Steve Jobs

gigatos | January 26, 2022

Summary

Stephen Paul (February 24, 1955 (1955-02-24), San Francisco, California, USA – October 5, 2011, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, California, USA) was an American entrepreneur, inventor and industrial designer widely recognized as a pioneer of the information technology era. Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Apple Corporation. Co-founder and CEO of Pixar Film Studios.

In the late 1970s Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak developed one of the first personal computers with great commercial potential. The Apple II computer was the first mass-produced Apple product created by Steve Jobs. Jobs later saw the commercial potential of the mouse-driven graphical interface, leading to the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh.

After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a company that developed a computer platform for universities and businesses. In 1986 he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, turning it into Pixar. He remained the CEO of Pixar and a major shareholder until the studio was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2006, making Jobs the largest private shareholder and board member of Disney.

Difficulties developing a new operating system for the Mac led to NeXT”s purchase by Apple in 1996 to use NeXTSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X. As part of the deal, Jobs was promoted to an advisor to Apple. By 1997 Jobs had regained control of Apple by taking over the corporation. Under his leadership, the company was saved from bankruptcy and a year later was turning a profit. Over the next decade, Jobs led the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, as well as the development of the Apple Store, iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore. The success of these products and services, which provided several years of consistent financial returns, allowed Apple to become the most expensive publicly traded company in the world in 2011. Many commentators have called Apple”s rebirth one of the greatest accomplishments in business history. At the same time, Jobs was criticized for his authoritarian management style, aggressive actions toward competitors, and his desire for total control of products even after they are sold to customers.

Jobs received public recognition and a number of awards for his influence on the technology and music industries. He is often called the “visionary” and even the “father of the digital revolution. Jobs was a brilliant speaker and took presentations of innovative products to a new level, turning them into fascinating shows. His easily recognizable figure in a black turtleneck, worn jeans and sneakers is surrounded by a kind of cult following.

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955. His parents were unmarried students: Abdulfattah (John) Jandali, a native of Syria, and Joan Schieble, from a Catholic family of German immigrants. Joan was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and Jandali was a teaching assistant there. Since Joan”s relatives objected to their relationship and her father, who was dying, threatened to disinherit her, she had to go to a private doctor in San Francisco to give birth and then put the child up for adoption.

When Steve was two years old, the Jobses adopted a girl, Patty, and three years later the family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View. Paul was an auto mechanic and worked for the CIT finance company. He repaired old cars for sale in the family garage to earn money for Steve”s education and fulfill obligations to his biological parents. Paul also tried to instill in his son a love of the auto mechanic profession. This occupation did not appeal to Steve, but through cars his father introduced him to the basics of electronics. Together they took apart and reassembled radios and televisions, and as a result Steve became interested and passionate about this kind of technology. Clara Jobs worked as an accountant at Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech companies that later became part of Silicon Valley. She taught Steve to read before he went to school.

School classes frustrated Steve with their formalism. The teachers at Mona-Loma Elementary School characterized him as a troublemaker, and only one teacher, Mrs. Hill, could see the student”s great ability and approach him. When Steve was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Hill gave him “bribes” in the form of candy, money, and do-it-yourself kits for doing well, thereby stimulating his learning. This quickly bore fruit: soon Steve began to study diligently without any reinforcement, and at the end of the school year he passed his exams so brilliantly that the principal offered to transfer him from the fourth grade straight into the seventh. As a result, by decision of his parents, Steve was enrolled in the sixth grade, that is, in high school. It was a school in Crittenden, a few blocks from Mona-Lom, but in a very different, crime-ridden neighborhood. Both on the street and in the school itself, bullies gave Jobs no pass. A year later Steve gave his parents an ultimatum to transfer to another school. The family had to buy a house in a more decent neighborhood, in South Los Altos, with their last savings.

Jobs went on to attend high school and Homestead High School in Cupertino. After the family moved, his father took a job as a mechanic in the nearby town of Santa Clara in the heart of the future Silicon Valley, at Spectra-Physics.

Steve talked to Larry Lang, an engineer who lived next door to Jobs” old house. Lang brought Steve to Hewlett-Packard”s research club. “An engineer from some lab would be invited to class, and he would come in and tell me what he was working on now,” Jobs later recalled. It was here that Steve first saw the HP 9100A personal computer (a programmable calculator), which made a huge impression on him. The club members were working on their own science projects, and Steve decided to build a digital frequency meter. When he needed parts made by Hewlett-Packard to realize his idea, the thirteen-year-old Jobs, without thinking twice, called the head of the company, Bill Hewlett. As a result, he got not only the parts he needed, but also a job on the assembly line at HP at the end of his first year at Homestead, thanks to Hewlett”s personal invitation. In addition to this job, which aroused the envy of his peers, Steve delivered newspapers and the following year served in the warehouse at the Haltek electronics store. By the age of fifteen, Jobs already had his first car of his own – a two-color Nash Metropolitan, bought with the financial participation of his father. Paul Jobs also installed an MG engine in the car. A year later Steve, having saved up some more money, was able to exchange this car for a red Fiat 850 Coupé. At the same time Steve Jobs began to socialize with hippies, listen to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, smoke marijuana and use LSD, which caused him to clash with his father for a while.

Jobs befriended his classmate Bill Fernandez, who was also interested in electronics. Fernandez introduced Jobs to a computer enthusiast, a real “legend” of the school, Steven Wozniak (also known as “Woz”), five years his senior. In 1969, Woz and Fernandez began assembling a small computer, which they dubbed “the crème de la crème” and showed it to Jobs. So Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became best friends:

We sat with him for a long time on the sidewalk in front of Bill”s house and shared stories-we told each other about our pranks and the devices we had developed. I felt we had a lot in common. I usually have a hard time explaining to people all the intricacies of the electrical devices I was building, but Steve grasped everything on the fly. I liked him immediately.

Jobs and Wozniak collected Bob Dylan records, put on musical light shows and a variety of pranks at school.

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“The Blue Box

Jobs had his first real business project while still in high school. In September 1971, Wozniak, who had already been in university for a long time, learned from Esquire magazine about some “phone freaks” who had learned how to break phone codes and make free calls around the world. Hacking a telephone line was done with an audible imitation of a tone of a certain frequency. Then a number had to be dialed, also through a simulated tone call. As it turned out, there was a whole subculture of freeloaders who hacked into telephone networks. One of them, hiding under the pseudonym of Captain Crunch, discovered that the whistle that manufacturers put in packages of oatmeal cereal of the same name (“Cap”n Crunch”) could produce the sound of the right tone, suitable for picking up the line. Crunch used a homemade device called a “blue box” to dial the number afterwards. Wozniak and Jobs, who were still servicing air conditioners at the time, were inspired by the idea of making such a “box. Wozniak”s first analog prototype was flawed and did not produce reliable tone signals. Then Wozniak made a fully digital device that reproduced frequencies with the necessary accuracy, and the device worked.

At first the friends amused themselves by calling all over the world and arranging pranks. However, Jobs soon realized the commercial potential of their invention. They set up artisanal production and successful sales of “blue boxes” among students and local residents, although the business was illegal and rather risky. At first it cost about $80 to make one “box”, but then Wozniak made a circuit board which allowed 10 to 20 “boxes” to be made at a time, and the cost per piece dropped to $40. Friends sold the finished “boxes” for $ 150 each, the income was divided equally. They made and managed to sell about a hundred “boxes” and made good money. It was decided to stop the business after a couple of unpleasant incidents with potential buyers and the police. Perhaps the story with the “blue boxes” convinced Jobs that electronics can not only bring joy, but also bring a good income. This story also laid the foundation for their future cooperation: Wozniak invents another ingenious gizmo for the good of humanity, while Jobs figures out how to design and market it in order to make good money.

In the summer of 1972, after graduating from high school, Steve Jobs left his parents” home and settled with his girlfriend, Chris-Ann Brennan, in a cabin in the mountains above Los Altos, despite his parents” objections. That same year he enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. It was a private liberal arts university, one of the most expensive in America, and his parents, who had been saving every cent for their son”s education for many years, had a hard time paying for his education. But Steve didn”t want to go anywhere else, and most of his parents” savings were spent on his education at Reed. Reed was famous for its free-spirited and hippie atmosphere, while the standards of education were very high and the curriculum saturated. At Reed, Jobs first became seriously interested in Eastern spiritual practices, especially Zen Buddhism. At the same time he became a convinced vegetarian and began to experiment with fasting.

At Reed College Jobs met Daniel Kottke, who became his best friend along with Wozniak, and the natural-born leader Robert Friedland, student council president, apple-farm manager and follower of Eastern philosophy, who had a great influence on Jobs:

Robert was a communicative, charismatic guy, a real salesman. Steve, when I met him, was shy, secretive, kept to himself. I think it was Robert who taught him how to sell, how to come out of his shell, open up and master the situation.

Freedland, interested in Hinduism, became friendly with local Krishnaists and lured Jobs and Kottke along with him. In the summer of 1973, Friedland traveled to India, to the guru of Ram Dass, Nim Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji, in search of enlightenment. On his return, Friedland took a spiritual name, donned Indian clothes and sandals, and paraded around campus as such. By all means, Jobs wanted to repeat Friedland”s path and “find himself.

After six months of study, Jobs dropped out of college. Since the tedious compulsory program did not interest him, he saw no point in studying it. He was expelled, but for another year, with the permission of the dean”s office, Jobs took creative classes he was really interested in, including calligraphy classes. Jobs would later say:

If I hadn”t been into calligraphy in college, the Mac wouldn”t have had many fonts, proportional kerning, and interlining. And since Windows is copied from the Mac, no personal computer would have any of these things at all.

While in college, Jobs continued to live a bohemian lifestyle, though he slept on his friends” dorm floors, collected Coke bottles to feed himself, and went to the Krishna Temple on Sundays for free lunches.

In February 1974, Jobs took a job as a technician at the fledgling Atari company in Los Gatos, California. The company was producing video games and already had one absolute hit, the two-player Pong arcade simulator. Jobs, making $5 an hour, was one of its first fifty employees. Atari, Jobs was mainly engaged in the “fine-tuning” of games, putting forward interesting and original design suggestions. But there he was immediately disliked for his arrogance and untidy appearance. But Nolan Bushnell, the founder and head of Atari, liked Steve and transferred Jobs to the night shift, keeping a promising employee:

He was a philosopher, unlike many of the people I worked with. We often talked about free will and predestination. I argued that everything is predetermined, that we are all programmed. And if you have reliable raw data, you can predict the actions of other people. Steve thought otherwise.

In April 1974, Jobs traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. And Jobs managed to convince Atari management to pay his way to Munich, where he carried out an assignment related to the company”s business. In India, Jobs, on the advice of Friedland, was going to visit the guru Nim Karoli Baba, but it turned out that he had died in September 1973. On the way, Jobs contracted dysentery and lost 15 pounds. He had to stay in the countryside for recuperation. In early summer, Kottke joined Jobs. Together they made the long trek to the ashram of Hariakhan Baba. They spent a lot of time traveling by bus from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and back, and then to Himachal Pradesh and back. Jobs did not seek another guru, but tried to achieve enlightenment on his own through ascesis, fasting and simplicity. According to Kottke”s recollections, Jobs failed to achieve “inner silence” in India, and to his close friends Steve admitted that he conceived the trip and generally immersed himself in the trials of various spiritual and mystical practices to numb the pain of realizing that he had been abandoned immediately after birth. After a seven-month stay in India, Jobs returned to the U.S. gaunt, red-brown with a tan, with a shaved head and wearing traditional Indian clothing.

After his return, Jobs was still able to find a spiritual mentor, right in Los Altos. He was Kobun Chino Otogawa, a disciple of Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Buddhism Center and author of Zen Consciousness, Beginner”s Consciousness. Otogawa gave evening lectures and meditations with his students in Los Altos on Wednesdays. Jobs became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, participated in long meditations at the Tassahara Zen Center and even considered joining the Eiheiji Shrine in Japan, but his mentor persuaded him to stay in America.

At this time Jobs was experimenting with psychedelics. He later referred to his LSD experience as “one of the two or three most important things he ever did,” adding that people who had not tried “acid” could never fully understand it.

In early 1975, Jobs returned to Atari. At that time, the game Breakout was being reworked, and a bonus was announced for optimizing the game”s circuitry in the amount of $100 for each chip excluded from the circuitry. Jobs volunteered to take on the job, but as he had little understanding of electronic circuit design, he had to turn to Wozniak, then working at Hewlett-Packard. The additional difficulty was the deadline – Jobs said that the work had to be done in 4 days. It usually took several months to develop such a circuit, but Jobs was able to convince Wozniak that he could do it in four days.

Wozniak practically didn”t sleep for four days, working during the day at his main job, but he completed the task, having developed the game scheme in the allotted time. To the great surprise of the Atari engineers, he used only 45 chips (similar circuits then contained 130-170 chips, and the most successfully developed ones contained 70-100 chips). For this work, Jobs gave Wozniak a check for $350. However, later it turned out that Jobs had cheated his partner, saying that Atari only paid him $700. Jobs was silent about the declared bonus of $100 for each chip saved, which amounted to $5,000. It turned out that this bonus was completely appropriated by Jobs. In addition, Jobs also made up the four-day deadline because he wanted to get to the Friedland farm in time for the apple harvest and was in a hurry to get on a plane. After getting the money, he quit his job at Atari.

On March 5, 1975, the first meeting of a group of enthusiasts who called themselves the Homebrew Computer Club took place. Club members met in Menlo Park, in the garage of Gordon French, an unemployed engineer. They were also engineers and computer aficionados, all with a common desire to change the common perception of computers as very expensive and unwieldy devices that required special skills to use. The intention was to introduce new technologies into the lives of ordinary people by promoting self-design and handmade computers. Steve Wozniak was present at the meeting. Already after the first meeting, he was very enthusiastic about designing the machine that would later become known as the Apple I. The club became Wozniak”s second home, especially since the ideas he heard at the meetings were becoming more and more audacious and ambitious – it was already talking about a “computer revolution” for the benefit of all mankind. This kind of problem definition suited Wozniak”s ideas perfectly, and by the end of June he had his first unique result for the time: the display of characters typed on the keyboard. Woz immediately demonstrated his invention to Steve Jobs, who was impressed with it.

After this, Jobs also began to attend the “Homemade Computer Club”, in any case, in 1975 he was at several meetings: Woz demonstrated his computer to other club members at the end of meetings, and Jobs helped him carry a television, which served as a display, as well as with the setup. In addition, Jobs was able to get Woz”s computer the best, most expensive and very scarce at the time Intel “dynamic” memory (DRAM) chips for free. The club meetings were already attended by over 100 people, and meetings began to be held in one of the classrooms of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, chaired by pacifist engineer Lee Felsenstein.

