October 6, 2011 10:14 pm
A disruptive digital visionary
By Richard Waters and Joseph Menn
Steve Jobs presented the world with products it did not know it wanted and cannot now live without
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Steve Jobs stamped his mark on the first 35 years of personal computing history, from the rudimentary but ground-breaking Apple II to the sleek touch-screen iPad. In the process, he helped instil new digital tastes in a generation, while touching off a wave of disruption that has reshaped the consumer electronics, mobile communications and media and entertainment industries.
An unlikely business leader, with an early leaning towards the counter-culture that stayed with him throughout his life, he carved out one of the most remarkable careers of his age, including a corporate comeback that is unrivalled in modern business history. Apple, the company he co-founded – widely thought to be heading for bankruptcy when he returned after a decade’s absence in 1996 – this year briefly overtook ExxonMobil to become the world’s most valuable company.
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Jobs was not an engineer-entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley mould, and did not make his mark as an inventor in the classic sense. With no formal technical background, he borrowed, bought or merely popularised many of the ideas most closely associated with his company’s success. His genius for anticipating what millions of consumers would want next from their digital devices – and shaping the conditions that would create feverish excitement for each successive Apple advance – was unparalleled.
Jobs was not an engineer-entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley mould, and did not make his mark as an inventor in the classic sense. With no formal technical background, he borrowed, bought or merely popularised many of the ideas most closely associated with his company’s success. His genius for anticipating what millions of consumers would want next from their digital devices – and shaping the conditions that would create feverish excitement for each successive Apple advance – was unparalleled.
Steven Paul Jobs was born in Los Altos, California, in 1955, son of a Syrian professor of political science and his American speech therapist girlfriend. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a hard-working couple of moderate means.
At high school, he dabbled in electronics with his friend Steve Wozniak – their first gadget was an illegal device that transmitted a tone down telephone networks to allow them to make free calls – but his path seemed anything but set.
He dropped out of Reed College, Oregon, and in 1974 went to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. He once said that his rival, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates (pictured to the right of Steve Jobs in 1984), would have benefited from similar experiences. Jobs retained the 1960s Bohemian spirit throughout his life, usually dressing in the artist’s uniform of black turtleneck sweater and jeans.
Back in Silicon Valley, he was drawn, along with Mr Wozniak, to the hobbyist culture of the early personal computing aficionados. It was Mr Wozniak who displayed the technical flair, working on circuit boards that became a model for packing the most computing power into the most efficient space – but it took Jobs to turn the idea into a product, the basis of a business. Jobs hawked the board for the Apple I, designed in Mr Wozniak’s bedroom, to local consumer electronics stores, with the wooden cases for the machines an optional extra.
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Steve Jobs (right) with Steve Wozniak in the mid-1970s with the Apple I
Success, when it came, struck with surprising speed. The 1977 Apple II – designed by Mr Wozniak, and widely viewed as one of the technical breakthroughs of early personal computing – won an almost instant following, turning the company’s young founders into instant business celebrities.
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Jobs represented a new phenomenon in the 1970s: businessman as pop culture hero, as recognisable and charismatic as a film star. Aged only 21, he was propelled into the public eye as the maverick face of a fresh and liberating technology culture.
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Behind the early success lay an ambitious and mercurial leader. Jobs was renowned among those with whom he worked closely for being both inspiring and maddening: he could turn withering anger on subordinates who did not live up to his demanding standards, humiliating them in front of colleagues. A perfectionist who did not suffer fools lightly, he insisted on having the final say over the technology, design and marketing of everything stamped with the Apple name. He was famous for sending back to the drawing board many of what became the group’s best-known products, sometimes for what seemed the smallest of design tweaks.
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Apple’s initial public offering, when he was still only 25, made him rich and turned Apple into the most visible success to emerge from a wave of start-ups springing up to cash in on the first personal computing boom.
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In 1983, however, IBM – at the time the world’s largest computer manufacturer – introduced its own personal computer. The IBM brand legitimised the PC in the business marketplace and established the Microsoft operating system as the industry standard.
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That year Jobs asked PepsiCo president John Sculley, who had a reputation for brilliant marketing, to become Apple president and help counter the IBM challenge. In a display of Jobs’ persuasive skills that would enter business history, he said: “If you stay at Pepsi, five years from now all you’ll have accomplished is selling a lot more sugar water to kids. If you come to Apple, you can change the world.”
