Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)[5] was an American computer entrepreneur and innovator. He was co-founder,[6] chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc.[7] Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.
In the late 1970s, Jobs—along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula[6] and others—designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Macintosh.[8][9] After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platformdevelopment company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its interim CEO from 1997, then becoming permanent CEO from 2000 onwards.[10]After resigning as CEO in August 2011, Jobs was elected chairman of Apple's board of directors and held that title until his death.
In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios.[11] He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer.[12] He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006.[13] Consequently Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7 percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.[14][15]
On October 5, 2011, Jobs died in California at age 56 of pancreatic cancer, seven years after being diagnosed.[16]
At the time of his resignation, and again after his death, he was widely described as a visionary,[17] pioneer[18] and genius[17][19][20]—perhaps one of the foremost[21][22]—in the field of business,[22][21][23] innovation,[24] and product design,[25] and a man who had "profoundly"[26] changed the face of the modern world,[24][19][18] revolutionized at least six different industries,[17][24] and an "exemplar for all chief executives".[17][22][23] His death was widely mourned[27][28] and considered a loss to the world by commentators across the globe.[20]
A true visionary
Apple’s CEO, at last
Macworld 2000
Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Macworld on January 5 2000 was a milestone for two reasons.
First, after a little over three years of managing Apple, he declared he had accepted his de facto situation and become the company’s full-time CEO. Remember that he was only interim CEO up to this point, not wanting to upset either Pixar’s or Apple’s shareholders by being simultaneously CEO of two public companies. Time had proven this wasn’t a problem: Pixar was well managed by Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, and had released two successful movies sinceToy Story, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. His main role at Pixar was negotiating with Disney, which left him plenty of time to run Apple. He had turned the Cupertino firm into a leader in computer innovation again, steadily refreshing its product line and pioneering new technologies.
When the crowd heard the news, everybody stood up and cheered at their beloved leader (see it in the Movie Theater). It was obvious the Apple community was grateful to Steve for saving their favorite company.
Mac OS X
But the biggest news was probably the unveiling of Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X.
Mac OS X was the result of three years of hard work by all of Apple’s software engineers to port NeXTSTEP to the Mac platform. The new system felt like an evolved version of the Mac OS, but people familiar with NeXTSTEP felt home too. You can verify this on this video from our website.
Let’s have a look at the system’s architecture to see what we mean.
The system’s UNIX kernel was called Darwin, and it was based on Mach, the modern kernel technology developed by Avie Tevanian at Carnegie Mellon and the foundation of NeXTSTEP. Darwin was why Mac OS X had protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking, which allowed for multiple applications to run at the same time without ever bringing the system down. It also provided very advanced networking, unlike the old Mac OS.
2D graphics were based on PostScript, just like NeXTSTEP, which allowed for nice font anti-aliasing and on the-fly PDF rendering. 3D graphics however, unlike NeXTSTEP, were based on the most widespread standard, OpenGL, not on Pixar’s RenderMan. And the media core was Apple’s QuickTime, an old Mac technology ported to the new system.
Object-oriented application development, which was the raison d’être of NeXTSTEP and its true competitive advantage, was of course possible in OS X, but it required entirely rewriting an application. So Apple provided an environment to which old Mac apps were easy to port, called Carbon — and OS X even supported those apps natively in a third environment, called Classic. Although Classic could not support any of OS X’s benefits, it was necessary to ease the radical transition from the old Mac OS to the brand new OS X.
All these advanced technologies (most of which had been available on NeXTSTEP for over a decade) were essential, but what users noticed the most was Mac OS X’s brand new user interface, called Aqua. In fact, it is Aqua that Steve Jobs introduced at Macworld 2000, since OS X’s technologies had been known to developers for over two years, and the actual system wouldn’t ship for another year.
Aqua was a revolutionary new user interface that visually took the Mac OS and even NeXTSTEP to a whole new level. It used translucent colors instead of solid grays, circles instead of angles, and shadows and transparency aplenty. In fact the reason it was called Aqua is that “you wanted to lick it”.
Mac OS X shipped on March 24, 2001, and became the core of Apple’s resurgence and current success. What an incredible twist of fate: to make a long history short, Apple was eventually saved by NeXT, a company that was created to defeat it by an angry Steve Jobs.