As in the case of the blue boxes, Jobs soon started talking about the commercial potential of Wozniak”s invention. First of all, he persuaded Woz to stop handing out computer blueprints to anyone who wanted one, even though this did not meet the principles of the Home Computer Club, created for the free exchange of ideas and unselfish mutual help. Jobs also pointed out that club members worked hard on the blueprints, but projects were usually never finished because the authors lacked the time and skill. Steve suggested that Woz sell printed circuit boards in the club, which means that he would take on the most difficult part of the work, and the buyer would only have to solder the chips to the board according to the finished blueprints. Jobs estimated that it would cost $20 to produce one board, but he intended to sell it for twice as much. Wozniak was initially skeptical of the idea: the business required at least $1,000 in start-up investments that could be recouped after selling 50 units of merchandise. Although the club already had about 500 members, many of them were supporters of fancy off-the-shelf solutions like the Altair 8800, and Woz didn”t see enough customers. But Jobs knew his friend too well. He didn”t convince Wozniak that the company was sure to be profitable, but instead painted their venture as an exciting adventure. And it worked:

I thought it would be great. Two best friends organizing their own company. Cool. I realized I really wanted it. How could I say no?

To raise the necessary amount of money, Jobs had to sell his “hippie” Volkswagen T1 minivan and switch to a bicycle, while Wozniak sold off one of his main treasures, the HP-65 programmable calculator. From the proceeds, Jobs paid an Atari employee he knew to create a circuit board, which could then be put into mass production. In January 1976, the first batch of boards arrived at the companions” disposal.

Jobs needed a third voice in case he disagreed with Wozniak, so Steve took on another engineer from Atari, his friend Ron Wayne, who had a bad experience running his own casino slot machine business and therefore had a good grasp of the law and paperwork. Jobs also hoped, with Wayne”s help, to convince Wozniak to quit designing calculators for Hewlett-Packard and concentrate entirely on their business.

All that remained was to register the company and then it was time to start selling the goods. But first it was necessary to decide on the name of the future company. Jobs had just returned from Oregon, from Freedland”s All-One Farm. The farm was a real hippie commune – Steve had pruned the apple trees there and had even gone on an apple diet, becoming a fruitarian and deciding that now he was clean and that washing once a week was enough for him. He returned to Los Altos absolutely happy. Woz met him at the airport and drove him in his car into town. On the way, they were choosing a name for the future company, since they had to apply for registration the next morning. Jobs suggested “Apple Computer:

The name sounded fun, energetic, and not scary. The word “apple” softened the serious “computer. In addition, in the phone book

Jobs said that if nothing better was proposed by the morning, the Apple name would remain. And so it happened. So the computer designed by Wozniak was called Apple I.

The company was incorporated on April 1, 1976. Wayne drafted the tripartite partnership agreement, he also wrote the first Apple I manual and created the first Apple logo. However, after 12 days, Wayne, in his own words, realized that he “couldn”t keep up” with the pace set by the partners and left the company, taking his share – $800, and then getting another $1,500 for a written waiver of any claims.

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Apple I

At a regular meeting of the Homemade Computer Club, Jobs and Wozniak gave their first computer presentation. Steve Jobs, who was a natural-born orator, spoke passionately and convincingly, addressing rhetorical questions to the audience. But only one person showed interest in buying the Apple I: Paul Terrell, owner of Byte, a computer store that had recently opened on Camino Real in Menlo Park. The next day Jobs showed up at his store barefoot – and made a deal that he and Wozniak would later call the biggest one of their lives. Terrell ordered 50 at once, but he wasn”t interested in circuit boards, he wanted computers that came complete, and he was paying $500 for each. Jobs immediately agreed, even though they didn”t have the funds to fulfill such an order. Jobs needed $15,000, but even then he found a way out: he was able to borrow $5,000 from his friends, and got the components from the Cramer Electronics distributor on credit for 30 days, with Terrell as a guarantor, who actually financed the entire project.

The associates occupied Jobs” house and garage. Work began to boil, and Steve enlisted everyone he could. His friend Daniel Kottke and his pregnant sister, Patti, were inserting chips, getting a dollar a charge. Elizabeth Holmes, Daniel”s ex-girlfriend, who had a background in jewelry, initially did the chip soldering. But when she accidentally dripped solder on the board, Jobs announced that they didn”t have any spare parts and put her on the books and paperwork. He took care of the soldering, though. Quality control and, if necessary, troubleshooting were done by Wozniak. During this collaboration Jobs first showed himself to be a rather rigid, authoritarian leader. He made an exception only for Woz, to whom he never raised his voice during their friendship and cooperation.

A month later the order was ready: 50 computers were delivered to Terrell by the companions and paid off the loan for the components. The Apple I did not come with keyboards, monitors, or power supplies, not even a case – only a complete motherboard. Despite this, the Apple I is widely regarded as the first computer ever to be supplied by a manufacturer ready-made, because other computers of the time, including the Altair, came to market as kits which had to be assembled by the retailer or end-customer. The look of the Apple I clearly didn”t match Terrell”s expectations, but thanks to Jobs” diplomatic skills, he was accommodating this time too, agreeing to pay for the order. The production of the boards was much cheaper than expected because Jobs managed to negotiate with the supplier for a significant discount on components. With the saved money they managed to assemble another 50 devices, which Jobs and Wozniak sold to acquaintances from the “Homemade Computer Club”, making a profit. Later the companions managed to sell more than a hundred more Apple I computers to other stores and acquaintances. Elizabeth was employed as the company”s accountant with a salary of $4 an hour, and Clara, Jobs” mother, answered the phone under the guise of a secretary. Customers and business associates who had never been to Jobs” house had the impression that the address really was a solid firm with a large staff.

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Apple II

According to Stephen Wozniak, the Apple I was just an elaboration of the ARPANET terminal he had invented earlier and contained no electronic innovations except for the use of “dynamic” memory. Wozniak had some wild ideas while working on the Apple I, but wanted to finish the project as quickly as possible, so Woz decided to pursue them later, in a separate model designed from scratch. The Apple II board was completed by August 1976. The new Apple product had many revolutionary features: working with color, sound, connecting game controllers, and more.

Jobs drew conclusions from the Apple I sales experience and realized that Paul Terrell was right:

We wanted our customers to be more than just a limited group of hobbyists who know where to buy a keyboard, a transformer, and assemble computers themselves. For one such connoisseur, there are a thousand people who would prefer to buy a device that is ready to use.

Due to the reorientation of the business towards the mass unsophisticated consumer, the first serious disagreements between Jobs and Wozniak arose. Jobs suggested leaving only two slots: for a printer and a modem. Wozniak insisted that there should be eight slots: “People like me will think of something else to add to their computer. But Jobs preferred to decide for himself what people needed. In the end, Steve had to give in, because the always compliant Woz this time delivered an ultimatum, suggesting that his partner look for another computer to sell.

Another crucial conclusion Jobs soon reached was that the design of the device was of the utmost importance. In August Jobs and Wozniak attended the first Personal Computer Festival (PC”76) in Atlantic City, where they demonstrated the Apple I. Jobs noted that for all the undeniable functional advantages of their project, it lost out in presentability to the Sol-20 computer (designed by Home Computer Club members Gordon French, Lee Felsenstein, and Bob Marsh.

Realizing this fact, Steve began to approach every component of the computer in terms of design excellence. He saw a Cuisinart food processor in a store and decided that the Apple II needed a lightweight molded plastic case. Then Jobs decided to get rid of the fan in the power supply because, he said, the fan inside the computer went against the principles of Zen and distracted from work. Even the topology of the motherboard was approached with the same principles, rejecting the first scheme because the “tracks” did not seem harmonious enough.

Jobs commissioned a $1,500 consultant, Jerry Manock, familiar from the “Homemade Computer Club,” to design the case. Atari designer Al Alcorn, who was well-versed in electrical engineering. Holt asked a high price, but designed a switching power supply and was eventually enlisted by Apple.

After estimating the costs, Jobs realized that they could not afford to mass-produce a complete computer with a plastic case and original design. We were talking about a hundred thousand dollars to produce the enclosures, and at least two hundred thousand dollars to put the computers themselves into production. Jobs decided to try to sell the rights to the whole Atari development, and again contacted Al Alcorn. Like Bushnell, Al was a man of informal views, he arranged for Jobs to meet Atari director Joe Keenan. Nothing came of it:

Jobs came in to promote his new product, but Keenan barely listened to him. Steve smelled so bad that the old man felt sick to his stomach.

And when Jobs threw his bare feet right onto Keenan”s desk, the latter shouted him out the door.

Then Jobs held an Apple II presentation at the Commodore headquarters. During the presentation, Jobs behaved so arrogantly and self-righteously that Wozniak was ashamed of himself. Commodore”s management turned them down, but Jobs had no intention of giving up. He went back to Atari and offered Bushnell to invest $50,000 in the project in exchange for a third of Apple”s stock. Again the refusal, which Bushnell later regretted very much. Out of sympathy, Bushnell advised Jobs to contact Don Valentine, the founder of one of the first venture capital companies, Sequoia Capital, who used to be a marketing director at National Semiconductor and was involved in semiconductors.

Respectable and businesslike Don Valentine showed up at Jobs” garage in person. He was impressed by the environment and the appearance of the garage”s occupants:

Steve was trying his best to pass himself off as a neo-formal. Skinny, with a sparse beard, looking like Ho Chi Minh.

Markkula had a tremendous influence on Jobs, his authority for Steve was comparable to that of his father:

Mike took me under his wing. Our views on the world were much the same. Markkula argued that when you start a company, you should not strive to get rich, but simply do what you believe in. That is the only way to succeed.

After the founding of Apple Corporation, the Jobs family was able to breathe a sigh of relief when they finally got their own office on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino. The company already had about a dozen employees. The question of its president came up. Jobs, despite his obvious talents, ambition, and inflamed ego, was certainly not suited for the job, and after much persuasion he had to admit it. In February 1977 Markkula invited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to be CEO. Scotty – as he was nicknamed at Apple to distinguish him from Markkula – was reputed to be an experienced executive, and his main task was to tame Jobs. And it was really necessary: Steve, feeling out of place in the company because of the loss of his sole leadership, was becoming more and more rude, irascible and oppressive day by day:

Steve would come into the office, look at what I was doing, and declare that it was crap. He had no idea what it was or what it was for.

The new president”s handling of Jobs was not too good, but still better than anyone else”s. Jobs quickly realized why Markkula had hired Scott and began to rebel, causing scandals on insignificant occasions. For example, he despaired that everyone thought Wozniak was the sole author of the Apple II. Jobs always wanted to be first everywhere, and when Scott deliberately assigned him the No. 2 employee card and Woz as No. 1, Jobs once again threw a tearful tantrum. In the end, he demanded a card with the questionable number “zero”, just to get ahead of Wozniak. He got the card, but Jobs remained second on the Bank of America payroll, since the numbering was supposed to start with one, and no one was going to rearrange the employees because of their caprices. Scotty served as a lightning rod; since his arrival at the company, Jobs had never had so many conflicts with anyone as with him:

It was a question of who would overpower who, Steve and I. And I was stubborn. Steve had to be kept on his toes, and, of course, he didn”t like that.

From time to time both the president of the company and its charismatic leader had to yield in these disputes. One day Jobs was inspired by the idea of offering customers an unprecedented, at the time, one-year warranty, whereas the typical warranty period was only 90 days. And Scotty had to give in.

Without the help of Regis McKenna, Silicon Valley”s chief ad man, a real success could not be dreamed of. McKenna agreed rather quickly to cooperate with Apple. First of all, he commissioned his team to develop the company and product logo – the Victorian engraving style logo, invented by Wayne in his time, clearly did not correspond to the concept of simplicity as the cornerstone of quality design and was the exact opposite of the Apple II look. Art director Rob Yanof suggested two apple-shaped logos, one whole and one bitten, and several coloring options. Jobs said the whole apple could be confused with a cherry, so he chose the biting one. In addition, he went with six horizontal stripes of color, firstly, as a symbol of the main “trump card” of Apple II, the work in color, and secondly, because of its psychedelic character. This logo was approved and did not change until 1998.

In April 1977, the first West Coast Computer Fair was held, another regular of the “Homemade Computer Club. Jobs, on Markkula”s advice, decided to wow everyone with the scope of Apple”s display: he deposited $5,000 and booked an exhibit space in the center of the hall. The Apple booth was covered in black velvet, and an illuminated Plexiglas backdrop with the new company logo was installed. Jobs had only three computers in a complete set – that was how many samples of plastic enclosures the contractor from Palo Alto had managed to supply them with. They had to put empty boxes around the booth as if they contained computers, too. Jobs punished the employees by making them polish the three beige computer cases to a shine. For the occasion, he and Wozniak even ordered three-piece suits from the San Francisco atelier, which looked rather ridiculous on them. Jobs” efforts more than paid off: Apple received an order for 300 computers already at the fair, and the company also got its first foreign dealer – textile magnate Satoshi Mitsushima from Japan.

The company entered a phase of rapid sales growth and prosperity that lasted several years. Against this background, internal scandals and conflicts between its founders could be ignored. As for the Apple II, it was a phenomenally successful and profitable computer for 16 years. During that time, the company sold up to 6 million Apple II computers, including several modifications, and numerous clones were produced all over the world. The Apple II remains one of the most profitable projects in the history of the industry, and it is the result of a collaboration between engineer Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, manager and designer:

Woz created the greatest computer, but if it weren”t for Steve Jobs, his invention would still be gathering dust on the shelves of technology buffs.

However, such recognition was not enough for Jobs. He was confident that he was capable of achieving success that he would not have to share with anyone.

Also read, history – Second Boer War

Apple III

The first attempt to design and produce a computer with marketing objectives at the heart of its development from the beginning was the Apple III. Work on this model began in late 1978 under the direct supervision of Dr. Wendell Sander, since Wozniak was in charge of the Apple II, developing its various modifications, and did not consider it necessary to design anything else, since the ideal computer, in his opinion, had already been created. The Apple III project was actually handed over to the marketing department and Steve Jobs personally. The Apple III was a complete overhaul of Wozniak”s business-oriented computer, and the Apple II was to be repositioned as a junior model, an amateur computer for the home. Marketing experts figured out that business people who bought the Apple II for work tended to add two extra expansion cards to the computer, allowing them to work with spreadsheets. It was decided to supply everything together, in one case. At the same time, the size and shape of the enclosure were strictly defined by Jobs, and he didn”t allow them to be changed, nor were fans installed – the problem of heat dissipation was solved by the heavy aluminum enclosure. Jobs was the company”s vice president of research and development at the time, and his demands were met, regardless of their validity. In order not to lose Apple II fans, it was decided to leave the ability to boot in the old mode as well. In fact, they were two different computers in one case: the OS for the Apple III was redesigned, and the programs for the Apple II were not suitable for it.

