Our monthly “Geek of the Month” continues. From the humble Linus Torvalds, we will pass it over to the man who was newly named by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful person in business. He is the heart and soul of Apple Inc. and the father of what is now known as the most popular electronic gadget ever --the iPod. He is Mr. Steve Jobs.Steve Jobs is a great innovator. He help popularized the use of personal computer back in the late 70’s. Since then, he developed products that are both useful and aesthetically pleasing. He is also well-loved for his good-taste and personality. His positive charisma is even described as “reality distortion field” (RDF). In essence, RDF is the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, and marketing.
To know more about this legendary man, I have compiled some important facts that you may find interesting:
Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco to American Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian Abdulfattah John Jandali, a graduate student who later became a political science professor.One week after birth, Jobs was put up for adoption by his unmarried mother, who was also in graduate school. He was adopted by Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California.They gave him the name Steven Paul Jobs. His biological parents later married and gave birth to Jobs' sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, whom Jobs did not meet until they were adults.He 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.
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.
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).
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. Jobs' insistence that average people should be able to write custom "mission-critical" applications formed the basis of Interface Builder, which Berners-Lee utilized to do just that — by writing a program entitled "WorldWideWeb 1.0".
* 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 underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s, but his choice ultimately became an expandable, solid foundation for an operating system. Apple would later acquire this so
In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for US$402 million. The deal was finalized in early 1997, 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.
Some Famous Quotations of Steve Jobs:
"Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?"
"I want to put a ding in the universe."
"I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
"To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines."
"Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?"
"Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation."
"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
Special thanks to: wikipedia.org
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