Steve Jobs

2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Computing People

Steve Jobs
Born	February 24, 1955 (1955-02-24) San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
Occupation	CEO of Apple Inc.
Salary	US$1
Net worth	▲US$5.7 billion (2007)
Spouse	Laurene Powell (1991-present)
Children	4

Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the American co- founder, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc, and was the CEO of Pixar Animation Studios until it was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2006. Jobs is currently the Walt Disney Company's largest individual shareholder and a member of its Board of Directors. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. He is also widely credited as the inventor of the Macintosh, the iPod, the iTunes Store, and the iPhone, among other things.

Steve Jobs is listed as Fortune Magazine's most powerful businessman of 2007 out of twenty-five other top businessmen.

Jobs's history in business has contributed greatly to the myths of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design while understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.

Together with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Jobs helped popularize the personal computer in the late '70s. In the early '80s, still at Apple, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven GUI. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. Next's subsequent 1997 buyout by Apple brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he has served as its chief executive officer since shortly after his return.

Biography

Early years

Jobs was born in San Francisco and was adopted by Paul and Clara ( née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California who named him Steven Paul. His biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian Abdulfattah John Jandali —a graduate student who later became a political science professor— later married and gave birth to Jobs' sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. Jobs dislikes hearing the "adoptive parents" appellation applied to Paul and Clara Jobs and refers to them as his only parents.

Jobs attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as 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 the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build " blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls.

Jobs then backpacked around India with a Reed College friend (and, later, first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of philosophical enlightenment. He came back with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs experimented with LSD, calling these experiences "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life." He has stated that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not understand certain aspects of his thinking.

He 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 US$100 for 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 US$700 (instead of the actual US$5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus US$350.

Beginnings of Apple Computer

When twenty-one-year-old Jobs saw a computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use, he convinced Wozniak to assist him and started a company to market the computer. Apple Computer Co. was founded as a partnership on April 1, 1976. Though their initial plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, Jobs and Wozniak ended up creating a batch of completely assembled computers and thus entered the personal computer business. The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced, the Apple I, sold for US$666.66, a number Wozniak came up with because he liked repeating digits. Its successor, the Apple II, was introduced the following year and became a huge success, turning Apple into an important player in the nascent personal computer industry. In December 1980, with a successful IPO, Apple Computer became a publicly traded corporation, making Jobs a multi-millionaire.

As Apple continued to expand, the company began looking for an experienced executive to help manage its expansion. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from 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?" The following year, Apple set out to do just that, starting with a Super Bowl television commercial titled, " 1984." Two days later at Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as "pandemonium." The Macintosh became the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface, although it was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC. The development of the Mac was started by Jef Raskin, and eventually taken over by Jobs.

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic evangelist for Apple, some of his employees from that time had described him as an erratic and tempestuous manager. An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused a deterioration in Jobs' working relationship with Sculley, and at the end of May 1985 – following an internal power struggle and an announcement of significant layoffs – Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties as head of the Macintosh division.

NeXT

In 1986, finding himself sidelined by the company he had founded, Jobs sold all but one of his shares in Apple. The single share may have been for symbolic and sentimental reasons or to ensure that he would receive stock reports (as some biography books have stated) and attend shareholder meetings.

Around the same time, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was never able to break into the mainstream mainly owing to its high cost. Among those who could afford it, however, the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor 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. 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 aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by such things as the NeXT Cube's magnesium case. This put considerable strain on NeXT's hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel.

NeXT technology played a large role in catalyzing three unrelated events:

• The World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee developed the original World Wide Web system at CERN on a NeXT workstation. Jean-Marie Hullot's 'SOS Interface' became the basic for Interface Builder which Hullot built for NeXT and which Berners-Lee also used in his project the program 'WorldWideWeb'.
• NeXT computers were used in the development of the computer game Doom.
• The return of Apple Computer. Apple's reliance on outdated software and internal mismanagement, particularly its inability to release a major operating system upgrade, had brought it near bankruptcy in the early-to-mid 1990s. Jobs' progressive stance on Unix and open source underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s but ultimately became an expandable solid foundation for an operating system. Apple would later acquire this software and under Jobs' leadership experience a renaissance.

Return to Apple

In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for US$429 million. The deal was finalised in late 1996, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded. He soon became Apple's interim CEO after the directors lost confidence in and ousted then-CEO Gil Amelio in a boardroom coup. 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 Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company."

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's guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new products; since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the "interim" modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO, a job he still holds today.

In recent years, the company has branched out. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes Store, the company is making forays into consumer electronics and music distribution. Most recently, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, iPod, and internet device. 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 attractive design.

Jobs works at Apple for an annual salary of US$1, and this earned him a listing in Guinness World Records as the "Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer." His current salary at Apple officially remains US$1 per year, although he has traditionally been the recipient of a number of lucrative "executive gifts" from the board, including a US$46 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. This approach reduces his personal tax liability because, under current U.S. tax law, salary income is taxed at a significantly higher rate (currently up to 35%) than the capital gains tax (currently a maximum of 15%) applied to profits arising from the sale of stock grants. Obtaining remuneration through stock instead of salary is a common extrinsic rewarding technique which ties management performance to financial benefits. Furthermore, it acts as a tax minimization strategy.