The Digital Hub strategy
Apple’s so-called Digital Hub strategy also emerged in 2000, although it was only disclosed a year later at Macworld San Francisco 2001 (see it in the Movie Theater).
The Digital Hub strategy was a take on the future of personal computing that went against a common belief that had developed toward the end of the 1990s. Many analysts were so enthusiastic about the success of the Internet that they were convinced the personal computer was soon to disappear. It would evolve into a mere terminal whose only purpose would be to access all kinds of content on the Web. The consensus was that the current state of the PC was a dull, boring box, and that any innovation had stopped in the industry.
Steve Jobs and Apple thought differently. They were among the very few that professed quite the opposite: the PC had a very exciting future. As they put it, it had evolved throughout the years from the age of productivity, in the 1980s, where people used it for spreadsheets and databases; to the age of networking, in the 1990s, where it connected to the Internet; and it was now, in the early 2000s, entering its third age: that of the digital lifestyle. Consumers were increasingly starting to use all kinds of digital devices: digital cameras, camcorders, music players, PDAs... But these devices didn’t make sense without a computer. The personal computer was going to become the center or digital hub of this new digital lifestyle, making all its pieces — music, photos, movies, contacts, data — come together.
It’s worth stopping and looking back at this for a minute. See, it’s such decisions that have made Steve Jobs worthy of his reputation of hi-tech visionary. He certainly isn’t always right: he never believed in Pixar’s success in making animated movies, for example, until the very last months before Toy Story was released. He thought NeXT would become a new standard in personal computing, and Pixar’s RenderMan would allow mere mortals to draw 3D objects just as easily as they laid out and printed newsletters. He also released computers that flopped badly, from the NeXT Cube to the G4 Cube, released in July 2000 and discontinued just one year later. But he really did see the future at several points in his career: first, of course, with the personal computer, which led him to start Apple. Then with graphical user interfaces, and later with desktop publishing, on the original Macintosh. We can now say without doubt that the digital hub strategy was another one of those great visions, one that has turned Apple from a niche computer company to the computer/music/consumer electronics powerhouse it is today.
Looking back at this success, Steve summed it all up in this particularly telling phrase:
The great thing is that Apple's DNA hasn't changed. The place where Apple has been standing for the last two decades is exactly where computer technology and the consumer electronics markets are converging. So it's not like we're having to cross the river to go somewhere else; the other side of the river is coming to us.
Steve Jobs in How Big Can Apple Get?, Fortune, February 2005
Indeed, if you look back at what had always inspired Steve Jobs, it was simplicity, ease of use, using computers to do creative work, and making your life easier. He always looked up to Sony, to which he was thankful for creating the consumer electronics business... in a way, he always dreamed of what Apple is doing today, and prepared the company for it, even unconsciously.
It started with iMovie, a digital movie editing application that Apple introduced in 1999. As opposed to the digital hub strategy, one can think of iMovie as one of Steve’s erroneous visions. He thought that “desktop movies”, i.e. the ability to shoot movies with digital camcorders and edit them on your computer, was going to be the next big thing in personal computing, yet another “next desktop publishing revolution.” It was one of his main points when he introduced the iMac DVs in late 1999.
But quickly enough, he realized he was wrong. Users didn’t embrace desktop movies as fast as he hoped, and certainly PC users didn’t switch to the Mac to use iMovie. However, they did go online to download music over Napster, as digital piracy really started to emerge by the turn of the century.
It was the starting point of the digital hub strategy. Apple’s software developers began work on a couple of new digital lifestyle applications, namely iDVD, to burn your movies on DVDs, and especially iTunes, the digital music jukebox. iTunes was actually written in less than five months, which exemplifies the panic of Steve when he realized Apple was late catching up with the digital music revolution. The company actually didn’t start from scratch, as they brought in an outside developer who was working on a similar piece of software to save some time.
