Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco,
California. His unwed biological parents, Joanne Schieble and
Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption. Steve was adopted by Paul
and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, who moved to the suburban
city of Mountain View a couple of years later.
Paul Jobs and his son
The Santa Clara county, south of the Bay Area, became known as
Silicon Valley in the early 1950s after the sprouting of a myriad of
semi-conductor companies. As a result, young Steve Jobs grew up in a
neighborhood of engineers working on electronics and other gizmos in
their garages on weekends. This shaped his interest in the field as he
grew up. At age 13, he met one the most important persons in his life:
18-year-old Stephen Wozniak, an electronics wiz kid, and, like Steve, an
incorrigible prankster.
Five years later, when Steve Jobs reached college age, he told his
parents he wanted to enroll in Reed College — an expensive liberal arts
college up in Oregon. Even though the tuition fees were astronomical for
the poor couple, they had promised their son's biological parents he
would get a college education, so they relented. Steve spent only one
semester at Reed, then dropped out, as he was more interested in eastern
philosophy, fruitarian diets, and LSD than in the classes he took. He
moved to a hippie commune in Oregon where his main activity was
cultivating apples.
A few months later, Steve returned to California to look for a job.
He was hired at the young video game maker Atari, and used his wages to
make a trip to India with one of his college friends, in order to 'seek
enlightenment'. He came back a little disillusioned and started to take
interest in his friend Woz's new activities.
Apple's origins
The Jobses garage
Woz, whose interest in electronics had grown stronger, was regularly
attending meetings of a group of early computer hobbyists called the
Homebrew Computer Club. They were the real pioneers of personal
computing, a collection of radio jammers, computer professionals and
enlightened amateurs who gathered to show off their latest prowess in
building their own personal computer or writing software. The club
started to gain popularity after the Altair 8800 personal computer kit
came out in 1975.
The knowledge that Woz gathered at the Homebrew meetings, as well as
his exceptional talent, allowed him to build his own computer board —
simply because he wanted a personal computer for himself. Steve Jobs
took interest, and he quickly understood that his friend's brilliant
invention could be sold to software hobbyists, who wanted to write
software without the hassle of assembling a computer kit. Jobs convinced
Wozniak to start a company for that purpose: Apple Computer was born on
April 1, 1976.
The following months were spent assembling boards of Apple I
computers in the Jobses' garage, and selling them to independent
computer dealers in the area. However, Wozniak had started work on a
much better computer, the Apple II — an expandable, much more powerful
system that supported color graphics. Jobs and Wozniak knew deep down it
could be hugely successful, and therefore Jobs started to seek venture
capital. He eventually convinced former Intel executive turned business
angel Mike Markkula to invest $250,000 in Apple, in January 1977.
Markkula was a big believer in the personal computing revolution, and he
said to the young founders that, thanks to the Apple II, their company
could be one of the Fortune 500 in less than two years.
Apple II Forever
Although Markkula was a bit too optimistic about Apple's growth rate,
he was right that the company quickly became an American success story.
Because of its beautiful package, ease of use, and nifty features, the
Apple II crushed most of its competition and its sales made the Apple
founders millionaires. The biggest surge in sales came after the
introduction of VisiCalc, the first commercially successful spreadsheet
program: hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether they be
accountants, small business owners, or just obsessed with money, bought
Apple IIs to make calculations at home.
In the wake of Apple's success, its investors decided it was time to
go public. The IPO took place in December 1980, only four years after
the company was started. Steve Jobs's net worth increased to over $200
million, at age 25.
Apple's success attracted the attention of the computer giant IBM,
which until then was still only selling mainframe computers to large
companies. A crash project was started and in August 1981, the IBM PC
entered the personal computer market. It was the biggest threat yet to
Apple, whose reputation was being put into question after the flop of
the Apple III in 1980. Most hopes rested on a business computer project,
called the Lisa.