The machine was announced and released on May 19, 1980, the release was accompanied by a grand advertising campaign. With the introduction of the Apple III, all work on the Apple II was curtailed, and the company”s resources were reallocated to a new project. However, it quickly became clear that the Apple III was unstable: computers were constantly failing due to overheating, too dense components on the circuit board, and poor connectors. In addition, there was virtually no quality software on the market for Apple III. It was also impossible to use the computer fully in Apple II mode, because the developers had blocked the connection of additional external boards. The machine had been fine-tuned, improving stability, but the reputation of the Apple III was already hopelessly ruined. In 1983, IBM PCs were in first place in terms of sales, leaving Apple products behind, and two years later the Apple III was completely discontinued:

Apple”s reporting documents from the early 1980s did not indicate that the company was still being pulled by the Apple II, and it might have seemed as if the Apple III was selling well, but analysts unanimously argued that it was a complete failure.

Also read, biographies – Milton Friedman

Apple Lisa

Steve Jobs cooled down on the Apple III during the development phase. However, his irrepressible energy demanded an outlet, and Jobs started a new project. He brought two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to Apple, and tasked them with developing an “advanced” computer based on a processor with a 16-bit architecture, costing around $2,000. Jobs commissioned Tripp Hawkins, a marketing specialist, to write the business plan. The head of the engineering group was the former director of HP Ken Rothmuller, later replaced by John Couch. Jobs named the project Lisa, after his newly born daughter, whom at the same time, he did not want to acknowledge. Similarly, he did not recognize the connection between her name and the name of the computer. Details of Jobs” personal life were passed on by word of mouth and had a negative impact on the company”s image. The PR managers from Regis McKenna”s agency had to invent an obscure acronym for “Local Integrated Systems Architecture,” which “deciphered” the name of the project. It was impossible to fool anyone in this way, and the company had alternative mock transcripts like “Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym”. Apple engineers got the job done by designing a better and more powerful computer than the Apple II, but a completely mediocre one that was essentially nothing new. The only bright spot was the applications written by engineer Bill Atkinson, in particular the high-level version of the Apple II”s Pascal programming language.

The Lisa situation did not suit Jobs at all: he needed a breakthrough, a move forward, not a repetition of what had been done. Jeff Raskin, Apple”s computer interface specialist and Bill Atkinson”s lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, came to help. Raskin and Atkinson persuaded Jobs to start working with Xerox PARC, a research center based in Palo Alto. Xerox, which specialized in copiers, had many advanced IT developments at its disposal, which were mostly of limited distribution. For example, the Xerox Alto, designed in 1973, had a graphical user interface, but it was never commercially available, and a few thousand Alto”s were used at the Xerox PARC and various universities. One year earlier, Xerox employee William English had invented the computer ball mouse. The company was also preparing to release the first publicly available object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk, with Larry Tesler working on its development.

Among other things, Xerox was involved in venture capital investments, and in the summer of 1979 the company”s management expressed an interest in buying Apple stock. Jobs immediately put forward a condition: 100 thousand shares at ten dollars apiece, and in return, Apple employees get access to the latest Xerox developments. The agreement was reached: Steve received an invitation to tour Xerox PARC for himself and several other Apple employees. The Xerox management felt that the “upstarts” from Apple wouldn”t understand anything about their developments anyway, and even if they could understand them, the cooperation would be mutually beneficial. Tesler was flattered by such attention from Jobs, because his own bosses were not very nice to him. Adele Goldberg, another Smalltalk developer, on the other hand, was outraged at the actions of her superiors who had suddenly decided to give up all their secrets to the competition and made every effort to keep Jobs and her colleagues as small as possible. They were shown a few text applications on Alto, nothing special. Jobs realized they were trying to fool him, so he called Xerox headquarters and demanded a second tour. This time he took with him Bill Atkinson and programmer Bruce Horn, who used to work at Xerox PARC. The Xerox staff again tried to get away with “little blood” by showing the guests the text editors, and then tried to pass off the open demo version of Smalltalk as a fully functional one. Again, it didn”t work: Atkinson and his colleagues quickly figured them out. Jobs lost his temper and complained over the phone to the head of Xerox”s venture capital department. The company management immediately contacted the science center and demanded that Jobs immediately be shown the full possibilities of the development. Goldberg had to give up.

Apple”s raid on Xerox PARC has been called the most audacious heist in the history of the IT industry. Jobs snatched up the most important Xerox secrets: Ethernet, object-oriented programming capabilities, graphical raster interface, the WYSIWYG principle, the mouse manipulator. It was not about sharing any codes, programs, or blueprints with Apple employees, but that was not required. The main thing was ideas, and it was a matter of time before they were implemented by Apple, which Atkinson estimated at around six months:

Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have never been shy about stealing great ideas.

If Jobs ever felt uneasy about this “theft” with the consent of the “robbed”, it should have passed in 1981 when the Xerox Star computer arrived in stores. The novelty from Xerox contained all the innovations Jobs had “stolen” a few years before Apple had a chance to use them, and yet it failed miserably in sales. Xerox had an excellent chance of capturing the computer market, but missed the opportunity. The next move was for Apple.

After his return from Xerox PARC, Jobs lured Larry Tesler and Xerox engineer Bobby Belville to Apple. He himself became even more enthusiastic about interfering in the work of the Lisa group, demanding, on the one hand, that the project implement Xerox ideas, all at a higher level of execution, and, on the other hand, that the computer remain available to the mass buyer. Jobs could easily call some engineer in the middle of the night and dictate his instructions to him, bypassing the direct management of the group. He also became more aggressive by the day. In the end, Jobs so terrorized the employees that Markkula and Scott, without looking at the status of the founder and main shareholder of the company, reorganized Apple behind his back. Jobs, 25, was removed as vice president of research and development and moved to the honorary chair of the board of directors, with no real powers. The position of head of development for Project Lisa was invented for Couch, and his decisions were now non-negotiable.

Thus, by the end of 1980, Steve Jobs found himself cut off from the project he himself had initiated:

I got upset. Markkula dumped me. He and Scotty decided that I wasn”t capable of leading the development of Lisa. I thought about it a lot.

Also read, biographies – Jean Dubuffet

Macintosh

Jeff Raskin, who had so timely drawn Jobs” attention to Xerox developments, had been in charge of another project with a “female” name at Apple since 1979: Annie. Raskin wanted to create an inexpensive, a thousand-dollar portable machine. It was supposed to fold up like a suitcase and look more like a household appliance than a computer. Soon after the project began, Raskin changed its name to Macintosh, after his favorite kind of apple. The corporation by this time occupied a separate building at 3 Bandley Drive, and a few blocks away, in the old Apple office on Stevens Creek, a small Macintosh project team worked away from the bosses. Progress was slow, but in addition to Raskin, there was a second “motor” in the group: Burrell Smith, a young self-taught engineer and a fan of Steve Wozniak. Smith managed almost impossible: to make a graphic interface on a single board using only standard components. The classified prototype Lisa by this time was built on five circuit boards and a huge number of custom components. The Macintosh prototype was three times cheaper and twice as fast. Not surprisingly, Raskin managed to save the project from being shut down several times. Jobs immediately switched from the Lisa project to the Macintosh.

The disagreement between Jobs and Ruskin was fundamental, and therefore insurmountable. Raskin designed the computer on the basis of its final price. He set the bar at $1,000, and began to see what could be done for that money. Raskin tried to squeeze as much as he could out of the limited budget, but he made little progress in terms of quality or appeal. Jobs embraced a different approach: first setting the problem, then the solution and, finally, the search for optimization and cheapening of the solution, but not at the expense of loss in quality or abandonment of goals. Besides, Jobs dreamed of taking revenge for the Lisa debacle and embodying, now in the Macintosh, all the technologies he had seen in the Xerox Science Center. Raskin, though he had personally led Jobs to these technologies, approved of only a few of them: namely, the windowing and bitmap graphics, but he did not like pictograms and mouse-type manipulators at all. Bill Atkinson, a former student of Raskin”s, supported Jobs, and Steve decided to re-staff the Macintosh team, retaining his loyalists and inviting a few more specialists.

Jobs would escalate: Raskin would give orders or schedule meetings – Jobs would cancel them. In addition, Steve challenged the Lisa team with a $5,000 bet with John Couch that the Macintosh group would be the first to release an innovative product and that it would be better and cheaper than the Lisa machine. Raskin sought help from the company”s management, sending Mike Scott a letter titled “Working with and on Steve Jobs:

He is a disgusting leader… It is impossible to work with him… He regularly misses meetings. He acts without thinking and without really understanding the situation… He does not trust anyone… When he is told new ideas, he criticizes them at first, saying that they are nonsense and a waste of time. But if the idea is good, soon he starts telling everyone about it as if it was his idea….

Scotty passed the difficult decision on to Markkula. He summoned Jobs and Raskin. Steve, as often happened to him at critical moments, cried, but did not change his position. It was unthinkable to suspend Jobs for the second time in a row, and there was no particular reason for it either – the project under Ruskin was clearly stalling. Taking advantage of the situation by sending the conflicted founder away from the center of the corporation to solve a secondary and clearly unpromising task seemed like a much more tempting idea. Jobs looked at all this differently and was even happy about the new assignment:

They decided to make concessions and find me some business. That suited me fine. It was like I was back in my garage and running my own little team again.

At the beginning of 1981 Jobs took over the Macintosh project. Jeff Raskin was placed on forced leave and resigned from Apple. Raskin was soon given the opportunity to complete his development at Canon. The specialized Canon Cat desktop computer, released in 1987 from his design, contained many unique ideas, but was not a commercial success.

Jobs immediately began to renew the Mac team, soon there were about 20 people, but Jobs continued to recruit new employees. To each candidate, he ceremonially showed a prototype computer, watching for reactions. If a candidate became animated, asked questions about everything, and was eager to try it out, Jobs enrolled him in the group.

Jobs decided to sacrifice the portability of the computer while strictly limiting its size. Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama made plaster models of the case, but Jobs made new comments each time. He wanted the computer to look as friendly as possible, and gradually the appearance of the Mac began to remotely resemble a human face. Jobs sought to perfect the appearance of every element, from the windows and icons to the packaging that the customer would immediately throw away. Even the inner workings of the computer had to look harmonious, even though only the developers and service people would see them. This was also the flip side of Jobs” perfectionism: he was convinced that only Apple employees should have access to the contents of the system unit, and that the user should have nothing to do there, because he should perceive the Apple product as a whole, not as a collection of components. To ensure this perception, Jobs went to very unpopular measures, up to the use of non-standard screws, for which it was extremely difficult for the user to find screwdrivers. Jobs did not hesitate to sacrifice compatibility and, consequently, a significant portion of the market for the sake of image: the customer should feel that he was buying a unique and complete work of art.

For the same reason, and also because of Jobs” personal ambition to be removed from Lisa development, the two computers, developed in parallel at Apple and aimed at the same audience, were not compatible with each other either in terms of hardware or software. This in turn meant the fierce competition between Lisa and Macintosh for customers, and even animosity between the two groups of Apple engineers and programmers. Jobs” actions split the company, but Steve did nothing to overcome it. On the contrary, he never missed a chance to let loose a quip or a prank on the Lisa designers, proclaiming the Macintosh “killed” the project.

Jobs did not risk developing a universal style for all subsequent Apple products, but decided to rely on professionals. In 1982, he organized a competition in which Hartmut Esslinger of Bavaria, who had designed Sony Trinitron televisions, won. Esslinger moved to California with his company at Jobs” invitation, where he incorporated it as Frog Design, signing a $1.2 million contract with Apple. By 1984, Apple had introduced the “Snow White” style invented by Esslinger. This style became a global trend in the computer and office equipment market.

While working on the Macintosh, Jobs traveled to Japan, visiting some high-tech manufacturing facilities. He did not like everything about the Japanese factories, but he was impressed by the exemplary discipline and impeccable cleanliness in the workshops. Back in California, Jobs decided to build a Macintosh factory in Fremont. He ordered the factory walls to be whitewashed and the machines to be painted in bright colors, which shocked employees and workers.

The Lisa computer was presented to the public in January 1983, and Jobs bet Coach 5 thousand dollars. Lisa favourably differed from the products of competitors with high quality and advanced capabilities. But the unaffordable price, about 10 000 dollars, did not allow her to become a mass home computer, Lisa did not show high sales. At the same time, there was a period when many U.S. offices had at least one such computer, on which employees could alternately prepare documents that looked very decent for its time. Thus Jobs, having lost the battle, was moving steadily toward a final victory in the war. The enemy”s product had the unenviable role of warming up the market in anticipation of the arrival of the Mac.

Gradually Jobs came to think of his group as a gang of pirates in which he acts as the leader. “I”d rather be a pirate than serve in the Navy!” – he declared. Jobs poached the company”s best people working on other projects and stole all the valuable work he had done in 3 years from the Lisa project. Finally, in mid 1983 Jobs “gang” got out of a cramped office in the back of the corporation, “boarded” the Apple headquarters on Bandley Drive, and finally settled there, hoisting the “Jolly Roger” on the roof. Steve”s subordinates liked such games and the atmosphere of rebellion, but not other employees and executives. But Jobs made his point, and the black flag flew atop Apple”s headquarters as long as the Mac was in production. Jobs was well aware that the spirit of adventurism and rebellion was, above all, a team spirit. Debi Coleman ordered hooded sweatshirts that read, “I work 90 hours a week, and I love it!” Band Lisa responded by going to work in T-shirts that read, “Working 70 hours a week and putting out a product.” Group Apple II, who knew their price and had long been tired of the infighting within the company, “rubbed the nose” of both, choosing “Work 60 hours a week and earn money to pay for Lisa and Mac” as their motto.

Despite the fact that Jobs was increasingly picking up the threads of the company management, by 1983 having almost regained his influence and authority, he knew that much would depend on who would take over the chair of Apple”s president. Temporarily after Scott”s dismissal, Markkula served as president. It had been more than two years, and all that time Markkula had been looking for a replacement. Jobs was the obvious candidate, but they both realized that Steve was not yet mature enough to lead the corporation. They had to look for a candidate on the side. Jerry Roche, head of human resources, suggested John Scully, the super-successful marketer and president of the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo Corporation. Jobs immediately took Scully on a treatment that lasted several months, which Isaacson describes as a love affair. They called ten times a day and spent a lot of time together. In their conversations, Jobs skillfully and subtly flattered, revealing himself fully to Scully, and gaining the same trust on his part. However, Scully was hesitant to leave the measured and very successful business at Pepsi. So Jobs went on the offensive without warning, asking Scully a killer question: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sweetened water, or are you going to try to change the world? According to Scully, he felt as if he”d been punched in the gut:

Steve always knew how to get his way, he read people like an open book, and he knew exactly what to say to everyone. For the first time in four months, I felt like I couldn”t refuse.