However, Cupertino didn’t always plan to develop all its digital lifestyle applications in-house. After all, they had enough work on their hands with bringing their new operating system to market. That’s why they went to one of their main software partners, Adobe, maker of Photoshop, and asked them to develop a consumer version of their photo editing software for the Mac. To their surprise, Adobe refused, as the company didn’t believe in the digital hub strategy and was already having a hard time porting their existing apps to the new OS X platform. That’s why Apple started releasing the so-called iApps one after the other.
The iApps were a digital suite of applications that eventually evolved into iLife, which Apple branded as“Microsoft Office for the rest of your life.” They all had the same purpose of making our emerging digital lives easier. In addition to iMovie, iDVD and iTunes, iPhoto was released in 2002, followed by iCal later that year, GarageBand (for recording and editing music) in 2004, and iWeb (for making websites) in 2006. The reason Apple was able to develop such breakthrough software so rapidly was mainly Mac OS X, with its object-oriented environment inherited from NeXTSTEP.
Although the iApps were really the foundation for Apple’s future lead in the consumer electronics business, that’s not what they were envisioned for. They were intended as killer apps, i.e. apps that would compel consumers to buy a Mac just so that they could use them. More precisely, they were supposed to entice Windows users to switch to the Mac, as there was no similar complete digital-life solution on their platform.
“5 down, 95 to go”
The digital hub strategy itself was just one part of Steve’s greater plan to finally gain market share in the PC market. Since he had returned to Apple, the Cupertino company was stuck at around 5% of the overall PC market, even though most industry analysts acknowledged the superiority of its operating system, and the innovations in its hardware.
One other plan was an aggressive TV campaign called “Switchers”. Its ads showed several former PC users who had switched to the Mac and were describing how it had made their life so much easier. The purpose of the campaign was to encourage people who were thinking of switching but were a little afraid to do so, by showing them someone who had made the change and was happy with it.
Yet the riskiest strategic move Apple did to seduce Windows users was to get into the retailing business.
Steve Jobs behind the Genius Bar at New York’s SoHo Apple Retail Store in 2002.
Notice the huge black and white photographs, so typical of him.
It was far from an obvious choice. Once again, there was a consensus in the industry that brick-and-mortar computer retailing had had its day. The new model was Dell, which only shipped computers directly to customers after they were purchased on its website. The one company that had their own computer boutiques, Gateway, was actually closing them because they were huge money sinks.
But Steve’s vision was different. He understood that Windows users wouldn’t even consider Apple unless they would actually see how Macs worked and could help them run their digital lives effortlessly. He envisioned “lifestyle stores” that would showcase Apple’s products working with digital devices, that people could pick up and test drive on the spot. The stores would be in very expensive locations, in popular malls or in the center of shopping districts.
To help get into retailing, Steve had former Gap executive Mickey Drexler join the Apple board as early as 1999, then hired Ron Johnson away from Target in late 2000. After months of experimentation, Apple inaugurated their first Retail Store in May 2001, in the midst of the industry’s post-Internet bubble crisis. Almost every expert agreed they would turn out an expensive mistake...
The iPod revolution
1,000 songs in your pocket
Although Mac OS X, the digital hub strategy, the breakthrough hardware and the retail stores all played a role in Apple’s renaissance, they were not the essential key that made it all come together. As you probably know, that key was a little shiny white device the size of a pack of cigarettes called the iPod.
The iPod was of course an integral part of Apple’s vision of the digital lifestyle. When they looked at the big picture, they realized that, unlike the digital camera and camcorder markets, the digital music player market did not yet offer compelling products to work with your Mac. That’s how the idea of making such a device in-house arose, in early 2001, after iTunes was introduced and the company started focusing on the digital music revolution.
Just like iTunes, Steve Jobs wanted to get a product out to market quickly, to catch up with the rest of the industry. That’s why he turned to an outside engineer, PortalPlayer founder Tony Fadell, who had notoriously tried to sell his prototype of a little MP3 player to several consumer electronics company. Fadell joined Apple in February 2001, and the iPod shipped only nine months later, in late October 2001, just in time for the holiday season.
The original iPod distinguished itself from its competition for several reasons. Apart from its gorgeous look, its click wheel and user interface made browsing through one’s music collection very easy and fast; it had a hard drive which could store up to 5GB, or “a thousand songs in your pocket”, which was Apple’s tag-line for the new product; it connected to your Mac via FireWire, which was 30 times faster than your typical USB MP3 player; and it synced with iTunes seamlessly: you just had to plug it in, and the software took care of the rest.
