Steve Jobs, a man whose life is an example of sheer brilliance, inspiration and insight beyond words; the incredible genius behind Apple computers and other revolutionary products deserves to be praised for his contribution to technology that changed the way of life.
This entrepreneurial legend was born on 24th February 1955 in San Francisco, California. Adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs who was a middle class couple, he lived most of his childhood in Mountain View, Santa Clara. The place which became known as the ‘Silicon Valley’ in the early 1950s laid the grounds for Steve’s immensely successful career. The growing years of Steve’s life consisted of gizmos and other electrics being worked by the neighboring engineers. He enrolled in Reeds College initially but soon dropped out after realizing that he was more interested in fruitarian diet and philosophy. He moved to a hippie community in Oregon where his pastime was cultivating apples.
Although incredibly smart, Jobs lacked right guidance. During his high school years he befriended Steve Wozniak who was a computer engineer not knowing that this friendship would alter his life course. Steve took up a job at Atari as a video game designer for a short while. At the age of 21 he started ‘Apple Computers’ along with Steve Wozniak. Their computers were user friendly, smaller, cheaper and easily available for the common people. The first model, the Apple I made sales of 774, 000 dollars. This figure increased by 700% to 139,000 million dollars.
The business started undergoing a downfall in sales and profits in the early 1980s despite the heavy marketing of Macintosh. As a result the executives at Apple started phasing out Jobs blaming him for the loss they were suffering. Consequently, he resigned from his post of CEO at Apples only to start a new company known as NeXT, Inc. He purchased another company in the following year which was later named ‘Pixar Animation Studios’. Steve believed in this new venture so much so that he invested 50 million dollars of his own money into it. This company is the producer of the smash hit animations such as ‘Toy Story’, ‘Finding Nemo’ and ‘The Incredibles’. Pixar Studios was bought by Walt Disney in 2006 with Jobs remaining its biggest shareholder.
NeXT Inc. was not as successful as Steve would have hoped it to be. It was purchased by Apple in 1997 with Steve Jobs back as Apple’s CEO. The person who was blamed for the downfall was the one to bring back its lost glory and this time never to leave again. He was wiser, older and more experienced. The introduction of inventive and trendy products such as iMac combined with huge and effective marketing strategies worked the magic and the once again the consumers had their loyalties with Apple.
Steve was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and after a surgery the tumor was removed successfully. Steve was a very private man and disclosed very little about his ailing health which did not seem to get in the way of his flourishing accomplishments. In the following years he presented other ground-breaking products such as the MacBook Air, iPhone and the iPod.
Steve Jobs died on 5th October 2011. We have this visionary entrepreneur to thank for providing the world remarkable innovations. His whole career is an epitome of greatness and belief in oneself.