Scully was completely captivated by Jobs and accepted the offer to lead Apple. Soon enough, however, Steve regretted his choice. Jobs projected onto Scully the qualities that he himself possessed, and more than that, he convinced Scully that he possessed them too. In reality, however, Scully was only an efficient manager, intent on maximizing profits. He fancied himself a romantic and idealist, whereas Jobs really was one. The first real conflict between the two men came just before the Macintosh presentation, when Scully insisted on including an advertising campaign in the price of the product, making it $500 more expensive. Jobs was furious, but there was nothing he could do.

On January 22, 1984, during the CBS broadcast of the American soccer final between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Washington Redskins, a commercial was shown, invented by the ChiatDay advertising agency and directed by Ridley Scott, author of the acclaimed Blade Runner (1982), which set a trend for the cyberpunk aesthetic. The plot of the one-minute reel was unpretentious: in a huge hall, a gray crowd heeds Big Brother from a giant screen. An athletic-looking girl, wearing a Macintosh T-shirt and holding a hammer, runs into the room. She is chased by the Thought Police, but the girl breaks away from her pursuers, spins the hammer and fires it at the face on the screen. A dazzling explosion follows and a voice-over announces that thanks to Apple, “1984 won”t be ”1984.”” The video bombshell effect, was shown on the news of the largest TV channels, and became, according to some experts, the first example of “viral advertising. Ironically, the key metaphor Jobs chose for his advertising campaign was much less applicable to Apple devices than to IBM open architecture computers. According to Isaacson, it was the Macintosh, in its sealed casing, which could not be opened without special tools, that looked like the spawn of Big Brother”s mind. But skillful and aggressive marketing allowed everything to be turned upside down so that the substitution was not conspicuous.

Jobs” January 24, 1984 Macintosh presentation at De Anza University”s annual shareholders meeting also went down in marketing history. Andy Herzfeld described the venue as “pandemonium. Jobs turned a simple presentation into an unforgettable show. He began his presentation with a Bob Dylan verse about how “times are changing.” Then Scully took the floor, admitting that his friendship with Steve Jobs was the main event for him since he joined the Apple team. The climax of the evening rightfully belonged to Jobs. For starters, Steve poked fun at his IBM competitors, painting them as losers and short-sighted retrogrades intent on taking over the PC market with totalitarian methods. Jobs compared IBM to the Party in Orwell”s anti-utopian novel 1984, and Apple to a lone rebel challenging the total system of control. The now-famous commercial was then shown. De Anza”s audience went wild. The further program of the presentation was no less impressive: Jobs demonstrated the interface, graphics, and sound capabilities of the Macintosh. The computer told its own story, with the help of a software speech generator, and its low metallic voice drowned in the applause and cheers of the audience.

However, the euphoria of Apple shareholders could not change the disappointing state of affairs. The Macintosh was a success, but it did not sell as well as expected. Jobs was convinced that the reason for this was the inflated price, and he blamed Scully for IBM”s eventual takeover of the PC market.

Also read, biographies – Constantine P. Cavafy

The Crisis and Dismissal

After the successful market launch of the Macintosh, Steve Jobs” position at Apple was temporarily strengthened. The Lisa and Macintosh departments were merged into one, with Jobs in charge. After a year, however, Macintosh sales began to plummet. Users had time to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the computer, and the latter forced them to choose in favor of IBM. First of all, the Macintosh, with its 128 Kilobytes of RAM, was too slow to perform the tasks assigned to it, upgrades were not provided by the manufacturer. The latest IBM computers had 1MB on board by 1985. Secondly, the Macintosh had no hard drive, and users had to constantly rearrange 3.5″ floppy disks. Finally, due to the lack of fans, the Macintosh had serious cooling problems. As for the Lisa, sales of this model were zero. Then Jobs made very doubtful step, ordering the unsold Lisa computers to emulate Macintosh and put the result on the market as Macintosh XL. The sales tripled, but in fact it was a deception, against which many leading Apple specialists rebelled.

Jobs” second unsuccessful action was to launch an advertising campaign for the Macintosh Office suite. The kit was supposed to consist of a file server, networking equipment for Macintosh terminals on AppleTalk protocols, and a LaserWriter laser printer. Jobs tried to take the same assertive and aggressive tone that had brought success a year earlier, but “overdid it”. In the new video, titled “Lemmings”, the black-blinded office managers marched to the cliff and fell over it, one by one. And only the Macintosh Office “opened their eyes. The commercial was far too gloomy and depressing, with no trace of last year”s drive and optimism. In addition, it was able to offend many potential customers of Apple, and the company”s employees, unlike Jobs, understood this. The commercial was received coldly, and the Macintosh Office project did not take place.

A decline in sales and questionable management actions caused the departure of a number of leading specialists, with whom Jobs parted too easily and self-confidently. By early 1985, Andy Herzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, and Burrell Smith, the main “workhorses” of the Macintosh project, had left the company. Even Steve Wozniak was about to leave to start his own remote control company, but he was persuaded to stay on part-time. It was as if Jobs did not notice what was going on and continued to “squeeze” and “corral” the remaining employees. He would close meetings late at night, send out verbose faxes, then schedule new meetings at 7 a.m. Jobs became increasingly withdrawn and irritable, at any moment able to take his anger out on the first person he met. The crisis also caused a deterioration in the working relationship between Jobs and Scully, leading to a power struggle between them. By this time Jobs had already considered Scully unfit to lead the company and “bad for Apple” in general. However, the management did not support him, and it was decided to gradually remove Jobs from the management of the company, the more so because he had the idea of creating the AppleLabs research center, where he could become an effective manager. For some time Jobs vacillated between the desire to keep power in the company and the temptation of once again being the “captain of the pirate ship. He repeatedly asked for a postponement, but in the end he could not help himself, contemplating a coup d”état on the board of directors in Scully”s absence and a takeover. Even Jobs” staunchest supporters thought the plan was crazy and tried to dissuade him. Scully found out about everything, cancelled his trip, and on May 24, 1985, at a meeting of the board of directors, he denounced Jobs” plans. The board sided with Scully and fired Jobs as head of the Macintosh division. Steve felt betrayed and abandoned by everyone. He was given a small house, away from Apple”s main buildings, Jobs called it “Siberia.” After a while, he just stopped going to work and made sure no one noticed his absence. So Jobs lasted five months in the formal position of chairman of the board, with no real authority, after which he left Apple and that same year founded NeXT Inc.

In his speech to Stanford University graduates in 2005, Jobs said that quitting Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him at the time:

The burden of being successful was replaced by the levity of being a beginner, less confident about anything. I freed myself and entered one of the most creative periods of my life. <…> I”m sure none of this would have happened if I hadn”t been fired from Apple. The medicine was bitter, but it helped the patient.

In 1985, Jobs met Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Paul Berg. Berg shared his vision of a computer for scientific research: it had to be personal, powerful, and inexpensive. Jobs launched the Big Mac project, aimed at creating such a computer. After Jobs left Apple in the fall of 1985, however, his successor Jean-Louis Gasset closed down the project. Now Jobs had a chance to realize his vision in his own company.

The company logo was designed by the famous designer Paul Rand for $100,000. Jobs poached some like-minded people from the Macintosh team – leading programmers Bud Tribble and Rich Page, artist-designer Susan Kare, marketer Daniel Levin – and with $7 million registered NeXT Inc. This prompted accusations of bad faith against Jobs by Apple. The scandal was immediately picked up by the press, and Jobs responded with sarcastic comments:

It”s hard to imagine that a company with two billion dollars in sales and 4,300 employees on staff would be intimidated by six guys in jeans.

Jobs saw his new task as creating a computer for the needs of science and education. The problem was that Apple had a strong position only in this market. According to Joanna Hoffman, Jobs deliberately decided to get even with Apple by having insider information about the company”s future projects and by poaching leading experts. The board of directors, led by Scully, filed a lawsuit against its former chairman “for breach of fiduciary duty.” But Jobs got away with it: an out-of-court agreement was reached in January 1986 without paying any monetary compensation. Jobs pledged not to release his product on the market before March 1987 and to position the new computer as a “professional workstation” delivered directly to colleges and universities. Moreover, Jobs soon forced Esslinger of Frogdesign to break with Apple and sign a contract with NeXT.

Steve ran the NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection. Together with Esslinger, they designed the NeXT computer, an idea that belonged to Jobs. The magnesium case of the computer was a perfect matte black cube with an edge length of exactly 1 foot (30.48 cm). The smallest scratches were clearly visible on such a case, but Jobs wasn”t embarrassed by it. Steve knew no compromise when it came to design: perfect right angles presented a serious technological challenge, but Jobs did not skimp on costs. To produce the computers, Jobs built a white factory in Fremont, just as he had done with the Macintosh. The fully robotic assembly line, 50 meters long, consisted of brightly colored machines and worked according to the Japanese Kanban system, embodying the “just-in-time” logistics concept.

The NeXT didn”t go on sale until mid-1989 at a price of $6,500 and was initially sold in limited quantities to universities with a pre-installed beta version of the NeXTSTEP operating system. Also included with the system, at Jobs” initiative, were an Oxford edition of Shakespeare”s Collected Works, a thesaurus, and an Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. According to Isaacson, these materials were the forerunners of full-text searchable e-books. The following year, the NeXT Computer appeared at retail for $9,999.

In the same year, 1990, a revised second-generation computer, called the NeXTcube, was released, as well as the NeXTstation server, which used the “pizza box” form factor. Jobs advertised the NeXTcube as the first “interpersonal” computer to replace the personal computer. With its innovative NeXTMail multimedia e-mail system, the NeXTcube allowed voice, images, graphics and videos to be shared via e-mail. “Interpersonal computers will revolutionize human communication and group work,” Jobs told reporters.

Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT was technologically advanced, but was generally rejected by the industry as too expensive. However, among those who could afford it, NeXT gained admirers because of its technical advantages, chief among which was its object-oriented software development system. Jobs oriented NeXT products toward the financial, scientific, and academic environment, emphasizing the innovative and experimental technologies involved – such as the Mach core, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and wrote the world”s first hypertext web browser at CERN using a NeXT computer, and John Carmack wrote the games Wolfenstein 3D and Doom on it.

The production of such complex and technological devices put a significant burden on NeXT”s hardware division, and the return was not great – the market segment was firmly occupied by Sun products. In 1993, after selling only 50 thousand machines, NeXT completely switched to software development and licensing with the release of NeXTSTEP

Shortly before he left Apple, Jobs met Ed Catmull, head of the computer division of Lucasfilm, through Alan Kay. Catmull, at the behest of George Lucas, was looking for a buyer for the division, and Jobs, shocked by what he saw at the studio, was eager to buy it for Apple:

I wanted to buy them because I was fascinated by computer graphics. I realized that they were the best at combining art and technology, and I”ve always been very interested in that.

At first Jobs viewed short films only as a byproduct to demonstrate the capabilities of technology and software. It was for this purpose that John Lasseter directed his first film, Luxo Jr. (1986) The cartoon was shown at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference, won first place there unexpectedly for its creators, and then was nominated for an Oscar. Jobs became friends with Lasseter, and even in the most difficult times for the company found the means to finance his films. The touching cartoon Tin Toy (1987) won an Oscar, and Jobs realized that they should focus on film production. This success brought Pixar to the attention of Disney, with whom Jobs managed to sign a co-production agreement for a feature-length film in May 1991. The terms were very unprofitable for the young company – Disney received all the rights to the future film and its characters, as well as the lion”s share of the distribution profits – but Pixar was on the verge of bankruptcy, there was nothing to choose from.

The first full-length animated film produced in partnership in 1995 was Toy Story. Work on the film was difficult: when half of the material had already been shot, we had to return to the original version of the script, requesting additional funds from Disney. Jobs actively supported the Pixar animators, defending Disney”s right to creative independence, and was named executive producer of the film:

Toy Story brought Pixar fame and critical acclaim, but Jobs was not happy with his role as a contractor for Disney. He decided to take a risk, and right after the premiere Pixar organized a public offering. This offering was the most profitable of the year, and the studio gained financial independence. After co-branding, the two companies equally financed joint projects and shared the profits equally.

Over the next 15 years, under creative director John Lasseter, Pixar produced box office hits like “The Adventures of Flick” (1998), “Toy Story 2” (1999), “Monster Corporation” (2001), “Finding Nemo” (2003), “Supergirl” (2004), “Cars” (2006), “Ratatouille” (2007), “WALL-E” (2008), “Up” (2009) and “Toy Story: The Great Escape” (2010). “Finding Nemo, Supergirl, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story: The Great Escape each won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film.

In 2003 and 2004, as Pixar”s contract with Disney was coming to an end, Jobs and Disney CEO Michael Eisner tried to negotiate a new partnership, but without success. In early 2004 Jobs announced that Pixar would look for a new partner to distribute its films after the end of the contract with Disney.

The first discussion between Steve Jobs and Apple CEO Gil Amelio about a possible merger or acquisition of NeXT took place in 1994: NeXT had the multitasking object-oriented operating system NeXTSTEP with its OpenStep API, and Apple had the hardware and production facilities. Two years later, Amelio realized the depth of Apple”s crisis and went back to Jobs” proposal. NeXT”s competition for the right to merge with Apple was Be Inc. founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gasset, who had once succeeded Jobs as head of the Macintosh division and had closed down his Big Mac project. Gasset proposed using BeOS in Apple”s new computer and was confident of winning. However, Apple soon announced that it would buy NeXT for $427 million. The deal was completed in late 1996. After buying NeXT, most of the company”s technology found its way into Apple products – most notably NeXTSTEP, which became the basis for Mac OS X.

On December 20, Jobs returned to the company he had founded and was introduced to the Apple staff as “advisor to the chairman. The company immediately began to feel the movement: production was cut, a succession of personnel replacements and reshuffles followed. It became clear that Jobs would try to bring Apple back to himself, although he only called himself a “consultant” and denied any claims to power, constantly referring to his busy schedule at Pixar and the need to devote more time to his family. At the same time, Jobs quickly managed to place people loyal to him in key positions in the company and gained a rather unambiguous reputation:

Mr. Jobs has become the grey cardinal at Apple. It is said that decisions to cut production depend on him. Mr. Jobs has encouraged some former Apple employees to return to the company, hinting transparently that he plans to take over. According to a person trusted by Mr. Jobs, he believes that Amelio and his appointees are unlikely to revive Apple, so he wants to replace them in order to save “his” company.