There was simply no other MP3 player that matched any one of those breakthrough features. iPod quickly became a very, very hot product for music lovers... and digital pirates. It was quickly acknowledged as “the walkman of the digital age”, as even Windows users either hacked it or moved to the Mac just so that they could use it.
Apple was confused about how to react to this unexpected success. They could decide to continue limiting iPod to Macs, so that it would entice PC users to switch; or they could make it Windows-compatible, which would broaden their target and show users unfamiliar with Apple how good their products could get. At Macworld New York in July 2002, Steve announced they had opted for the second solution.
The iTunes Music Store
Steve Jobs introducing the iTunes Store on Apr. 28, 2003
Once Apple had step foot in the music business with iPod, they started looking at content. At the time, most people either ripped their CDs on their Macs or downloaded music illegally on peer-to-peer networks. Recognizing they were in a unique position to do so, Apple decided to try and come up with a legal solution by building an online music store. They had enough experience to do so thanks to their own popular online store on apple.com, as well as their QuickTime movie trailers, which had taught them how to handle massive downloads on their servers.
Moreover, they were able to negotiate with the music companies because they were still a niche player. The majors were trying hard to fight Napster, but they were reluctant to launch online stores, afraid that it would destroy their current business model. But iTunes could only run on Macs, which were still a fraction of the PC market — so they viewed Apple’s proposal as an opportunity to try a new model with limited risks.
Steve Jobs used his negotiation skills to have the labels agree on a unique price: $0.99 for each track, and $9.99 for whole albums. Although Apple would not get much from the iTunes Store, they expected it to drive iPod sales, as purchased music could only be played on their player.
So, on April 28 2003, Steve unveiled the iTunes Music Store at a special Music event. The results quickly exceeded the company’s best hopes. Five million songs were sold in just eight weeks, and another eight million in the following fifteen weeks, bringing iTunes’ share of legal music downloads to 70% — yet it was still only Mac-compatible!
Unexpected success
It was the first viable business model for selling music online. Everybody was happy: the labels, who finally saw a way to defeat Napster; Apple, whose sales of iPod were boosted; and of course the customers, who were finally offered a seamless and legal way to acquire music. As a result, the labels agreed to let Apple extend its business, and on October 16 2003, Steve Jobs introduced the company’s second app for Windows (the first was its QuickTime Player): iTunes, “the best Windows app ever written”. Windows iPod users would finally be able to sync their device on Apple’s software, and, more importantly, every PC user could now purchase music on the iTunes Store.
It was the start of a revolution. iPod was already a success, but it was now becoming a cult object, a music player so successful that it embodied the digital music era all by itself — the same way Sony’s Walkman had come to symbolize the portable music era some twenty years earlier. Steve was thrilled: his products were finally recognized for their value, they were finally adopted by the masses. Unlike the Mac’s 5% market share, as of January 2004, iPod was enjoying a 30% market share (by units sold), making it the leader of the portable music players market.
As Steve often pointed out, only Apple could make the iPod. The reason was, there was simply no other company out there that still knew how to make both great hardware and great software. In the computer business, there were PC manufacturers on one side, and software developers on the other. As for the consumer electronics business, they could never come up with advanced software such as iTunes, which made the iPod experience so effortless. What had always been designated as Apple’s greatest flaw turned out to be their greatest strength in the emerging digital consumer electronics market. Steve saw that unique opportunity — and he grabbed it.
Health problems
However the most serious troubles Steve had to face in recent years were not legal ones, but medical ones: in October 2003, while performing a routine abdominal scan, doctors discovered a tumor growing in his pancreas. Usually a pancreatic cancer is quick to kill you — but not in Steve’s case. He was suffering from an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, one that can be removed by surgery and usually leave the patient with some ten more years on earth, or more.
