Steve Jobs: co-founder of Apple, a visionary and an innovator
Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple back in the now-distant 1976. At the time, nobody really saw computers as things that everybody should possess, they were mostly reserved for professional and mostly military use. Steve Jobs was among the first entrepreneurs to see value in what could be a personal computer – small enough so people can have them in their houses. For some though, he had quite the conflicting and dominant personality, mostly because of his vision for Apple and his pursuit of excellence. Controversies about how he was managing the company led him to be kicked out of the company he co-founded in 1985. The issue that led to this was the apparent failure to produce sales with the Macintosh computer, which was at the time underpowered and expensive, but with few applications. After leaving Apple, Jobs started another company called NeXT Inc, which focused on computers for the education market. The computer the company produced was overshadowed by cheaper alternatives. However, in the early 1990s Jobs focused on the company’s operating system NEXTSTEP (which would later help him get back into Apple).
Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs also got interested in Pixar, a computer graphics company. He built it into a major animation studio, which later produced the first full-length feature film that was computer animated – Toy Story, in 1995. This movie made the public stock value of Pixar skyrocket and made Jobs a billionaire for the first time. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006.
However, as Jobs was finding new ventures, Apple was struggling. In 1996, the company was failing to produce an alternative to the Macintosh operating system and thus went ahead and bought NEXTSTEP for $400 million, bringing Jobs back into the Apple game. It wasn’t too late after that (in 1997) that Apple’s board of directors saw the potential in Apple’s co-founder again and requested him to lead the company for a second time.
Jobs wasn’t only great with computer design. He also had a hunch about how to do marketing and even came up with an award-winning ad campaign that urged people to “think different” and buy Macintoshes. He also simplified to company’s product line.
Jobs also focused on innovation. In 1998, Jobs introduced the iMac – a one-piece computer that offered high-speed processing for a relatively cheap price and thus started a trend of high-fashion computers that not only work well but also look good. The iMac brought success and stable profits to the company that was once going downhill.
In 2001, Jobs focused on reinventing Apple for the 21st century and introduced iTunes, and started selling the iPod (for those of you who are too young, that was a portable MP3 player). Interestingly enough, by 2006 more than one billion songs and videos had been sold through Apple’s iTunes Store.
In 2007, Jobs announced the iPhone, which revolutionized the telecommunications industry and is largely credited for transforming the mobile tech industry to what we have today. The iPhone was a phone that could play music like an iPod and could also access the internet, and it also sported a touch screen (before that, phones didn’t really look like that, and focused mainly on talking and sending SMS messages).
The OG iPhone, which revolutionized the mobile tech world
The iPhone 4