Jobs is both admired and criticized for his consummate skill at persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the " reality distortion field" and is particularly evident during his keynote speeches (colloquially known as " Stevenotes") at Macworld Expos and at Apple's own World Wide Developers Conferences.

In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of Apple's poor recycling programs for 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 liberal investment fund why Apple's programs lagged behind Dell's and HP's, Jobs wound up his critic by calling the advocates' complaints "poo-poo head." 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 commencement speaker. The banner read "Steve — Don't be a mini-player recycle all e-waste". In 2006 he further expanded Apple's recycling programs to any U.S. customer who buys a new Mac. This program includes shipping and "environmentally friendly disposal" of their old systems.

Jobs began 2007 with Macworld Expo at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. He began the episodic keynote address by reviewing Apple's music business through iTunes music and video highlights, mentioning that rumors of the decline in Internet music business were false. Highlights included the long-awaited iPhone mobile device as well as the rebranding and official introduction of Apple TV. After the long-awaited introduction of these two products, Jobs announced on January 9, 2007 that "Apple Computer, Inc" would be now known as "Apple Inc."

Jobs was also involved in 2007 in an attempt to persuade former Vice President of the United States Al Gore, a member of Apple's board of directors, to run for President in 2008.

Stock options issue

In 2001, Steve Jobs was granted stock options in the amount of 7,500,000 shares of Apple with an exercise price of US$18.30, which allegedly should have been US$21.10, thereby incurring taxable income of $20,000,000 that he did not report as income. Apple overstated its earnings by that same amount. If found liable, Jobs may face a number of criminal charges and civil penalties. Apple claimed that the options were originally granted at a special board meeting that may never have taken place. Furthermore, the investigation is focusing on false dating of the options resulting in a retroactive US$20 million increase in the exercise price. The case is the subject of active criminal and civil government investigations, though an independent internal Apple investigation completed on December 29, 2006 found that Jobs was unaware of these issues and that the options granted to him were returned without being exercised in 2003.

Pixar and Disney

In 1986 Steve Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for the price of US$10 million, US$5 million of which was given to the company as capital.. The major cause of the low purchase price was George Lucas' need to finance his 1983 divorce without significantly reducing his stock and control of the Star Wars enterprises.

The new company, which was originally based in Point Richmond, California, has since relocated to 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 the 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), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), and Ratatouille (2007). Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001.

In the years 2003 and 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 Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth US$7.4 billion. Once the deal closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder with approximately 7% of the company's stock. Jobs' holdings in Disney far exceed those of Eisner, who holds 1.7%, and Disney family member Roy E. Disney, who holds about 1% of the company's stock and whose criticisms of Eisner included the soured Pixar relationship and accelerated his ousting. Jobs joined the company's board of directors upon completion of the merger.

Jobs also helps oversee Disney and Pixar's combined animation businesses with a seat on a special six-man steering committee. One of the committee's first decisions was to discontinue the production of so-called "cheapquels" (cheap direct-to-video sequels). Many also see Jobs as a valuable and influential advisor to Iger and Disney on technology matters.

Managerial style

Much has been made of Jobs's aggressive and demanding personality. Fortune noted that he "is considered one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs." Commentaries on his temperamental style can be found in Mike Moritz’s The Little Kingdom, one of the few authorized biographies of Jobs; Jeffrey S. Young’s unauthorized Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward; 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, the reaction to Jobs' famous firing from Apple by CEO John Sculley and the Apple Board of Directors was talked about by various people:

Personal life

Jobs married Laurene Powell, nine years his junior, on March 18, 1991 and has had three children with her. He also had a daughter named Lisa Brennan-Jobs with Chris-Ann Brennan, whom he did not marry. Lisa (born May 17, 1978) is a journalist who wrote for The Harvard Crimson.

In the unauthorized biography 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 another unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon, the authors suggest that Jobs might have married Baez, but her age at the time (41) meant it was unlikely the couple could have children. Baez included a mention of Jobs in the acknowledgments of her 1987 memoir And A Voice To Sing With.

Steve Jobs is also a devoted Beatles fan. He has referenced them on more than one occasion at Keynotes and also was interviewed on a showing of a Paul McCartney concert. He also enjoys Bach and other classical music. When asked about his Business Model on 60 Minutes, he replied:

"My model for business is The Beatles; they were four guys that kept each others negative tendencies in check- they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people."

Jobs is not a vegetarian or vegan as is often claimed. Although he does not eat mammalian meat or fowl, he eats fish from time to time. This is known as pescetarianism.