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Think Different

The board removed Gil Amelio as CEO in July 1997. Jobs issued an ultimatum to dissolve the board, and management went along with it. Chairman Ed Woolard, who had done much to bring Jobs back and enjoyed his trust, kept his chair, as did Gareth Chan, and among those fired was Mike Markkula, Jobs” mentor under whom he and Wozniak had built Apple in 1977 and who sided with Scully in 1985. Jobs treated Markkula like a father and, despite an old grudge, went to see him personally to inform him of his dismissal and ask for advice. Markkula was sympathetic to Jobs” decision and said that to save the company, it would have to re-produce what no one had done before, a new type of product: “Take the example of the butterfly and transform yourself. Another repentant “traitor,” Bill Campbell, Jobs forgave and returned to Apple”s board of directors. Larry Ellison, the founder and head of Oracle, and Jerry York, the former CFO of Chrysler and IBM, also joined the new board.

Jobs enlisted the help of his old acquaintances from TBWAChiatDay, the originators of the idea for the iconic “1984” commercial. From the proposed options, Jobs chose the concept Think Different. Steve defended this spelling of the slogan, abandoning the grammatically more obvious “Think Differently. Apple”s new slogan seemed to play on IBM”s famous “Think” slogan, challenging them. The campaign slogan served to more clearly challenge consumers who preferred Apple products to IBM-compatible PCs. Jobs set out to restore the former relationship between Apple and its customers. The advertising campaign was built around the images of famous historical figures: Edison, Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Dylan, Lennon and many others whom Jobs considered close in spirit to himself, the team and Apple users:

The basic premise of the campaign was that people had forgotten what Apple was fighting for, even its employees had forgotten. We thought long and hard about how to tell someone what you were fighting for, what your values were, and then it came to us that if you don”t know someone well enough, you can ask them, “Who is your hero?” You can learn a lot about people by hearing who their heroes are. So we said, “Okay, we”ll tell them who our heroes are.”

In September Jobs was officially appointed interim CEO and became the de facto head of Apple. In March 1998 Jobs went to tough measures to revitalize the company. He shut down a number of projects, such as Newton, Cyberdog and OpenDoc. Many employees at this time were afraid to run into Jobs in the elevator, for fear of losing their jobs by getting out. More than 3,000 people were laid off in a year.

Jobs, being a principled opponent of product cloning, refused to renew the software license to third-party manufacturers. As a result, the production of Macintosh clones by Power Computing Corporation and Motorola, established during Jobs” absence and not justified, was stopped:

It”s the stupidest thing in the world to let lousy computer manufacturers use our operating system and take a chunk of our sales.

Instead of the large range produced under Amelio, Jobs announced the development of just four products, stationary and portable models for professionals and consumers. They were called the Power Macintosh G3 and PowerBook G3. (professional devices), iMac and iBook (for the general consumer). Jobs traditionally paid special attention to the appearance of mass-produced products. Design once again began to drive technology at Apple, not the other way around. The “star” of the company was Jonathan Ive, the new vice president of industrial design. Ives and Jobs became fast friends, with Jobs admitting that he found in Ives “a kindred spirit. Their alliance became one of the key ones in the history of industrial design.

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iMac

The first achievement of the Jobs and Ives alliance was the iMac G3. Like the Macintosh fourteen years earlier, it was unveiled in the Flint Auditorium of De Anza College, May 6, 1998. The monoblock computer with a CRT display had a completely “crazy” futuristic design. In Jobs”s words, “it was as if it had come from a beautiful planet inhabited by extraordinary artists.

The first-generation iMac looked like a spacecraft, a drop of water, and even a lamp from Luxo Jr., Pixar”s landmark debut short. The case was made of transparent plastic in “Bond Blue,” the color of the water off the coast, and finally showed the end-to-end harmony between interior and exterior that was so important to Jobs. Ive later picked up some more plastic colors for the iMac G3. “The back of our computer is better than the front of any other,” Apple proudly proclaimed. The crowning feature of the design was a comfortable handle, recessed into the computer and inviting you to touch it:

When we showed the project to the engineers, they immediately gave 38 reasons why it could not be implemented. And I said, “No, it has to be implemented.” “Why is that?” – they ask. “Because I”m the CEO of the company,” I replied, “and I think it can be done. And they had to comply.

The iMac became the fastest-selling computer in Apple”s history. About a third of the sales came from people who had never bought a computer before, so Jobs once again managed to create a product “that doesn”t scare people. The success of the iMac G3 helped popularize the USB interface among peripheral manufacturers, as evidenced by the fact that many early USB devices were made of translucent plastic to match the design of Apple”s new computer.

Since then, eye-catching design and powerful branding worked for Apple. At the Macworld Expo in 2000, Jobs officially dropped the word “interim” from his job title at Apple and became permanent CEO. Jobs joked at the time that he would call his position the iCEO.

Subsequent models of the iMac “line” included LCD displays, but the monoblock concept and tradition of unexpected, innovative design were preserved. In particular, the iMac G4, introduced in January 2002, was based on the idea of a sunflower, on the one hand, and on the other, this computer with a monitor on a movable hinge again resembled a desk lamp.

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Apple Store

Steve Jobs disliked very much the conditions under which Apple products were sold. First of all, computer equipment was sold mostly in large shopping malls. They often didn”t even have branded departments – Apple and competing brands could be located on the same shelf, the consultants were interested in selling any product and had little understanding of its capabilities, not to mention the “philosophy” of the product, which for Jobs was always in the first place. Selling through an online store only partially solved the problem: there was no full-fledged contact between Apple and the consumer anyway. Secondly, electronics stores were usually located on the outskirts, where rents were lower. According to marketing experts, this was very important for customers, because computers are purchased infrequently and are quite expensive – you can go out of town to buy at a better price. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was convinced of the need to come to the consumer, so that he could get expert advice and buy the product close to his home.

By the end of 1999 Jobs was thinking about creating an Apple specialty store. He had two examples in front of him: the negative experience of the IT company Gateway, which had gone bankrupt after opening its own chain of suburban stores, and the successful experience of Gap, the owner of a chain of clothing stores. Jobs came to the conclusion that Gateway”s mistake was, first of all, that they did not risk bringing their stores close to the customers, but, otherwise, there was no fundamental difference between selling computers and clothes. Then Jobs took Millard Drexler, the head of the Gap, to the board of directors:

I left department stores because I was annoyed by the inability to control my own goods from the time they were made to the time they were sold. Steve is the same way, which is probably why he hired me.

Jobs also hired Target vice president of sales Ron Johnson. Millard advised Jobs not to rush into opening the store, but to begin by secretly modeling it completely. An empty warehouse in Cupertino was rented for this purpose. Jobs was often there, with Johnson or alone, thinking over all the details. Gradually the warehouse began to resemble a design studio.

Six months later, the prototype store was ready. It was a room with one entrance, divided into four sections, according to the number of the main products produced by Apple at the time: iMac, iBook, Power Macintosh G3 and PowerBook G3. And then Johnson realized that this concept was going nowhere – the sections should not be separated by product “line”, but by their purpose: music, video, and so on. Jobs was furious, but had to admit that Johnson was right. We had to postpone the opening of the store for several months and redo everything from the beginning.

The first two Apple Stores opened on May 19, 2001: Tyson”s Corner in McLean, Virginia. (Virginia) and the Glendale Galleria in Glendale, California. The stores are decorated in the traditions of Bauhaus and architectural minimalism. Wood, stone, steel and glass are combined in the restrained and laconic interiors. Jobs designed and approved every detail himself, from the Tuscan sandstone floors and unique glass staircases to the posters and wall switches. The idea for the “Genius Bar,” a cross between a bar and a reception desk, was Johnson”s. He suggested placing Apple”s best experts as consultants in this section, and calling them “geniuses.” At first Jobs criticized the idea for being pretentious, saying that they were not “geniuses,” but rather tongue-in-cheek geeks, but later approved of Johnson”s proposal.

Analysts amicably predicted Apple Store failure, but after 3 years Apple stores were visited by an average of 5,400 people per week. As of 2012 there are more than 370 Apple Stores around the world, and more than 50 more are preparing to open. Apple Stores generate the most revenue per square meter, not only in the United States but also in Europe. The opening of each new store is anticipated by fans with no less anticipation than the release of a new Apple device, and takes place in an equally festive atmosphere. The commercial and marketing success of the Apple Store has prompted other companies to open their own branded stores.

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iTunes

At the turn of the century, the IT industry was booming. The digital photography boom was coming. CDs and DVD drives with data recording capabilities appeared. Peer-to-peer networks made it possible to share any information and get it practically for free. It was a colossal untapped market in which, except for CD producers, no one was seriously working, and which had to be streamlined beforehand in order to make a profit. At the same time, the dot-com crash of 2000 hit the vast majority of tech companies. The personal computer market was also stagnating. In this environment, Steve Jobs came up with the global vision of the computer as a digital hub, complete with portable compact devices, simple media content programs, and convenient networking services. This would make a breakthrough in the industry, and Apple, which made computers, peripherals, and software, seemed almost the only company capable of such a massive task.

When everyone tightened their belts, we decided that this downturn was good for us. We kept investing in research and development, kept inventing, so that when the crisis was over, we would be one step ahead of the competition.

This ambitious effort began with the creation of quality software. The iMac came with an iMovie video editor, and the computer itself was equipped with a high-speed FireWire serial port for video transmission, which was the starting point. iMovie later became the first component of the iLife multimedia suite. The universal media player iTunes was introduced on January 9, 2001. It was based on the work of former Apple employees Bill Kincaid, Jeff Robbin and Dave Heller, named SoundJam MP. All three returned to Apple after the company bought out SoundJam. Jobs was heavily involved in refining and simplifying the player.

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iPod

An important part of the digital hub was to be a mini-player. MP3 players with flash memory hit the market in the late 1990s, but Jobs was not satisfied with any of them: they were complicated and expensive devices with limited capacity – they could only hold a half or two dozen songs in good quality. CD players supporting the MP3 format were also unsuitable: large size, laborious recording of discs, insufficient reliability. The decision was made to create their own device specifically to run iTunes on the iMac. VP of Engineering, John Rubinstein, stocked Toshiba”s experimental 1.8-inch 5GB hard drives. Rubinstein designed the other components as well, and had Tony Fadell, an engineer, put the whole thing together. Jonathan Ive suggested a white color for the entire device. The white earbuds looked particularly strange, but Jobs supported Ives, and iPod users got the chance to stand out in the crowd. In order to limit the illegal distribution of content, Jobs decided to technically prohibit downloading music from the iPod to other devices, and to put “Don”t Steal Music” on the player”s packaging. Jobs also eliminated the switch, and this has become a distinctive feature of many Apple devices – they simply “fall asleep” during inactivity and “wake up” when any button is pressed.

The first generation iPod was released on October 23, 2001. Jobs scrapped the iMac advertising campaign, correctly calculating that iPod sales would spur demand for computers as well. The advertising campaign was not built on the functional advantages of the player, they were too obvious for that. iPod was positioned as a cult accessory and really gained that status: more than a hundred thousand players were sold by the end of 2001, and in 10 years more than 300 million devices were sold. In 2005, a noticeable trend in the public life of America was the discussion of the contents of the iPod public figures, up to the President of the United States.

With the release of the iPod, Apple became a major player in the music industry. The company produced different variations of the player: with a hard drive and flash memory, with the ability to play video, with a touch screen and without it at all. The last option was proposed by Jobs during the consistent miniaturization of the device and, to the surprise of many, was in great demand.

The head of the iTunes Store, Eddy Cue, predicted a million sales in the first six months, instead a million songs were sold in six days. Apple confidently entered a new market, Jobs called the opening of the iTunes Store a turning point in the history of the music industry. In June 2011, the 15 billionth song was sold. Movies, TV shows, audiobooks and other media content are also sold through the store. Attempts by competitors to create a service similar to the iTunes Store have not been seriously successful.

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iPhone

The phenomenal success of the iPod did not bring Jobs peace of mind. The development of cell phones had already led to a decline in demand for cameras and digital cameras, and Jobs realized that soon the phone would absorb all the possible functions, which meant that no matter how convenient a music player was, it would be out of demand. Apple absolutely had to carve out a niche for itself in the cell phone market. An attempt to take the easy way, combining effort and technology with an experienced manufacturer, was unsuccessful: Motorola”s hybrid iPod and RAZR called ROKR received poor reviews. Then it was decided to modify the iPod in-house by adding phone features to the player.

At the same time, Apple was in full swing to develop its own Internet tablet, for which a multi-touch interface was invented. But this project was frozen because the phone was a higher priority. The interface of the tablet was adapted to the size of the phone screen, and the further work was going in two directions: one group was trying to redesign iPod, saving the disk, and the other was working on a multi-touch screen. The wheel, convenient for scrolling through lists, turned out to be completely unsuitable for dialing, and the second version was put into production. In early 2005, Apple bought FingerWorks, a company that designed and manufactured multi-touch control panels.

At Jobs” insistence, the mechanical keyboard was removed, and the software took over its function completely. Jobs abandoned the plastic screen, deciding to try a new type of material – glass. It had to be very strong and scratch-resistant. The material, developed back in the 1960s, was in the catalog of Corning Glass, which had no use at the time. Jobs convinced the management of the company that it was necessary and possible to establish mass production of this glass in a very short time. To do this, one of the Corning Glass factories was repurposed literally overnight.

After nine months of hard work, Jobs realized that the design of the phone did not suit him. Its main trump card was the large glass screen, but it was visually overwhelmed by the metal case. Jobs consulted with Ive and announced it to the team:

You guys almost got yourselves killed working on this design, but we”re going to change it. We”re going to work nights and weekends if you want, we can hand out guns so you can shoot us right now.

The glass screen was brought to the very edge, only a narrow strip on the end was left metal. This visually subdued all parts of the screen, the phone became more pleasant to the touch, but we had to change the location of internal components.

The phone was presented in January 2007 at the traditional Macworld Expo. Isaacson tends to regard this presentation as the best of Steve Jobs” career. According to polls, 6 out of 10 Americans knew about its release on June 29, 2007. Time magazine declared it the invention of the year. Subsequent modifications added new features, including voice control and the Siri virtual assistant.

In July 2008, the online App Store was launched on iTunes. Third-party developers were allowed to create apps, but they had to undergo mandatory approval by Apple: Jobs was able to give users some freedom without giving up complete control.

Over five years, more than 250 million iPhones have been sold, bringing Apple about $150 billion in revenue.