Lisa & Xerox PARC
Steve Jobs was a big believer in the Lisa computer initially. It was
he who came up with the name. Indeed, in 1978, his ex-girlfriend from
high school Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a little girl, who she named
Lisa. Steve denied paternity, although it was ovious to everyone who
knew him that he was the father, given the on-and-off relationship he
still had with Chrisann at the time. Jobs refused to give any money to
Chrisann, despite the millions he had accumulated at Apple. While in
denial, he came up with the name Lisa for the new computer Apple was
building…
The following year, a tour of the computer research lab Xerox PARC
made a huge impression on him. The scientists who worked there had
invented a number of breakthrough technologies that would mark the
industry for the coming decades, including the graphical user interface
(GUI) and the mouse, Ethernet, laser printing and object oriented
programming. Jobs became obsessed with the GUI which was a lot easier to
use than the command-line interfaces of the day, which required any PC
user to learn a computer language. He insisted the Lisa had a GUI and a
mouse, too.
Macintosh
However, because of his hot temper and his relative inexperience in
technology or management, Steve Jobs was thrown out of the Lisa project.
He felt absolutely crushed by this decision. As a revenge, he took over
a small project called Macintosh, a personal computer that was supposed
to be a cheap appliance, 'as easy to use as a toaster'. In 1981, Steve
Jobs became head of the Macintosh project, and decided to make it a
smaller and cheaper version of the Lisa, complete with a GUI of folders,
icons and drop-down menus, and a mouse.
The three years it took to develop Macintosh were some of the most
productive and intense for Steve Jobs. He formed a small group of
dedicated, young, brilliant engineers who stood fully behind his vision
of a computer 'for the rest of us'. They saw themselves as 'pirates'
against the rest of Apple, 'the Navy'. The team antagonized both the
Apple II group and the Lisa group, because the Mac was competitive of
both. Yet in 1983, after it became clear the Lisa was turning into
another major flop for Apple, all of the company's hope started to rest
on the Macintosh. Steve was supported in his mission by John Sculley,
Apple's new CEO whom he hired in 1983 to help him run the company and
groom him into a future chief executive.
Leaving Apple
On January 24 1984, after Apple had run a very memorable TV
commercial for the SuperBowl ('1984'), Steve Jobs introduced Macintosh
at the company's annual shareholders meeting. The product was launched
in great fanfare and for the first few months, it was very successful.
Jobs and Sculley, 1984
However, by early 1985, sales were plummeting, but Steve Jobs refused
to acknowledge it and continued to behave as if he had saved Apple.
This created a lot of tension within the company, especially between
Steve and the CEO, John Sculley, who used to be very close but now
stopped talking to one another.
In May 1985, Steve Jobs started trying to convince some directors and
top executives at Apple that Sculley should go. Instead, many of them
talked to Sculley, who took the matter to the board of directors. The
board sided with Sculley and a few days later, announced a
reorganization of the company where Steve Jobs had no operational duties
whatsoever — he was only to remain chairman of the board.
Steve was aghast: Apple was his life, and he was effectively kicked
out of it. After four months spent traveling and trying out new ideas,
he came back in September with a plan: he would start a new computer
company aimed at higher education, with a small group of other ex-Apple
employees. When Apple learned of the plan, they declared they would sue
him as he was taking valuable information about the company to compete
with it. As a result, Steve Jobs resigned in September 1985, and sold
all but one of his Apple shares, in disgust. He went ahead with his plan
anyway, and incorporated NeXT. Apple dropped its lawsuit a few months
later.
The NeXT years
Steve aimed at the highest possible standards for his new NeXT
machine: he wanted the best hardware, built in the world's most
automated factory, and running the most advanced software possible. He
decided that the computer's operating system, NeXTSTEP, would be based
on UNIX, the most robust system in the world , used by the military and
universities— but that it would also be as easy to use as a
Macintosh,with its own GUI. NeXTSTEP would allow for object oriented
programming, another breakthrough from Xerox PARC, that made writing
software much faster and more reliably. These ambitious plans put off
the release date of the computer — called the NeXT Cube — to October
1988.