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Bill Gates, to the right of Steve Jobs, pictured in 1984
The Apple Macintosh appeared in 1984, bringing icons and the mouse to a mass audience. Small, light and affordable, it was even described as “lovable” – probably a first for any computer. Yet Microsoft soon emulated the breakthroughs in the Mac, keeping Apple from breaking its stranglehold on the market.
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As the battle wore on, Mr Sculley began to see Jobs as disruptive and forced a showdown that led to Jobs’ resignation. Neither Apple nor Jobs did well without the other.
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His new company, NeXT, developed a high-powered – and expensive – computer for the education market, but it was not a success. He did better with a side project: a computerised movie production house called Pixar that he bought in 1986. The company scored a string of hits, starting with the animated children’s film Toy Story, and its eventual purchase by Walt Disney made Jobs the biggest individual shareholder of that entertainment colossus.
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Apple, meanwhile, lost its technological edge, and a series of chief executives failed to turn the tide. The end seemed in sight for the company until, in 1996, it bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back as an “informal adviser”. NeXT’s software was to form the core of the Mac OS X operating system.
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That year, Jobs was named interim chief executive – a position that was soon made permanent. The following May brought the launch of a product that signalled the return of the company’s creative spark: the iMac, a one-piece, brightly coloured computer in a curved plastic case. It was a vivid indication of how Jobs would go on to rebuild the company by uniting compelling design and cutting-edge technology. By the end of July, Apple had sold almost 300,000 of the machines.
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It was the start of perhaps the most impressive comeback in business history. In completing the turnround, Jobs went on to shake up the personal computing industry he had helped to create with a series of portable devices – in the process also upending the mobile communications industry and creating new markets for digital media and entertainment.
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The Apple Mac and third-party software, in combination with the laser printer, provided the essential tools of the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980s. The more powerful Macintosh computers, with large display screens, became the computers of choice for the graphics and design industries. But that still left Apple with only some 3 per cent of the world market for desktop computers.
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Then, in the early years of the new century, Jobs saw a new opportunity. Though many music services had tried to get the main record labels to provide licensed versions of their content online, Jobs was able to convince them that Apple’s technology would protect their songs from the endemic piracy afflicting their business models. The small, elegant iPod quickly came to dominate the market for portable music players, while iTunes would become the biggest seller of digital music.
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The iPhone and iPad that were to follow built on the iPod’s successful combination of high style and user-friendly technology with online services – in their case, the App Store – to create digital experiences that rivals could not match.
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Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. The following year, in a speech to students at Stanford University, he said that receiving a diagnosis that he might die had reinforced a personal philosophy that had been with him since the age of 17. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” he said. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
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Steve Jobs shows off the new iMac in 1988
The illness returned, forcing Jobs to step aside as Apple chief executive in the first half of 2009, during which time he underwent a liver transplant. Early this year he announced he would take another leave of absence because of his health. He retained the title of chief executive until he stepped down in August, though he remained chairman.
Jobs was eventually reunited with his natural mother, Joanne, and met his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. He was romantically involved with a number of charismatic women, including folk singer Joan Baez, once the lover of Bob Dylan, Jobs’ favourite artist. His high school girlfriend, Chris-Ann, bore him a daughter, Lisa. Though he initially refused to recognise the child as his, he eventually accepted her and took a strong interest in her career.
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In 1991 he married Laurene Powell, an MBA student he met when lecturing at Stanford graduate business school. They had a son and two daughters. His wife survives him, as do his four children.
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Though Jobs never lost his reputation as a hard taskmaster and irascible boss, his management style eventually shaped one of the most highly regarded and effective management teams in the tech industry. The managers who could were able to withstand his intensely demanding ways – including operations expert and new chief executive Tim Cook and design guru Jonathan Ive – went on to become members of a cohesive team that is regarded as one of Jobs’ main legacies to the company he founded.
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Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, where a new generation of 20-something tech entrepreneurs has recently come to the fore, the influence of Jobs looms large.
The MacBooks that are standard issue among up-and-coming developers, the iPads that have become the blank slates on which new digital dreams are being sketched, the stripped-down style that is now the standard design aesthetic for consumer technology: all pay homage to the man who was long the Valley’s presiding creative genius.
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Echoing a widely expressed view this week, Dave Morin, a former Apple employee who went on to become an early Facebook employee before branching out to start his own internet service, blogged that Jobs had “led an entire generation of entrepreneurs to see what is possible when you combine design, technology, and focus”. Above all, he praised the Apple co-founder’s “relentless editing, intense focus and really hard work”.
Amid the outpouring of tributes from former allies and foes alike, it was an eloquent reminder of Jobs’ enduring impact on the world-changing industry he helped to found.
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