In 1982, Jobs bought an apartment in The San Remo, an apartment building in New York City with a politically progressive reputation, where Demi Moore, Steven Spielberg, Steve Martin, and Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, daughter of Rita Hayworth, also had apartments. 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, also known as Jackling House. Jobs lived in the mansion for ten years, it was, reportedly, in an almost unfurnished state; he kept an old BMW motorcycle in the living room, and let Bill Clinton use it in 1998. He allowed the mansion to fall into a state of disrepair, planning to demolish the house and build a smaller home on the property; but he met with 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 expressed interest, including several with experience in restoring old property, but no agreements to that effect were reached. Later that same year, a local preservationist group began seeking legal action to prevent demolition. In January 2007 Jobs was denied the right to demolish the property, by a court decision.

Jobs had a public war of words with Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, starting when Jobs first criticized Dell for making "un-innovative beige boxes." On October 6, 1997, in a Gartner Symposium, when Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he owned then-troubled Apple Computer, he said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." In 2006, Steve Jobs sent an email to all employees when Apple's market cap rose above Dell's. The email read:

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.

When Jobs spoke at the Stanford Commencement, he spoke frankly about his opinions on entrepreneurship, work, and life. He reflected on what kept him going through challenging times: "I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going is that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love." He continued to stress the importance of "finding something you love" and "following your own inner voice." (The full podcast of his speech can be found at stanford.edu and the video at YouTube.com and the text can be found here)

In May 2007, Jobs proposed Al Gore for President.

Health concerns

In mid-2004, Jobs announced to his employees that he had been diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very grim; Jobs, however, stated that he had a rare, far less aggressive type known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. On July 31, 2004, Jobs underwent surgery that successfully removed the tumor, and did not require chemotherapy or radiation therapy. During his absence, Timothy D. Cook, head of worldwide sales and operations at Apple, ran the company.

In early August 2006, Jobs delivered the keynote for Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. His “thin, almost gaunt” appearance and unusually “listless” delivery, together with his choice to delegate significant portions of his keynote to other presenters, inspired a flurry of media and internet speculation about his health.

According to an Ars Technica journal report, WWDC attendees who saw Jobs in person said he “looked fine.” Following the Keynote an Apple spokesperson said that "Steve's health is robust."

In popular culture

Jobs was prominently featured in three films about the history of the personal computing industry.

• Triumph of the Nerds— a 1996 three-part documentary for PBS, about the rise of the home computer/personal computer.
• Nerds 2.0.1— a 1998 three-part documentary for PBS, (and sequel to Triumph of the Nerds) which chronicles the development of the Internet.
• Pirates of Silicon Valley — a 1999 docudrama which chronicles the rise of Apple and Microsoft. He was portrayed by Noah Wyle.

Other Jobs references include:

• In the anime Eureka 7 there are two members of Gekko State called Jobs and Woz, both engineers/software specialists. Their names are homages to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
• In the Remnants series by K.A. Applegate, which takes place in the near-future where characters can name themselves, one of the main characters calls himself "Jobs" after him.
• Jobs is a recurring character in the mostly Apple-centric comic, The Joy of Tech.
• In 2007, the Philadelphia Theatre Company premiered Nerds://A Musical Software Satire written by Jordan Allen-Dutton, Erik Weiner (musical book and lyrics) and Hal Goldberg (music) at the Plays and Players Theatre on Delancey. It is a partially fictionalized account of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in their early years (portrayed by Charlie Pollock and Jim Poulos).
• On Saturday Night Live, Fred Armisen often parodies Steve Jobs whenever a new iPod is debuted. He also parodied the rapid successions and upgrades of iPods in his parody debut in which whenever Armisen debuted an iPod, he quickly stated they were outdated and a new one, such as the iPod "Invisa" or "Micro" would debut – an iPod that could hold "1 million songs", And "every picture ever taken". And if you drop it, "it's not lost… it floats."
• On an episode of the Adult Swim show Robot Chicken, in a parody of That '70s Show titled That '00s Show, which takes place in the new millennium. Red Forman (voiced by Kurtwood Smith) complains that his iPod is busted, and says "I'm gonna put my foot right up Steve Jobs's ass!"
• On an episode of MADtv, Michael McDonald took on the role of Jobs in a parody of the Iraq War. The skit involved Jobs introducing Apple's new "i" product, the iRack, with the amazing ability to hold all of Apple's other i products. When the iRack starts to collapse when too many products are placed into it, Jobs ignores any advice to stop forcing products into it and urges the press to instead focus on his new idea: a white running shoe called the iRan.
• After over two decades of no public meeting interaction between Jobs and Bill Gates, they shared the stage at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference in May 2007.
• Also, in May 2007, Jobs was listed among Time's 100 Most Influential People in The World.
• Jobs once commented that the Whole Earth Catalog was a conceptual forerunner of Google, a Web search engine.
• Forbes senior editor Daniel Lyons runs the blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. The identity of the blogger was for long not known, until journalist Brad Stone revealed Lyons.
• Jobs is praised in JibJab's video "A Year in Review 2007" for the invention of the iPhone.

Honours

On August 20, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced that Steve Jobs was inducted into the California Hall of Fame on December 5, 2007. He has also been awarded the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan in 1985 and the Jefferson Award for Public Service in 1987.

On November 27, 2007, Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune Magazine.