But Steve Jobs was no ordinary patient. True to the Eastern mysticism of his youth and his strange yet deep beliefs about medicine and food, he stubbornly refused to have the surgery, sticking to a special diet that he thought would cure him from his cancer. This lasted for nine long months, while his family and Apple’s top people got increasingly concerned about him. However, observing that his situation was not improving, he reluctantly agreed to have the surgery in August 2004, at the Stanford Medical Center. It was only then that the news were made public, with Steve himself writing a letter to Apple employees from his hospital bed. He took one month off and came back as CEO in September, assuring everyone he was “cured.” This first event was felt as a shock by the Apple community worldwide, but it was even more shocking to the company’s shareholders, who argued that they should have been aware of the CEO’s diagnosis early on, given his importance to the company. Most lawyers did agree that such move wasn’t mandatory though, since Jobs had a right to protect his privacy.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech, 12 Jun 2005Of course, as you noticed, Steve didn’t mention his nine-month refusal to have surgery and his special diet techniques.
The case seemed closed for a while, before it surprisingly resurfaced some three years later, in 2008. First came rumors following Steve’s public appearances at Macworld in January, but especially at WWDC in June 2008. He obviously had lost weight in a substantial and even frightening way during those six months. Many blogs and dedicated websites speculated his cancer had come back. Because of increasing pressure from journalists, Apple’s spokeswoman Katie Cotton had to issue a public statement after the WWDC keynote, confessing Steve was suffering from “a common bug.” Considering Steve’s gaunt appearance, many people found it hard to believe. They didn’t feel more relieved when, the following month, CFO Peter Oppenheimer declared at the company’s earnings conference call that: “Steve’s health [was] a private matter.” As if to make things worse, press agency Bloomberg accidentally published Jobs’ obituary in late August 2008. It is common practice in the media to keep such obituaries ready in case of emergency — but the publication obviously added concern to the issue of Steve’s health.
Steve himself reacted to the news in his September 9 Music Event, using a famous quotation from Mark Twain:
He reiterated in his October 14 event Media Event, when he told journalists his blood pressure was 110/70: “and that’s all we’re gonna talk about Steve’s health today”. Although most laughed at the joke, hardly any of them failed to notice that, in addition to his still alarmingly frail look, he unusually shared the stage with several executives — most notably Apple’s #2 Tim Cook and Senior VP of Design Jony Ive, keeping only the introduction of the new laptops for himself.
Unfortunately, those growing concerns eventually proved justified. On December 16, Apple made a shocking announcement:
Apple today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show.
Although the demise of Macworld seemed inevitable to many, as the company did progressively scale back from its trade shows one after the other, the real shock was that it wouldn’t be Steve, but head of marketing Phil Schiller, that would appear on stage for the last Macworld keynote in history. There was no doubt that the CEO, who hadn’t missed a single Macworld keynote since his return (except Apple Expo 2004, one month after he had his cancer surgery), was simply not in good enough health to go on stage and face Apple’s fans (including your fellow webmaster).
Because of the stream of reactions that the statement caused, Steve once again made a personal announcement on Apple’s website on January 5, 2009, the day before Macworld. He explained his medical situation in those terms:
As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority. Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.
Steve said he would remain CEO during his recovery. He contradicted himself some nine days later, in an email to all Apple employees that was made public:
During the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought. In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.
The CEO would continue to oversee key strategic orientations, while he left most of the day-to-day tasks to his second-in-command, COO Tim Cook, as he had already done in 2004. As a result, the company and the whole Apple community learned how to live without Steve Jobs for half of 2009. This was a historic moment, reminding everybody of the simple truth that Steve was not eternal.
It would be later revealed that Steve underwent a liver transplant in April 2009. It actually is not uncommon for his type of pancreatic tumor to metastasize in other organs, including the liver. According to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, author of the Apple 2.0 blog at CNNmoney.com, Steve’s “lost his gall-bladder, part of his stomach, part of his pancreas, the upper end of his small intestine and now has someone else’s liver, which probably means he’ll be on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his life.” “That can’t be fun,” he added. The transplant took place at the Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the nation’s leading center for such surgery. The hospital officially disclosed that Jobs “received a liver transplant because he was the patient with the highest MELD score (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) of his blood type and, therefore, the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available.”