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iPad

For the next few years Steve Jobs was sick a lot, but he still took part in the development of the iPad Internet tablet. Jobs and Ive ordered two dozen similar devices from different manufacturers to decide on the best form factor. On January 27, 2010 Jobs held a presentation of the iPad. None of his previous speeches had been as anticipated, the press compared Jobs to Christ and Moses bringing the people the Tablets of the Covenant. However, the presentation itself disappointed many. Jobs presented the iPad as the missing link between the smartphone and laptop, as a “proper” alternative to the netbook. The audience did not understand much and did not feel the benefits of such tablets. Bill Gates, in particular, had the opportunity to reiterate that the future belongs to netbooks with a mechanical keyboard and stylus, and that the iPad is “a good reader and nothing more. The advertising campaign also turned out to be rather inarticulate and too ordinary for Apple.

The iPad itself, whose sales began on April 3, 2010, answered the accumulated questions. In less than a year, by March 2011, 15 million devices had been sold. According to some reports, this was the most successful consumer product launch in history. The iPad ran most of the iPhone apps, and a boom in the creation of many iPad apps by third-party and private developers followed. The iPad was accompanied by a free e-book reader iBooks, the iBookstore was opened, competing with Amazon.

The presentation of the iPad 2 took place on March 2, 2011. On it Steve Jobs called the competitors who had time to release analogues of the iPad, “imitators,” and announced 2011 “the year of the iPad 2. Jobs was especially proud of at this presentation was designed with his participation detachable case on magnets, designed together with the tablet. Another important motif of his speech was to refute the prevailing view that the iPad – a device not so much for creation, as for consumption. To correct the image of the product, Jobs devoted a significant part of the presentation to demonstrating some of the most creative applications – iMovie and GarageBand.

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Status

Steve Jobs became a millionaire by the age of 25, when he had a fortune of $256 million. By the end of his life, he owned 5.426 million shares of Apple stock worth $2.1 billion. Jobs also owned 138 million shares of Disney stock, which he received in exchange for the sale of Pixar Studios, worth $4.4 billion. At the same time, while serving as Apple”s CEO, he received an annual salary of only $1. Jobs joked that he got 50 cents for showing up to work and another 50 cents for his efficiency. Forbes magazine in 2011 estimated Steve Jobs” net worth at $7 billion, putting him in 39th place in the ranking of the richest Americans.

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Management style

Jobs was guided by the famous principle put forward by Alan Kaye – “the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Jobs always sought to position Apple and its products at the forefront of the information technology industry, anticipating and setting trends, at least in the areas of innovation and style. He himself articulated this at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Expo conference in January 2007:

There”s an old Wayne Gretzky quote I love. “I rush to where the puck will be, not where it was.” And we”ve always tried to do that at Apple. From the very, very beginning. And we always will.

When Steve Jobs was asked on 60 Minutes about the ideal business model, he said:

My model for business is The Beatles: They were a foursome of guys who kept each other”s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other out. And their total was more than the sum of all the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person-it”s always done by a team.

At the same time Jobs was a demanding and authoritarian perfectionist, often categorical in his judgments. In the early 1980s, when working on the Macintosh, he was despotic, rude and stubborn. There was even a joking annual tradition in the group to award a special prize to the employee who managed to give a decent fight to Jobs. However, his subordinates always respected him and acknowledged that, as a rule, Steve turned out to be right, and otherwise he could be outbidden. As for design issues, no one tried to argue with Jobs, and he had complete freedom to make decisions. The only Apple employee whose opinion Jobs recognized as equal to his own was Jonathan Ive:

Steve is very quick to verdict, so I don”t show him anything in front of other people. He might say, “that”s crap” and kill the idea. I think ideas are a very fragile thing and while they”re in the developmental stage, they have to be handled with care. I realized that if he got angry about it, it would be so sad because I knew it was so important.

According to Atkinson, Jobs” familiar phrase “This is total crap” was to be understood as “Prove to me that this is the best solution. Moreover, not all of Jobs” own ideas were supported, and when he felt this, after a while he simply “forgot” about them.

Jobs was one of the most charismatic leaders. Bud Tribble, manager of the Macintosh development team, coined the term “reality distortion field” to describe Jobs” charisma and his influence on his subordinates. Tribble claimed that the term was taken from Star Trek. Since then, the term has also been used to refer to the perception of Jobs” performances. Andy Herzfeld defined the “reality distortion field” as Steve Jobs” ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything, using a combination of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. As an object of criticism, Jobs” so-called reality distortion field has also been recognized as something that creates the feeling that the impossible is possible:

He distorts reality by imagining things that can”t be – for example, telling me that I can come up with a design for Breakout in a few days. And you realize that it”s impossible, but in the end it turns out that Steve is right.

After the term became widely known, it was often used in the press to describe Jobs” influence on the public, especially during new product announcements.

After leaving Apple and working at NeXT, Jobs” character softened somewhat. For instance, according to animator Floyd Norman, he never interfered with the creative process of the Pixar filmmakers. But otherwise, Jobs stayed true to himself, continuing to “distort reality” when it came, for example, to the possible prospects of this or that Pixar development:

I grew up in a Baptist congregation and remember religious meetings with charismatic but unclean preachers. Steve had the same way with his tongue, weaving a web of words that was hard to get out of.

Fortune magazine declared Jobs “one of Silicon Valley”s leading egomaniacs,” and his former colleague Jeff Raskin once said that Jobs could have been “the great king of France. Commentary on Steve Jobs” temperamental managerial style can be found in Michael Moritz”s Little Kingdom, Alan Deutschman”s The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, and in iCon. Steve Jobs” by Jeffrey Young and William Simon. In 1993 Jobs topped Fortune”s list of America”s toughest bosses.

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Inventions and projects

Steve Jobs” aesthetic sense was greatly influenced by Zen Buddhism: as a designer, Jobs always gravitated toward simplicity and even minimalism, and in making decisions he assigned a large role to intuition.

As of October 6, 2011, Jobs has co-invented 312 U.S. patents on designs and inventions related to computers and handheld devices themselves, as well as user interfaces (including touchscreen), audio speakers, keyboards, power adapters, ladders, buckles, sleeves, belts and bags. Most of the patents are not for technological innovations, but for designs. There are 43 patents for inventions in the U.S. The patent for the Dock user interface in Mac OS X with the “zoom in” feature was issued the day before he died.

Steve Jobs and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates are on the same page, pioneering the computer revolution. They are both privileged to be the first to see a future where every home has a computer. They both played decisive roles in this process. The first one, endowed with great intuition, developed the talent of a designer and the eloquence of a salesman. The second, an experienced and cautious businessman, had a knack for programming that he never tired of emphasizing.

In January 1976, even before Apple was founded, Gates wrote an open letter to the “Homemade Computer Club”, where Jobs and Wozniak were members. In the letter, Gates rebuked the club for its free software distribution policy, since one of the products was the Altair BASIC he had developed. This was a serious precedent in the history of software licensing.

Apple was already on its feet, while Microsoft was taking its first steps. In 1984, Gates and his colleagues were developing the first spreadsheet (Excel) and the first word processor (Word) for the newly released Macintosh. Microsoft developed its own Windows operating system, based on the same principles as the Mac: a mouse and a windowed graphical interface. Jobs raged and accused Gates of betrayal and theft, to which Bill calmly responded:

You know, Steve, I think there”s another point of view. Let”s say we both have a rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal a TV and found that you beat me to it.

In January 1982 it was agreed that Microsoft would take no steps in this direction for a year. But the release of the Macintosh was delayed, and in November 1983 Bill Gates considered himself free of his obligations to Jobs and announced the development of Windows for the more popular IBM-compatible machines. However, the relationship between them soured: Gates looked down on Jobs because he could not program, and Jobs called Gates a man without taste or imagination, a slacker who was always “shamelessly stealing other people”s ideas:

This “Windows copied from Mac” story was a real stumbling block between the two giants. Jobs kept saying, “We”re just being divided! Bill has no brakes on his conscience!” To which the other replied, “If he really believes that, the poor guy has completely lost his sense of reality.” In the 1990s, Windows beat the competition in the “war of operating systems” by a wide margin, almost obtaining a monopoly. But even that didn”t stop Jobs, who kept saying even then:

Microsoft”s only problem is that they have no taste at all. Not in a particular sense, but in a general sense: they do not strive for originality, they have no culture of working with the product. I”m not worried about their success, they deserve it… in general. But it saddens me that they produce a third-rate product.

The disagreement between Jobs and Gates lay in their fundamentally different approaches to work. While Jobs was an ardent supporter of total control and a closed vertical system of production and commerce, Gates supported a horizontal system based on product and technology licensing, which was Microsoft”s credo and allowed it to dominate the software market. Sometimes their relationship was more acute than usual, for example, when Gates, as a de facto monopolist, refused to create software for NeXT computers, almost laughing at the new project of Jobs, who had left Apple.

In 1997, after his return to Apple, Steve Jobs decided to put an end to this war, which had already resulted in a dozen open lawsuits. Jobs invited Gates to invest $150 million in Apple and develop Mac-compatible software. He explained the situation to Gates as follows: if the lawsuits continued, Microsoft would be forced to pay Apple a fortune, but even before that, the Macintosh brand could simply disappear. The deal was announced at the MacWord Expo conference in Boston, July 9, 1997. The head of Microsoft appeared on a huge screen. It was an amazing sight – huge Bill hovering over tiny Steve and the stunned audience. Jobs later admitted that this was one of his most serious mistakes. Journalists missed no opportunity to draw a nerve-racking parallel between Gates and Big Brother from a 1984 Apple commercial.

In the 2000s, when both companies dominated the IT market, the relationship between the entrepreneurs improved. Thus, during the All Things Digital Teleforum in 2007, both, as guests of Wall Mossberg and Kara Swisher, showered each other with praise. In front of those who had once watched their rivalry, Gates exclaimed:

I”ve seen Steve make decisions based on a flair for people and products that, you know, I have a hard time even explaining. He just has a very different approach to business, akin to magic, in my opinion. And then I said to myself: wow!

Jobs ended his return speech with a toast of “Here”s to both of us” and tears. In the summer of 2011, Bill Gates paid one last visit to Steve Jobs, whose illness had already reached a critical stage. They spent about three hours together, sitting in the living room of the Palo Alto home and discussing with great animation. Gates ended the conversation by saying, “I always thought the open horizontal model would win. But you”ve managed to prove that the closed vertical model can also be successful.” “Your model works, too,” Jobs replied.

Steve Jobs was not too ceremonious with other industry players either. For example, he had a public tiff with Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, beginning in 1987, when Jobs criticized Dell for producing “non-innovative beige boxes. When Michael Dell was asked at a Gartner symposium in October 1997 what he would do if he owned the troubled Apple Computer company, he said, “I would shut it down and return the money to shareholders.” In 2006, Jobs wrote an email to all employees when Apple”s market capitalization surpassed Dell. It said:

To all members of the team. Michael Dell was not a very good predictor. Apple is worth more than Dell at the close of trading today. Stocks go up and down, and things could change tomorrow, but today is a good reason to think about it. Steve.

Jobs showed his vindictive nature again in 2010 when it came to accessing Adobe Flash technology on the iOS platform. Jobs was close to company founder John Warnock, and helped him develop Adobe Illustrator for the Mac in the early 1980s. But Warnock retired in 1999, and the new executives refused to adapt Adobe products, particularly Photoshop, to the iMac. Jobs retaliated 10 years later, saying:

From a technological point of view, Flash is a knot of pasta that makes no sense and has very serious security problems. <…> With Warnock gone, the soul of Adobe is gone. He was a real inventor, he and I were close. He was inherited by a bunch of blazers and the company turned to shit.

Jobs was surrounded not only by friends, but also by enemies. He was constantly at war with someone. At the beginning of his career, his main enemy was IBM. Then Microsoft and Bill Gates personally took that place for many years. Towards the end of his life, Steve Jobs took on Google, with history repeating itself – there was the Android operating system for mobile devices. According to Jobs, this OS was just a boorish plagiarism of iOS. Nevertheless, Jobs promoted one of Google”s executives, Eric Schmidt, to join Apple”s board of directors. This, however, did not stop Jobs from announcing to Schmidt in 2010 that his company was acting in an unscrupulous manner, and that he would prefer five billion in compensation to have Google stop stealing ideas from Apple. Jobs said he was ready to start a “thermonuclear war” against Android and Google”s mobile devices to end their existence once and for all.

To this day, Apple is still trying to get its way in court, without Steve Jobs. And yet, during his last medical leave of absence in 2011, Jobs agreed to host Larry Page, the founder and new head of Google, in Palo Alto. Page needed Jobs” advice. “My first impulse was to tell him to go to hell. But then I thought about it and said to myself that when I was young myself, I had help from everyone around me, from Bill Hewlett to the engineer who lived down the street from me and was some big shot at HP. And then I offered him a meeting,” Jobs recounted. He told Page about the importance of proper staffing and that you should produce no more than five major product lines, because the rest “will drag you down, and before you know it, you”ll turn into Microsoft.

I tried to help him and I will try to help people like Mark Zuckerberg. That”s how I want to spend the rest of my life. I can help the next generation remember the achievements of great companies and continue the tradition. The Valley was a great help to me once. And now I have to try to return the favor.

Arik Hesseldahl of Businessweek magazine noted that “Jobs is not widely known for philanthropy,” compared to Bill Gates” efforts. Unlike Gates, Jobs did not sign the Warren Buffett Giving Pledge, which obliged the world”s richest billionaires to give at least half their wealth to charity. In a 1985 interview with Playboy, Jobs said of his attitude toward money, “The problem is determining how one would invest that money in the world: just give it away or make that investment an expression of one”s values.” Jobs also added at the time that when he had time, he would open a public foundation, but right now he was doing it privately.

After regaining control of Apple in 1997, Jobs shut down all corporate philanthropy programs. Friends of Jobs told The New York Times that he felt Apple”s growth would do more good than charity. Later, under Jobs, Apple signed up for the Product Red program, releasing red versions of devices with profits going to charity. Apple began spending more on charity, and Product Red project leader singer Bono quoted Jobs as saying, “There”s nothing like an opportunity to save lives.” According to Bono, Apple became the largest donor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS.

The Jobs family supported the Democratic Party and became friends with the Clinton family. Jobs even slept in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House. Bill Clinton sometimes consulted with him in difficult moments, particularly in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In October 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama visited Silicon Valley, where he met with Steve Jobs. The meeting lasted 45 minutes, and Jobs was extremely independent: he criticized the U.S. educational system as hopelessly outdated, and told Obama that he “wouldn”t last longer than one term. According to Jobs, learning should be a process of close interaction between students based on digital learning materials, and educational reform is obstructed by teachers” unions. In February 2011, Obama visited Silicon Valley again, where he met with representatives of the IT industry. At the dinner, Jobs sat next to the president and took an active part in the conversation. He suggested that all foreign students who receive a master”s degree in engineering in the U.S. should be given a work visa. Obama answered that it could be done through the Dream Act, which was blocked by the Republicans. After the meeting Jobs said: “The president is a smart man, but he kept explaining to us why we couldn”t do this and that. It pissed me off.”