Jobs unveils the NeXT Cube, 12 October 1988
When it came out, the NeXT Cube was indeed a great machine. But it
didn't sell — it was late, and way too overpriced: universities has
asked for a $3,000 computer, and Steve Jobs had built a $10,000
workstation. After two years of very low sales, NeXT launched the
cheaper NeXT Station, and expanded its target to businesses, in addition
to higher ed. It didn't work: the number of NeXT computers sold each
month remained in the hundreds. The company was bleeding money and all
its co-founders left one after the other, as well as its most prominent
investor, Texan billionaire Ross Perot. By 1993, NeXT had to give up its
entire hardware business to become a niche software company. Steve Jobs
had failed, and he was devastated. He started focusing less on work,
and more on his wife Laurene (who he married in 1991) and his newborn
son, Reed.
Pixar
To understand how Steve Jobs got out of his nadir, let's go back
eight years earlier, in late 1985. At the time, George Lucas, who was in
the middle of an expensive divorce, was selling the computer graphics
division of his Lucasfilm empire. Steve Jobs had millions in the bank,
after having sold all his Apple stock, and was interested. In early
1986, he bought the small group of computer scientists, and incorporated
it as Pixar. The founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, had
gotten together in the late 1970s with a common vision of making films
using computer animation only. But they also knew no computer was
powerful enough at the time, and they would have to hold out for a
couple decades before their dream could materialize.
Tin Toy
For the first five years of Pixar, Steve Jobs set a goal for the
company to sell high-end computer graphics workstations for
institutions, such as hospitals or even the army. The animations group
led by John Lasseter was very small at the time, and only survived
because it provided good publicity for the power of the Pixar rendering
software. Steve Jobs understood this when the studio won an Academy
Award for its short movie 'Tin Toy' in 1989. However, just like NeXT's,
sales of Pixar hardware were microscopic, and the company went
software-only in 1990.
Pixar then became a software company, developing the RenderMan 3D
rendering software. Its animation business was kept alive because it was
the only one that brought some cash in, with various 3D TV commercials
for consumer brands. However a decisive contract changed everything: in
1991, Disney signed with Pixar for making a full-feature
computer-animated movie. The script had to be fully approved by both
parties, and the very hands-on head of Disney animation Jeffrey
Katzenberg halted the production several times out of creative
disagreements with John Lasseter and his team. But in 1995, the movie
was finally starting to take form, and Steve Jobs became increasingly
enthused by it.
Steve as Woodie
Although he had used his personal money to fund Pixar for nine years,
Jobs had never been implicated that much in the company, which was
always more of a 'hobby' to him compared to NeXT. But by 1995, NeXT had
more or less tanked, whereas Pixar was obviously going to benefit widely
from the Disney marketing machine and make a hit with Toy Story. Steve
understood this new momentum full well: he planned to take Pixar public
the week following the release of the movie, in November 1995. He was
right, and Toy Story's box-office success was only surpassed by the
Pixar stock's success on Wall Street. Steve Jobs, who owned 80% of the
company, saw his net worth rise to over $1.5 billion — five times the
money he had ever made at Apple in the 1980s!
Back to Apple
Business wasn't all sunshine and roses at Apple. In the decade
following Steve's departure, the computer maker had milked all the cash
it could from the Macintosh and its successors, surfing on the wave of
the desktop publishing revolution that the Mac and the laser printer had
made possible. But in 1995, after Microsoft had released Windows 95,
which was a pale but working copy of the Mac OS, sales of Macintosh
computers started plummeting.
