and all the young people were not spending their time
shooting movies, but rather downloading and listening to MP3 music files.
iTunes was born out of that realization, but there was a problem: although
there were great digital camcorders to run in conjunction with iMovie, and
awesome digital cameras too, digital music players mostly sucked — not to
mention their universal ugliness.