Also read, important-events – Warsaw Pact

Stock options retroactively

Steve Jobs was willing to work practically for free, but willingly accepted generous grants from Apple”s board of directors in the form of large stock options and even demanded such gifts for himself, explaining that it was not about money per se, but about fair recognition.

In 2001, Jobs received stock options of 7.5 million shares of Apple stock with an exercise price of $18.30. In 2006, however, it turned out that the options had been issued retroactively, and the exercise price was supposed to be $21.10. This meant that if the options had been exercised, Jobs would have received an undeclared $20 million in income due to Apple overestimating its income by the same amount. The case was the subject of active criminal and civil investigations, and Jobs could have faced a number of criminal charges and civil penalties. An independent internal Apple investigation, completed on December 29, 2006, found that Jobs, although warned of the potential problems, was not fully aware of them, and that the options granted to him were returned unexercised in 2003. The blame for what happened was placed on Apple”s lawyer, as well as the company”s former CFO, who acted on Jobs”s direct orders. The scandal led to a tangible drop in Apple”s stock and the firing of several of the company”s top managers.

The decline in shareholder value as a result of the fraud and the ensuing scandal, in turn, led to a series of lawsuits from shareholders against the company”s management. On July 1, 2008, a class action lawsuit for $7 billion was filed against several members of Apple”s board of directors, including Jobs. Apple management managed to come to an agreement with the shareholders, paying a number of compensations.

Also read, biographies – Juan Perón

Unauthorized biographies

In 2005, John Wiley & Sons, a publisher specializing in academic, educational and technical literature, sent to Cupertino an introductory copy of the unauthorized biography “iCon. Steve Jobs.” In response, headquarters received an order to withdraw from the Apple Store all books from this publisher, including the popular series “…for Dummies.” There was no official comment from Apple representatives on this decision. Book author Jeffrey Young said: “The company had no complaints about the facts in the book, but for some reason they didn”t want it published.” According to some reports, the order came from Steve Jobs personally. The publisher regretted this decision of Apple, at the same time noting that Apple stores are not the most significant part of the publisher”s income. In July 2010, the publisher announced that its books would soon be available on the iPad.

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Harassment of bloggers

Jobs was very reticent about his speeches at product launches and demanded the utmost secrecy until the very last moment. In 1998, Nicholas Charelli, who called himself an “Apple fan,” founded ThinkSecret.com, where he published exclusive information about Apple innovations before they were officially announced. Some of the material was just rumor and was never confirmed, but there was some real inside information that was leaked from the corporation, which made the site extremely popular among Apple fans. For instance, in December 2004 the site published details about the new Mac mini, which was officially unveiled only two weeks later. A lawsuit was filed against the site”s owner. The proceedings lasted for about three years and ended with the closure of the resource with a reconciliation of the parties, the terms of which were not disclosed.

On March 25, 2010, a certain Brian Hogan found a prototype of a new iPhone model, accidentally left there by an Apple developer, in a bar in a San Francisco suburb. Hogan gave the device to the editors of the tech blog Gizmodo for a reward of $5,000. The blog published an article about the phone device. Apple filed a complaint with the prosecutor”s office, and the bloggers” homes were searched. As a result, the bloggers, by agreeing to return the sample to the corporation, were able to avoid charges of fencing stolen goods. If Hogan”s actions were qualified as theft, he faced up to a year in prison. However, the court found it possible to treat them as an administrative offense, and Hogan got probation, community service, and a fine. As in the Think Secret incident, Isaacson points to Steve Jobs” direct involvement in the development of this conflict.

Also read, biographies – Epicurus

Censorship on iPhones and iPads

In 2010, artist Marc Fiore won the Pulitzer Prize for his series of cartoons mocking George W. Bush”s policies. The fact that the cartoons had previously been rejected by Apple as potentially violating libel law caught the public”s attention. The company found itself in a silly position, and Jobs had to publicly apologize to users.

This incident sparked a discussion about the bans and restrictions imposed by Apple on customers. Jobs tried to maintain control over the actions of users without looking like a censor. In particular, there was talk of banning pornography on Apple devices. “People who want porn, let them buy Android,” Jobs told one critic. When asked by the editor of the website Valleywag. (who, incidentally, controlled the Gizmodo blog), Ryan Tate, what about the ideals of freedom, Jobs replied that his definition of freedom includes “freedom from porn” and other objectionable and potentially dangerous content. Jobs insisted on his point of view, personally debating with bloggers critical of his policies. The humorous website eSarcasm.com launched a campaign with the slogan “Yes, Steve, I want porn:

Anyway, we just like the idea of an open society without censorship, where there is no technodictator deciding what we can and cannot watch.

The scandal was discussed at the Apple board of directors. Jobs was told that the arrogance appropriate for an ambitious outsider was not appropriate for an industry leader. But Jobs declared that there was no arrogance in his position, and he stuck to his opinion.

Also read, important-events – Vienna Conference

Electronic Waste Disposal

In 2001, Apple, in the U.S. and Canada, launched an e-waste recycling program, however, this program was rather limited, and in this aspect the company lagged behind other major players in the IT industry. In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of the program by lashing out at environmentalists at Apple”s annual shareholder meeting in Cupertino in April. A few weeks later, however, it was announced that Apple would accept iPods for free in its retail stores. Computer TakeBack responded by flying a banner over Stanford University during the graduation ceremony, when Jobs was giving a speech. The banner read, “Steve, don”t be a mini-player-recycle all e-waste. In 2006 Jobs expanded Apple”s recycling program for all U.S. customers buying a new Mac. Later the program was expanded to include e-waste from other manufacturers, and after Jobs” death it was expanded to Europe.

In his private life as well as in his work, Steve Jobs tried to adhere to the principles of Zen Buddhism and Bauhaus. In addition, he was a pescetarian (according to other sources a vegetarian or even a vegan). Jobs usually wore a black turtleneck by Issei Miyake with long sleeves, blue Levi”s 501 jeans and New Balance 991 sneakers. According to Isaacson, he wanted his own uniform: “It was comfortable (that”s how he explained his desire) and allowed him to express his style.

Jobs drove a silver Mercedes-Benz SL 55 AMG without license plates. California state law gives six months to get license plates for new vehicles, so Jobs rented a new SL every six months. Jobs was offered named parking spaces, but he always declined, considering it immodest. At the same time, he believed that he deserved special treatment, exceptions to the rules, so he allowed himself to park in handicapped spaces, which became the subject of witticisms, such as the joke slogan “Park Different”.

Jobs was a big fan of Bob Dylan and The Beatles. He referred to them more than once in his speeches, and once gave an interview to accompany the broadcast of a Paul McCartney concert. The day the Beatles records, after resolving a nearly 30-year conflict with Apple Corps, appeared on the iTunes Store was one of the highlights of Jobs” life.

Also read, biographies – Abebe Bikila

Relationships with biological relatives

Steve Jobs knew nothing about his biological parents for a long time. He was always burdened by this obscurity and the realization that he had been abandoned as a baby. In the early 1980s, he secretly hired a private detective, but the search yielded nothing at the time. Shortly before Clara died, Steve ventured to ask her about her past, and she told him how he was adopted. In the phone book, Steve found the doctor whose name was on his birth certificate. He called the doctor, and the doctor told him that all the documents had burned in the fire. But the documents survived, and the doctor sealed them in an envelope on which he wrote, “Send to Steve Jobs after I die.” Soon the doctor died, and Jobs received the documents, from which he finally learned the name of his mother – at the time of his birth, an unmarried student named Joan Schieble from Wisconsin.

Steve hired a detective again, and the detective soon found his biological mother. It turned out that in December 1955, ten months after Steve was born, she had married his father, Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian. In 1957 they had a daughter, Mona, but they separated in 1962. Joan married skating instructor George Simpson and she and Mona took his last name. However, even this marriage was short-lived, and in 1970, mother and daughter began to wander, eventually settling in Los Angeles. Joan pursued a career as a speech therapist, while Mona became a writer and settled in Manhattan.

Steve continued to think of Paul and Clara as his parents, and so as not to upset them, he did not seek to meet Joan. However, shortly after Clara died of cancer in 1986, Steve called his biological mother in Los Angeles and arranged for his visit. He did this out of curiosity, he said: “I believe that the qualities of a person are determined by their environment, not heredity. But it”s still a little interesting to learn about biological origins. Besides, I wanted to assure Joan that, in my opinion, she did the right thing. I wanted to meet the birth mother mainly to see if she was okay and also to thank her for not having an abortion. She was only 23 years old and had to go through a lot to give birth to me.” Joan apologized to him a lot, and one Christmas Day he told her, “Don”t worry. I had a great childhood. I did great.”

The same day Steve stepped on his mother”s doorstep, Joan called Mona, his sister. Mona flew in and was soon determined to find her father. She, too, hired a private investigator and found out that Jandali had left the university, gone into the restaurant business, and had his own café. Mona suggested that Steve go to his father”s house together, but he refused. Jobs asked Mona not to tell Jandali about himself, because he could not forgive him for leaving his family, his wife and daughter, and he did not trust him: “I was rich then – what if he would blackmail me or tell the journalists about everything. Not knowing who his son had become, Jandali told Monet that he used to have a cafe in Silicon Valley: “Even Steve Jobs used to go there. Yeah, he was generous with his tea.” Jandali later found out by chance that Jobs was his son, but he didn”t seek to meet him either.

Jobs maintained a friendship with Joan Simpson, who lives in a nursing home in Los Angeles. Speaking about his biological parents, Jobs stated: “To me, these people are sperm and egg donors. I don”t want to offend anyone, I”m just stating a fact.” Jandali, 80, told The Sun in August 2011 that his attempts to contact Jobs were unsuccessful.

Steve Jobs and Mona Simpson became close friends, but kept their relationship a secret for some time. Mona introduced Steve at a party celebrating the release of her first book in 1986.

At a memorial service for her brother, Mona Simpson said:

I grew up as an only child in my family, my mother raised me without my father. Since we were poor and I knew that my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined that he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped that he was rich and kind, and that he would come back into our lives (and into our still unfurnished apartment) to help us. Later, after I met my father, I tried to believe that he had changed his phone number and left no new address because he was a revolutionary idealist who was building a new world for the Arab people. Even as a feminist, all my life I waited for a man who would love me and who would love me. For decades, I thought that my father would be that man. But when I turned 25, I met such a man, and he turned out to be my brother.

Also read, biographies – Licinius

Relationships with Women

Jobs always had a hard time containing his feelings and emotions, this also applied to his personal life. He was very keen, and people around him always knew about his hobbies, as Jobs was not shy to ask advice from those whom he trusted, and liked to publicly demonstrate the excitement of a newly started novel or longing for separation. Many considered him a romantic man, though in his relationships with women he was sometimes calculating, selfish, rude, and even cruel.

Steve Jobs calls his first love Chris-Ann Brennan, a hippie girl he began dating in the spring of 1972, before graduating high school. In the summer Steve left his parents” house and settled with Kris in a cabin in the mountains above Los Altos, despite his parents” objections. Kris was good at painting, and Steve played guitar and tried to write poetry. Their relationship, which lasted many years, could not be called easy. They studied Zen together, took LSD, worked part-time jobs, and hitchhiked. Steve and Chris were constantly drifting apart, and then Chris would meet with others, and then they got back together, and then lived together at the farm in Freedland: “That case when together is tight and apart is boring,” later recalled Brennan. In 1976 Kris, impressed by the change in Steve after his return from India, also went there, along with their mutual friend Greg Calhoun, but they returned separately, and Kris settled in the house, which was rented by Steve and Daniel Kottke. A few months later, Kris became pregnant. Jobs acted like it was none of his business, and nothing much happened at all. He even persuaded Kottke not to move out on them. In May 1978, Chris gave birth to a daughter, Lisa Brennan. Jobs continued to deny his paternity, claiming that Brennan was not the only one who was dating. Hired lawyers persuaded Kottke to testify that he had never seen Brennan in bed with Jobs, and carefully gathered evidence of her other affairs. Kris screamed that Steve was going to make her look like a philanderer so that she wouldn”t have to take responsibility, and she started scandals with breaking dishes and breaking furniture. At the same time, Jobs took part in his daughter”s fate: he persuaded Kris not to give the child away to strangers (as he himself had been given away once), he helped her choose a name and named her the new computer Apple Lisa, though he would not admit it.

By detaching himself from Brennan, Jobs partly detached himself from his former lifestyle as well. He stopped hippin”, got a stylish haircut, bought an expensive suit, softened his diet. To complete his image as a successful businessman, Jobs had an affair with Regis McKenna”s advertising agency employee, Barbara Jasinski, a half-Polish, half-Polynesian, a rare beauty. Jobs and Jasinski moved into a Tudor-style mansion. Their relationship lasted until 1982, gradually exhausting itself.

In 1982, Jobs hooked up with the famous folk singer Joan Baez. She was much older than Jobs and had a 14-year-old son. According to Jobs, what attracted him to Baez was that she was “smart and funny. They dated for three years. Elizabeth Holmes, Jobs” Reed College friend, once said that “Steve became Joan Baez”s lover in large part because Baez was the lover of Bob Dylan,” Jobs” favorite musician. An unauthorized biography, “ICon. Steve Jobs” suggests that Jobs might have married Baez, but her age at the time they met (41) meant that the couple was unlikely to have children. They remained friends, and later in her memoirs Baez posted a tribute: “To Steve Jobs – for making me learn the word ”processor” by putting one in my kitchen.

When Jobs and Baez”s relationship was already declining, Steve met Jennifer Egan, a student at the University of Pennsylvania. This romance was short-lived: a year later Egan let Jobs know that she was not going to get married yet, and they broke up.