A new CEO, Gil Amelio, arrived in early 1996 to save the company. He
cut costs, got rid of a third of the workforce, and decided that instead
of writing a new, modern operating system from scratch to compete with
Window, it was better for Apple to acquire one. Eventually, Amelio chose
to buy NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system — and Steve Jobs convinced him
to buy the whole company, for a whopping $400 million. The deal was
made in December 1996: Steve Jobs was back at the company he founded.
Steve Jobs and Gil Amelio, December 1996
The Amelio-Jobs cooperation didn't last long, though: Apple lost $700
million in the first quarter of 1997, and the board decided to get rid
of its CEO. Jobs effectively organized a board coup with the complicity
of his billionaire friend Larry Ellison, and after a tenure that lasted
exactly 500 days, Amelio was gone. In August 1997, Jobs took the stage
at Macworld Boston to explain his plan for Apple: he had gotten rid of
the old board of directors, and made a deal with Microsoft to settle
patent disputes and invest $150 million in the struggling Silicon Valley
icon. One month later, on September 16, 1997, Jobs accepted to become
Apple's interim CEO.
For the loser now will be later to win
The few months after Steve Jobs came back at Apple were among the
hardest-working in his life. He later told his biographer Walter
Isaacson that he was so exhausted, he couldn't speak when he came home
at night (remember he was also running a thriving Pixar simultaneously).
He reviewed every team at Apple and asked them to justify why they were
important to the future of the company. If they couldn't, their product
would get canceled, and there was a high probability they'd have to
leave, too. Jobs also brought with him his executive team from NeXT, and
installed them in key positions.
iMac introduction, May 1998
Critics started to believe in Steve Jobs's ability to run Apple when
he unveiled his first great product, the iMac. Introduced in May 1998,
it was Apple's first truly innovative product since the original
Macintosh of 1984. Its translucent design blew away the whole PC
industry, which had failed to produce anything but black or beige boxes
for over a decade. Moreover, it was a hot seller, and played a key role
in bringing back tons of developers to the Mac platform. Design
innovations continued throughout 1998 and 1999 with the colored iMacs
and the iBook, Apple's consumer notebook. After three years in charge,
Steve Jobs had brought Apple back to its status of cool tech icon.
At Macworld in January 2000, Steve Jobs made two significant
announcements: first, he demoed Aqua, the graphics-intensive user
interface that Apple would use in its next-generation operating system
derived from NeXTSTEP, Mac OS X. Second, he announced he had accepted
the Apple board's offer, and became the company's CEO, dropping the
'interim' from his title. It was not an obvious choice because he
remained CEO of Pixar, too. Mac OS X had not shipped yet, though, and
would take another year to ship.
The simple fact that such a massive OS transition happened is a
technical feat in itself. The Mac OS X team worked very hard and
released six major version of the system every year or so, between 2001
and 2007, each time with more stability, rapidity, and features.
Although Steve Jobs buried Mac OS 9 on stage in 2002, most observers
acknowledge that the transition from the old Mac OS to OS X was really
finished only in 2005, with the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The
continuous improvement of Mac OS X and the powerful core technologies
and development tools it provided proved key in the Digital Hub strategy
that Steve Jobs described in January 2001.
The Digital Hub strategy
Once Apple had been resurrected by the iMac, Steve Jobs started
focusing on ways to make the company's shrinking marketshare (around 5%
of PCs) grow. He decided to use Apple's unique knowledge of making both
the hardware and the software to do just that: not only would Macs be
very powerful and attractive machines, but they would also run software
that no Windows PCs could. His first move was to bet on what he called
'desktop video', the ability to shoot and edit personal movies on your
Mac. He was convinced that desktop video would be as big a deal as
desktop publishing had been in the 1980s, and in 1999, he introduced the
iMac DV and a digital movie editing software, iMovie, to pioneer that
concept.