Left: Apple’s COO and second-in-command Tim Cook
Right: standing ovation as Steve came back on stage on Sep. 9 2009
The transplant worked, and Steve went back to Apple in late June 2009, as planned. It wasn’t long after that that the Wall Street Journal ran a story about Steve “being back at Apple and focusing on [the] new tablet”, with employees complaining they “had to readjust” to their boss’s demanding habits. Good old Steve was definitely alive and well. He eventually proved it at the September 9 2009 Music Event, when he was welcome on stage by a standing ovation from Apple employees and several hundreds of journalists— before unveiling exciting new iPods, as he had done in the previous four years.
2010: Steve is back. Again...
After an almost entire year of complete absence from the media scene, due to his health problems, Steve has made an impressive comeback in 2010. The charismatic CEO has taken the public spotlight several times during that year, often to make game-changing announcements.
iPad
The biggest of all was undeniably on January 27, when Steve Jobs finally introduced iPad, Apple’s much-anticipated tablet. There were rumors on an Apple tablet even before there were rumors on an Apple phone, and for good reasons: the labs of Cupertino started working on a tablet years before they worked on iPhone.
I actually started on the tablet first. I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display. And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display? that I could rest my hands on, and actually type on. And about six months later, they called me in and showed me this prototype display. And it was amazing. This is in the early 2000s. And I gave it to one of our other, really brilliant UI folks, and he called me back a few weeks later and he had inertial scrolling working, and a few other things. Now we were thinking about building a phone at that time, and when I saw the rubber band, inertial scrolling and a few of the other things, I thought My God, we could build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet project on the shelf, because the phone was more important. And we took the next several years, and did the iPhone.
Steve Jobs at the D8 Conference, 1 June 2010
Throughout 2009, even before Steve Jobs came back from his medical leave of absence, the Apple rumor mill started spinning again with increasing confidence about an upcoming incredible device, a handheld tablet halfway between a Mac and an iPhone. The rumors went even crazier after Steve Jobs presented a prototype of the device to several major US publishers, who couldn’t help talking about it off the record. The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, one of Steve Jobs’ favorite industry analyst, reported early on that :
It’s better than the average movie experience, when you hold this thing in your hands.
Expectations were high to say the least.
Then, on January 27, Steve Jobs finally took the stage and unveiled iPad to the world. The presentation was bare, almost simplistic, with Steve sitting on a couch and demoing the device for most of his keynote.
iPad disappointed the majority of analysts at the time. It was deemed “a bigger iPod touch”, nothing else. Steve was being mocked for calling it “a magical device” during his keynote, and in Apple advertising too! Yet, once again, the market proved the critics wrong, and iPad turned out an amazing success. Apple sold 7.5 million of them as of September 2010, representing close to 8% of its 2010 fiscal-year revenues (iPods amounted for 13%).
Asked what his feelings about iPad were at the famous All Things D conference in June 2008, Steve Jobs boldly made the following comments :
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed, on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in urban centers, and America started to move into those urban, then suburban centers, cars got more popular and innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much, started to become paramount in cars. And now, probably [...] one out of every 25 vehicles is a truck, where it used to be 100%... PCs are gonna be like trucks. They’re still gonna be around, they’re still gonna have a lot of value, but they’re gonna be used by one out of x people. [...] And this transformation’s gonna make some people uneasy — people from the PC world, like you and me. It’s gonna make us uneasy, because the PC’s taken us a long ways — it’s brilliant. And we liked to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, I think it’s uncomfortable, for a lot of people [...] So... I think that we’re embarked on that.
Steve Jobs at the D8 Conference, 1 June 2010
It is worth thinking about these comments for a minute. If we assume Steve Jobs is right about this, and almost everyone (but Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer) agrees he is, then he will be a unique case in history of someone who has been instrumental in both creating and putting an end to an industry. Indeed, Apple was a key player in starting of the personal computing revolution in the early 1980s, and there would not have been an Apple without Steve Jobs. But Apple will also likely be the company leading the transition away from the PC, and this time there’s no denying this would not have happened so quickly without the iOS mobile revolution... What other man can be credited for such a huge impact on a multibillion-dollar industry?