In early 1985 Jobs met, he said, the most beautiful woman in his life and his first true love. Her name was Tina Redse, she was of the hippie variety and also worked in IT – as a computer consultant. When Scully was bailing Jobs out of Apple, Steve ran off to Europe with Tina for a distraction. They shared a difficult childhood of psychological trauma (in particular, Redse”s father suffered from mental illness), both were in search of beauty and harmony, both placed the spiritual above the mundane. They were also similar in character: like Steve, Tina was neurotic, sensitive, could let loose a tear. At the same time she was strong-willed, easily neglected her unusual beauty, often not doing makeup – and, according to witnesses, then became even more beautiful. Their romance was very stormy; they were passionately in love. Redse kept an equal footing with Jobs; she would leave his house and return to him whenever she felt like it. But for all the similarities, the differences were insurmountable. Redse was the kindest person: as a volunteer, she helped the sick and the poor, tried to build relationships with Lisa and even with Chris Ann. In this, she was the exact opposite of Jobs. Redse was fascinated by him, but she could not stand his selfishness, his neglectful attitude to people, his cruelty, his empty, unfurnished house. The philosophical differences were also very deep: Steve spoke of a universal aesthetic that should be given to people; Tina did not accept the Bauhaus, convinced that aesthetics could only be individual, that people were born with a sense of beauty and there was no need to teach them that sense. Their union was doomed. In 1989, Steve took the desperate step of proposing to Tina. Rejection and a final breakup ensued.

I couldn”t be a good wife to a legend named Steve Jobs. It would have been terrible in every aspect. <…> I didn”t want to hurt him, but I couldn”t stand to see him hurt others. It was too painful for me.

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Marriage to Lauren Powell

Lauren Powell was Steve Jobs” only wife and, by his own admission, the second woman he “really loved. Lauren was eight years younger than Steve, worked in a bank, and also came from a troubled family of four children. Her father was a pilot and died heroically while taking a falling plane away from residential neighborhoods. The rest of the family”s life with the stepfather was horrible.

Lauren met Jobs in October 1989, she asserts, by chance – her friends invited her to a lecture at Stanford Business School, where Steve was giving a talk. Jobs drew attention to a beautiful young woman in the audience, and she jokingly said she had come to the lecture to win a prize – dinner with Steve Jobs himself. The romance progressed rapidly; Lauren just turned Jobs” head:

He was absolutely fascinated. He called me to ask, “Do you think she likes me?” It was very strange to get such calls from a famous person.

On January 1, 1990, Jobs proposed to Powell, and then went off to work and forgot about her for several months. In September, Lauren, offended by Jobs” neglect, left him, but in October he presented her with an engagement ring, and two months later they went on a trip to Hawaii. Upon her return, it turned out that Lauren was pregnant.

The wedding took place on March 18, 1991. The ceremony was officiated by Jobs” Soto Zen mentor, monk Kobun Chino Otogawa, at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. Jobs was happily married, though he sometimes longed for Tina:

Lauren is like Tina, but totally different – tough, armored. That”s why the marriage was successful.

The couple had a son, Reed, in September 1991, followed by daughters Erin in August 1995 and Eve in 1998. Jobs devoted little time to his children, especially his daughters. He loved spending time with his son, but he said that it was the younger Eve, a fearless, strong-willed and very active girl, who would someday lead Apple, if not become president of the United States. Reed became very much like his father in appearance, but also differed from him in good manners and soft character.

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Housing

In 1982, Jobs bought an apartment in The San Remo, where Demi Moore, Steven Spielberg and Steve Martin also had apartments. But because of his obsession with perfection, Jobs never got to live there. With the help of James Fried of Bay Yumin Studios, he spent a long time renovating the apartment, only to sell it nearly two decades later to Bono, the lead singer of U2.

In 1984, Jobs bought the Jackling House, a 1,600-square-meter, 14-bedroom Spanish Colonial-style mansion designed by George Washington Smith in Woodside, California. (California). Although it was reportedly left nearly unfurnished, Jobs lived in it for nearly a decade. He reportedly kept his old BMW R60 motorcycle

Jobs brought the Jackling House into disrepair, planning to demolish it and build a smaller house in its place; however, local preservationists resisted his plans. In June 2004, the Woodside City Council gave Jobs permission to tear down the mansion on the condition that he advertise the property for a year so that those who wished to do so could have the opportunity to move it elsewhere and rebuild it. A number of people expressed interest, but no agreement was reached on this. Later that year, a group of local advocates began seeking legal action to prevent demolition. In January 2007, Jobs was stripped of his right to demolish the property by a court order. However, the decision was overturned on appeal in March 2010, and the mansion was demolished in early February 2011. Jobs died without having had time to build anything in its place, and now it is empty.

Jobs and his family lived in a house in the privileged neighborhood of Old Palo Alto. Next door are the homes of John Doerr, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Herzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith. The Jobs” two-story red-brick house, similar to the Cotswolds but with a colonial-style courtyard, was built in the 1930s by local architect John Carr. The Jobses rebuilt it a bit to suit the family”s needs. Buying furniture and appliances was a real ordeal for many months, as Steve, as was his custom, sought to make a single flawless choice. Overall, the house looks rather unassuming, especially as a billionaire”s dwelling, and doesn”t stand out. President Clinton dined in it with Jobs and 14 Silicon Valley CEOs on August 7, 1996.

Remembering death is the best way I know to avoid the trap that the idea of having something to lose traps you into. You”re already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart”s call.

In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In mid-2004 he announced the disease to Apple employees. The prognosis for this form of cancer is usually extremely poor, but Jobs turned out to have a very rare, surgically treatable type of disease known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. Jobs refused to undergo surgery for nine months because he did not want his body cut open, which he later regretted. He tried to prevent the disease by means of unconventional medicine: he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal therapy, even turned to a medium. In July 2004, Jobs agreed to undergo a pancreaticoduodenectomy (“Whipple”s operation”), during which the tumor was successfully removed, but at the same time liver metastases were revealed. Jobs announced that he was cured of the cancer, and secretly began chemotherapy himself. Doctors were able to partially sequence the cancer genome, and targeted therapy was prescribed. During Jobs” absence, the company was managed by Tim Cook, Apple”s head of international sales and operations.

The next three years were very nerve-racking for Apple and its shareholders. Jobs” health gradually deteriorated, he became terribly thin, but he continued to hold presentations until they began to talk about his appearance more than about the products he presented. Jobs did not reveal the whole truth about his health condition, turning wishful thinking into reality: the talk was about “a simple viral infection” or “hormonal imbalance. The reality was much worse: the cancer had metastasized, Jobs had little appetite for painkillers and immunosuppressants, and he was prone to frequent depressions from which he did not want treatment. Encouraging reports about his condition sounded utterly inconclusive, and Apple”s stock declined steadily.

On August 28, 2008, Bloomberg mistakenly published Jobs” pre-packaged obituary in its corporate news service. Although the error was quickly corrected, many news outlets and blogs reported it, reinforcing rumors about Jobs” health. Jobs responded at a Let”s Rock speech in September 2008 by quoting Mark Twain: “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” In a subsequent media event, Jobs concluded his presentation with a slide that read, “110

Finally, in January 2009, Jobs publicly acknowledged the problem and went on leave, turning things over to Tim Cook again. In April, Jobs underwent liver transplant surgery at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis. The prognosis for Jobs was “excellent,” and he returned to work in early 2010.

On January 17, 2011 it was announced that the head of Apple was again granted medical leave. Jobs announced this in a letter to employees, explaining that he made the decision “to focus on his health. As last time, it was announced that Tim Cook would manage day-to-day operations, while Jobs would continue to be involved in major strategic decisions. Nevertheless, Jobs spoke at the iPad 2 launch on March 2, presented iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6, and addressed the Cupertino City Council the next day.

On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced that he was stepping down as Apple”s CEO. “Sadly, that day has come,” Jobs wrote, referring to the fact that he “can no longer perform his duties and meet expectations as Apple”s CEO.” Jobs became chairman of the board and named Tim Cook as his successor. Jobs continued to be involved in Apple”s affairs, advising Tim Cook, until his last day.

Steve Jobs died at about 3 p.m. on October 5, 2011 at his home in California due to complications leading to respiratory failure. He died surrounded by his loved ones: his wife, children and sister. According to Dr. Ramzi Amir, his initial choice of alternative treatment “resulted in an unnecessarily early death.”

According to his family, Jobs “passed away peacefully,” and his last words, spoken hours before his death, were:

Wow! Wow! Wow!

Apple and Microsoft have lowered their flags at their headquarters and campuses. Bob Iger instructed that flags be lowered at all Disney facilities, including Disney World and Disneyland, from October 6-12.

Apple”s statement said:

It is with great sadness that we announce that Steve Jobs died today.

For two weeks after his death, Apple”s corporate Web site showed a simple page with Jobs” name and years of life next to his black and white portrait. Clicking on the image showed an obituary:

Apple has lost a visionary and a creative genius, and the world has lost its greatest man. Those of us fortunate enough to have known and worked alongside Steve have lost a dear friend and mentor. Steve left behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will always be the mainstay of Apple.

The published email address for remembrances, condolences and reflections received more than a million messages, which are now displayed on Steve Jobs” memorial page.

Pixar also dedicated its website to Jobs, publishing a picture of him with John Lasseter and Edwin Cutmull and the following text:

Steve was an extraordinary visionary, our dear friend and our guiding star of the Pixar family. He saw Pixar”s potential before any of us did, and more broadly than anyone could have imagined. Steve bet on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer animated movies; he always said “make it great.” He was the reason what Pixar turned out to be, and his strength, honesty and love of life made us all better. He will always be part of Pixar”s DNA.

A small private funeral was held on October 7, 2011 at Alta Mesa Cemetery, the only non-denominational cemetery in Palo Alto, information was not disclosed.

California Governor Jerry Brown declared Sunday October 16, 2011 as Steve Jobs Day. A private service was held at Stanford University on that day. Apple and other technology executives, members of the media, celebrities, Jobs” close friends and politicians, and Jobs” family were in attendance. Bono, Yo-Yo Ma and Joan Baez conducted the ceremony, which lasted more than an hour.

A private memorial service for Apple employees was held Oct. 19 at Apple”s Cupertino campus. Cook, Bill Campbell, Norah Jones, Albert Gore and Coldplay, as well as Jobs” widow, Lauren, were in attendance. Some Apple retail stores were briefly closed so employees could attend the ceremony.

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Media coverage

The death of Steve Jobs was the top story on ABC, CBS and NBC. Numerous newspapers around the world reported the death on their front pages the next day. A number of famous people, including former U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and The Walt Disney Company executive Bob Iger, commented on Jobs” death. Wired News collected the comments and published them on its home page. Many of Jobs” friends and colleagues, notably Steve Wozniak and George Lucas, offered their condolences. Adult Swim TV aired a 15-second clip with the word “hello” fading out, then changing to “goodbye.”

Time magazine dedicated an October 8, 2011 issue to Jobs. On the cover was a Norman Siff photograph of Jobs sitting in a lotus position holding his first Macintosh computer, first published in Rolling Stone, in January 1984. This was the eighth time Jobs had been on the cover of Time. This issue included a photo essay by Diane Walker, an Apple retrospective by Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman, and a six-page article by Walter Isaacson, as an announcement of the biography he wrote, Steve Jobs.

Bloomberg Businessweek published an ad-free issue devoted to Jobs that included extensive articles by Steve Jurvetson, John Scully, Sean Wisely, William Gibson and Walter Isaacson. A black-and-white photograph of Steve Jobs with his name and years of life was placed on the cover.

After founding Apple, Jobs became a symbol of his company and the industry. When Time named the computer “machine of the year” in 1982, the magazine published a big article about Jobs as “the most famous micro maestro.

In 1985 President Ronald Reagan awarded Jobs and Steve Wozniak the National Medal of Technology, and they were among the first to receive the award. In 1987 Jobs received the Jefferson Award for Public Service in the category “best public service by a person 35 years of age or younger. In 1988, Inventor and Innovator magazine recognized Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as recipients of the Technology – Chariot of Progress award. In December 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver inducted Jobs into the California Hall of Fame.

In 1989 Inc. magazine named Jobs the entrepreneur of the decade. In November 2007 Fortune magazine named Jobs the most influential person in business. In August 2009, Jobs was named the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers in a Junior Achievement poll. In November 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune. In March 2012, Fortune called Steve Jobs “the greatest entrepreneur of our time,” describing him as “brilliant, visionary, inspiring” and calling him “the quintessential entrepreneur of our generation.”

In November 2010, Jobs was ranked 17th on Forbes magazine”s list of the world”s most influential people. In December 2010 the Financial Times named Jobs its man of the year, ending its article about him with the following words: “In his autobiography, John Scully, the former PepsiCo executive who once ran Apple, said the following about the ambitions of the man he kicked out: ”Apple was supposed to be a manufacturer of great consumer products. It was a completely crazy idea. You couldn”t make consumer goods out of high-tech.” “That”s how wrong you can be,” concludes the author of the Financial Times article.

In December 2011 Graphisoft unveiled the world”s first bronze statue of Steve Jobs in Budapest, calling him one of the greatest figures of our time. In February 2012 Jobs was posthumously awarded the Grammy Trustees Award, given to those who have made an impact on the music industry in areas unrelated to performance. The Disney film John Carter and the Pixar cartoon Braveheart were dedicated to Jobs.

On the first anniversary of Jobs” death a sculptural composition “Thanks, Steve!” was unveiled in Odessa. The 330-kilogram composition is an almost two-meter-long palm (of Steve Jobs) made of scrap metal.

After his retirement and especially after his death, Steve Jobs was often described as a visionary, a pioneer and a genius in the fields of business and product design. Commentators agreed that Jobs profoundly changed the face of the modern world, and that his death was a great loss to all. The Independent states that as a “model for all executives,” Jobs revolutionized no fewer than six industries: personal computers, cell phones, music distribution, animated film production, e-books, and Internet tablets. Jobs was put on a par with such figures of the past as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Jobs” personal qualities were criticized especially often. As a perfectionist, Jobs always strove for the universal, the only possible, in his opinion, perfection and unindividualized beauty and simplicity. He demanded complete control over every situation, and in seeking it Jobs was selfish to the point of heartlessness. “He is an enlightened man, but also surprisingly cruel. A strange combination,” Chris Ann Brennan said of him. “The one question I”d really like to hear Steve answer is: Why can you be so mean? – Andy Herzfeld, who also accused Jobs of infidelity, was perplexed. – Steve and loyalty are incompatible… He leaves everyone who was once close to him.

Apple”s policies during the years Jobs led the corporation were always his policies, an extension of his ideas about how to do business, and ultimately a reflection of his personality. Free software pioneer Richard Stallman has pointed out that Apple has tight control over consumer computers and handheld devices, including limiting the press:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a painted prison invented to take away the freedom of fools, has died.

Malcolm Gladwell told The New Yorker that “Jobs” intuition was about editing, not inventiveness. His gift was to take what was in front of him–a tablet with a stylus–and mercilessly recycle it.

Also read, mythology – Thor

Theater

Books about Steve Jobs in Russian:

Sources

1. Джобс, Стив
2. Steve Jobs