The iMac DV was a hit, but desktop video failed to catch on as Jobs
had hoped. After a much introspection, in 2000, the Apple executive team
came up with a new paradigm for the Mac that would set the company's
destinies for the coming decade. They took the idea of desktop video and
decided to expand it to the other consumer digital devices that were
rapidly becoming mainstream at the time. Apple would write software for
the Mac to edit and store all the new digital content that consumers
created — and these apps would be so powerful, delightful and easy to
use, that they would entice PC users to switch to the Mac. The Digital
Hub strategy was born. Steve Jobs explained it to the Apple community at
Macworld in January 2001, the same day he unveiled the 2nd and 3rd of
the iApps: iDVD, to shares iMovies with family and friends on DVDs; and
iTunes, a digital jukebox software. Other iApps would follow: iPhoto in
2002, GarageBand in 2004, and iWeb in 2006.
2001: An Apple Odyssey
In many ways, the juggernaut that Apple became was shaped by very
smart decisions that Jobs and his executive team took in the crucial
2000-2001 timeframe. We've talked of Mac OS X and the Digital Hub
strategy, a crucial product and a crucial strategy that were both
unveiled in January 2001.
A third key decision was taken in 2000 and unveiled in mid-2001: that
of creating a fully-owned retail channel, the famous Apple retail
stores. Although it is easy to approve of this strategy in retrospect,
it was far from an obvious choice back in May 2001, when the first two
retail stores were inaugurated. PC maker Gateway was shutting down its
own retail stores one after the other, and the analysts consensus at the
time was that niche player Apple would burn precious money in this
economic downturn on a foolish and dated idea. On the other hand, Steve
Jobs explained that only in an environment fully controlled by Apple,
with Apple-trained staff and only Apple-compatible products, could the
superiority of Macs be fully appreciated by consumers.
iPod, October 2001
Finally, it was in 2000 that Jobs started realizing his mistake of
betting only on digital movies, and reoriented the company's efforts to
another media: music. Digital music file-sharing service Napster was at
the peak of its popularity, and all the young people were not spending
their time shooting movies, but rather downloading and listening to MP3
music files. iTunes was born out of that realization, but there was a
problem: although there were great digital camcorders to run in
conjunction with iMovie, and awesome digital cameras too, digital music
players mostly sucked — not to mention their universal ugliness.
That's why, in March 2001, Steve Jobs started a crash development
program to develop an Apple-branded MP3 player before that year's
holiday season: the iPod was born. On October 23, 2001, he introduced
this cute white digital device to a small group of journalists in the
company's campus auditorium. The tagline was '1,000 songs in your
pocket', and there was great emphasis on its symbiosis with the iTunes
app. But no one in the room, Jobs included, had any clue how important
it would turn out to the company's future.
iPod nation
The first digital music player that people loved, iPod was a
commercial success from the day it debuted. It was released, of course,
as Mac-compatible only, because its goal, just like iMovie or iDVD, was
to help sales of Macs. But it came at a time when a lot of people needed
a good MP3 player, and despite its rather high price tag, a lot of PC
users ended up buying it too, hacking it so they could use it on their
machines. This had Steve Jobs and his team think a great deal: should
they keep making a Mac-only iPod, or should they open it to Windows,
too? Although Jobs was opposed to the latter idea, he eventually
relented, and the first Windows iPods were introduced in July 2002 at
Macworld New York.
However, it was soon becoming clear that iPod benefited from music
piracy, and that its sales could go even higher if there was a legal way
to download music. Steve Jobs didn't wait for the music industry to
reinvent itself. He went to all record labels to negotiate landmark
deals that would lead to the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in
April 2003. Ironically, one of the arguments he used was that the risk
to music labels was quite low, because of the Mac's small market share
(iTunes was still Mac-only). The first compelling legal alternative to
illegal music file-sharing, the iTunes Store was an instant success,
selling one million songs in its first week. It not only helped the
sales of iPods, but it eventually reshaped the whole music industry. It
was introduced to Windows as well six months later, in October 2003.