Apple’s possible future
2010 has seen Apple’s dominance in the high-tech industry reinforced. The company is the market leader or a dominant player in four huge and growing markets: digital music players (with iPod), digital music distribution (with iTunes), smartphones and mobile apps (with iPhone, iPod touch and the App Store), and tablet PCs (with iPad).
This unique position at the crossroads of the digital revolution, makes the fruit company the subject of many a fantasy. Two trends have constantly re-emerged when speculating on Apple’s future.
The first is its take on the television market. Steve Jobs himself has commented at length on it at D8 (again), saying it was impossible for Apple to enter this market because of its structure. He talked about an insoluble go-to-market impossibility.
Yet only three months later, he introduced a revamped, network-based Apple TV at the traditional September Apple Media Event. The new box is iOS-based and most people think it won’t be long before it runs iOS apps. To speak more generally, it is very likely that, unlike what Steve Jobs has explained, Apple will try very hard to enter and revolutionize this “other” consumer electronics space that is television, and the Living Room in general — following a strategy that was conceived some four years earlier with iPod hi-fi.
Another controversial issue is that of Apple’s relation toward its new arch-rival, Google. This relation is controversial because for several years, Google was not an enemy, but an ally in the war against the behemoth of Redmond, Microsoft. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt even sat on Apple’s board of directors for three whole years, from 2006 to 2009. But it’s no wonder he left in 2009: by entering the smartphone market with its Android mobile OS (and its own app store!), Google had become a direct competitor of Apple. This conflict of interest was as good a reason for him to leave, as Steve Jobs’ shrinking tolerance for what he felt was a plain and simple betrayal.
Google’s increasing market share in the smartphone market led many observers to think that the scenario of the 1990s was being played again. Google, in the role previously played by Microsoft, was going to crush the industry innovator, Apple and its closed system, by licensing its “open” software to a myriad of different hardware companies... Steve Jobs supposedly had not learned from his own mistakes, and was going down the wrong path again because of his stubbornness. Of course it’s far too early to judge if this opinion is justified or not, but it’s fair to say that the fight between Apple and Google will be interesting to watch in the coming decade.
Has Steve changed?
Finally, an old debate about Steve’s personality has also re-emerged in 2010: has he changed? Although some of his traits, such as his propensity to take the spotlight then and again to unveil insanely great products to the world, have not changed... People have noticed two minor evolutions in his public persona.
The first is his increasing habit of communicating by writing emails to customers. He has been known to do so for years, and he is famous for reading a ton of them, but never before 2010 had he replied to so many of them, so often. Usually, he has used them to publicly respond to hot issues about Apple or to spread rumors himself. Some even pretend he has theorized this method, which is in essence a new way for CEOs to deal with PR, bypassing the traditional press.
Another change is more profound, and has to do with his implication on charity issues. Steve’s reputation in Silicon Valley was not very positive on this particular topic, as he was often dismissed for basically being stingy. Yet, in addition to large donations to charities, he spoke publicly twice for the defense of organ donations in 2010, and even played a critical role in the creation of the nations’ first organ donor registry in October 2010. This was obviously a praiseworthy side effect of the liver transplant that had saved his life one year earlier.
Steve Jobs hugs Barbara Ralston of Stanford Hospital during a ceremony to create the nation's first organ donors registry on Oct. 5, 2010
A tributes after death of 'visionary' Apple founder Steve Jobs
Bill Gates says
I’m truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death. Melinda and I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to everyone Steve has touched through his work. Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives. The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.
Barack Obama: 'He transformed our lives, redefined entire industries,and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history :he changed the way each of us sees the world.'
Tim Cook, who replaced Mr Jobs as Apple chief executive, pictured right, said: 'Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.'John Sculley, former chief executive of Apple, said: 'Steve Jobs was intensely passionate at making an important difference in the lives of his fellow humans while he was on this planet. He never was into money or measured his life through owning stuff. The world knows Steve Jobs as the brilliant genius who transformed technology into magic. A part of Steve still lives within all of us through his beautifully designed products and his no-compromises media experiences. Steve Jobs captured our imagination with his creativity. His legacy is far more than being the greatest CEO ever. A world leader is dead, but the lessons his leadership taught us live on.
Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, said: 'People sometimes have goals in life. Steve Jobs exceeded every goal he set himself.
