Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer Corporation, is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our generation. His success story is legendary.
His unwed mother decided to put him for adoption immediately after Steve was born because he was "an unexpected baby".
He went to college but decided to drop out because it was too expensive. Recalling his time there Steve Jobs said, "I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."
Innovative Entrepreneur
At 20, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976 after Steve saw a computer Wozniak designed for himself. Jobs named their company – Apple in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.
Later that year, the duo debuted the Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California. A local store offered to buy 50 machines and to finance the production, the duo had to sell their most expensive possessions. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van while Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator.2
The company's second product called Apple II became such a hit that it is credited to be the best selling computer in the 1970s and early 1980s. By 1982 however, his company sales sagged in the face of competition from IBM’s new PC.
Apple Inc. started working on a new machine (‘insanely great’ according to Jobs) called the Macintosh. Steve Jobs was reported to commandeered the project, ruthlessly pushing its computer engineers and flying a pirate flag above the building where the team worked.
Inspirational leader
Introduced in 1984, by 1986 the Mac was a huge success.
After 10 years, starting from 2 kids working in a garage, Apple computer had grown into a $2 billion dollar company with over 4000 employees.
An internal power struggle in Apple ended with Jobs being stripped of his duties in 1985 and so he left the company
A tragedy? Not at all!
"It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life," said Steve Jobs later on.
Steve Jobs is also a Former Chairman and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which is popular for its production of animated films such as The Incredibles and Toy Story . The firm was bought by Walt Disney Studios for $7.4 billion in stock, making Jobs the biggest individual shareholder at Disney.
Steve Jobs did wonders as his company teetered on the brink of collapse
Having left Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs founded NeXT Computer.
Meanwhile, Apple Computer has been struggling and in 1996, it bough NeXT for US$402 million, bringing Steve Jobs back at the helm of the firm he founded. Steve Jobs proved to be a great leader."The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament," he said and managed to completely turn the company around and back to profitability.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he looked at the number of proposed research and development projects. Then he stopped most of them. Today, the Apple brand is known for its small but value-added product range and launch program. The impact of this simple change, according to Jobs, "comes from saying 'no' to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much....it’s only by saying 'no' that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”
The strategy has served him well. Apple Inc. has regained its foothold in the computers and electronics industry and has even successfully branched out into the portable music business with the iPod MP3 player, iTunes digital music software and the iTunes Music Store. I don’t know what mettle Steve Jobs is made of…….?
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