'We've lost something we won't get back. The way I see it, though, the way people love products he put so much into creating means he brought a lot of life to the world.'
Larry Page, co-founder and chief executive of Google, said: 'He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it. His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me.'
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, pictured right, said: 'From the earliest days of Google, whenever Larry and I sought inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed to look no farther thanCupertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now). And I have witnessed it in person the few times we have met. On behalf of all of us at Google and more broadly in technology, you will be missed very much. My condolences to family, friends, and colleagues at Apple.'
Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter, said: 'Once in a rare while, somebody comes along who doesn't just raise the bar, they create an entirely new standard of measurement. RIP SteveJobs'
Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of Newscorp, pictured right, said: 'Today, we lost one of the most influential thinkers, creators and entrepreneurs of all time. Steve Jobs was simply the greatest CEO of his generation. While I am deeply saddened by his passing, I'm reminded of the stunning impact he had in revolutionizing the way people consume media and entertainment. My heart goes out to his family and to everyone who had the opportunity to work beside him in bringing his many visions to life.'
Steve Case, Founder of AOL, said: 'I feel honored to have known Steve Jobs. He was the most innovative entrepreneur of our generation. His legacy will live on for the ages.'
Dmitri Medvedev, Russian President, pictured right, said : 'People like Steve Jobs change our world. My sincere condolences to his loved ones and to everyone who admired his intellect and talent'.
GS Choi, chief executive of Samsung, which is currently involved in a major court battle with Apple regarding patents, said Jobs was an 'innovative spirit' who 'introduced numerous revolutionary changes to the information technology industry'.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair said: 'As much as anyone in any walk of life in the early 21st century he changed people's lives simply by imagination and determination. His memory will serve as a symbol of what the human mind can achieve.'
British Prime Minister David Cameron, pictured right, and Labour leader Ed Miliband both paid tribute to Mr Jobs using Twitter.
Mr Cameron said: 'Steve Jobs transformed the way we work and play; a creative genius who will be sorely missed. Our thoughts are with his family.'
Mr Miliband said: 'Very sad to hear about the death of Steve Jobs. His work had a huge impact on our lives and he inspired thousands of young minds.'
Paul Allan, co-founder of Microsoft, said: 'We've lost a unique tech pioneer and auteur who knew how to make amazingly great products. Steve fought a long battle against tough odds in a very brave way. He kept doing amazing things in the face of all that adversity. As someone who has had his own medical challenges, I couldn't help but be encouraged by how he persevered.'
Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-CEOs of Blackberry-maker Research in Motion, said : 'Steve Jobs was a great visionary and a respected competitor.'
New Yorkmayor Michael Bloomberg, said theU.S. had 'lost a genius who will be remembered with Edison and Einstein'.
Jeff Bewkes, chief executive of Time Warner, said: 'The world is a better place because of Steve, and the stories our company tells have been made richer by the products he created. He was a dynamic and fearless competitor, collaborator, and friend. In a society that has seen incredible technological innovation during our lifetimes, Steve may be the one true icon whose legacy will be remembered for a thousand years.'
Lord Sugar said: 'Gutted Steve Jobs died. We started our computer biz at same time and were competitors through the 80s.Great visionary. Sadly missed. RIP'
Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Inc, pictured right, said: 'Today the world lost a visionary leader, the technology industry lost an iconic legend and I lost a friend and fellow founder. The legacy of Steve Jobs will be remembered for generations to come.'
Bob Iger, chief executive of Walt Disney, said: 'Steve Jobs was a great friend as well as a trusted advisor. His legacy will extend far beyond the products he created or the businesses he built. It will be the millions of people he inspired, the lives he changed, and the culture he defined. Steve was such an 'original,' with a thoroughly creative, imaginative mind that defined an era. Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started.'
Steven Spielberg, film producer, said: 'Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.”
Manmohan Singh, said he was saddened at the demise of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, calling him an innovative man who had taught the world new ways to communicate and connect.
Abhinav Srivastav- 3 apples changed our life 1st apple of adam & eve 2nd apple of newtons invention of gravity & 3rd apple of steve jobs and now waiting 4th Apple who changing the world.....!!!
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