Despite this great success, Apple didn't rest on its laurels. In
January 2004, it introduced the iPod mini, a more compact version of
iPod that sold at $249, only $50 less than the full featured iPod. It is
really after iPod mini came out that iPod became the cultural icon it
is now known as. The phrase 'Walkman of the digital age' became
commonplace to describe it, and in July 2004, Steven Levy of Newsweek
wrote an emblematic cover story entitled 'iPod nation'. The iPod
adventure was far from over, since Apple introduced the $99 iPod shuffle
and the 'impossibly small' iPod nano in 2005, and the iPod video in
2006. By that time, iPod had become synonymous with music player, and
the iTunes Store had sold over one billion songs.
Steve posing with iPod minis, 2004
Although iPod changed the music industry and the way everybody listen
to music, the most important change it carried was probably that of
Apple. The wild success of iPod proved to all the company's employees,
starting with Jobs himself, that they were right to strive for
perfection and ease of use — unlike the Mac, which still didn't make it
past the 5% marketshare, iPod garnered Microsoft-like numbers of 80% of
sales of MP3 players. It was iPod that revealed the future of Apple, not
only as a PC manufacturer, but as a consumer electronics powerhouse. It
was also iPod that broadened the company's expertise in the
manufacturing, logistics and distribution of a mainstream digital device
in gigantic proportions. Finally, it was iPod which, through the crowds
it attracted to the company's retail stores, finally helped the Mac
business of Apple, whose growth rate outpaced that of Windows PCs
starting in 2005.
When Pixar met Disney
Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner, 1995
iPod also played an indirect role in shaping the future of Steve's
'other' company, Pixar. After having released hit after hit (A Bug's
Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo
(2003)), the animation studio had decided to let go of its distribution
deal with Disney, mainly because of increasing tensions between Steve
Jobs and Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Steve Jobs openly said he would not
make another deal with the Magic Kingdom company until Eisner was out.
Turns out his opinion was shared by many an executive at Disney —
including Walt's own nephew, Roy Disney, who started a public campaign
to oust the company's CEO in late 2003. Th led to the nomination of Bob
Iger as new CEO in September 2005.
Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, Disney CEO Bob Iger and John Lasseter on Jan 24, 2006
Rumor has it that one of the first phone calls Iger made after he
became CEO was to Pixar CEO Steve Jobs. He was willing to show his good
will in ending the Pixar-Disney dispute. Steve Jobs took the opportunity
to pitch him his new Apple plan. He was going to introduced an iPod
with video capabilities soon, and he wanted a movie store to go along
with it. Iger accepted, and both men appeared on stage in October to
announce that Disney would sell music videos and TV shows on iTunes. The
audience of journalists was pleasantly surprised to see the CEO of
Disney appear so friendly with Steve Jobs, and suspected there would
soon be news on the Pixar side.
Indeed, on January 24, 2006, Disney announced its friendly
acquisition of Pixar, putting $7.4 billion in stock on the table. Jobs
became a Disney board member and its largest individual shareholder
(owning 7% of the company's stock), while Pixar executives Ed Catmull
and John Lasseter were both given critical roles in the new studio.
Momentum
Meanwhile, Apple was seeing unprecedented success in all its
businesses, not only iPod and iTunes. The retail stores were hugely
popular, and a milestone was reached when Steve Jobs inaugurated the
impressive 5th Avenue store in New York CIty, a glass cube facing
Central Park. As for the Mac, it was gaining momentum on the market,
benefiting from both the aura of the iPod, and the switch to Intel.
Indeed, in June 2005, at WWDC, Jobs made a surprise announcement that
after over a decade using the PowerPC microprocessor architecture in
Macs, Apple would start using the more power-efficient Intel platform.
In the late 1990s, Apple had run several ads to make fun of Intel's
Pentium processors, which were commonplace in the Windows world. As a
matter of fact, the expression 'Wintel machines' (Windows + Intel) was
often used to describe PCs. That move to Intel was thus pretty bold, but
in the long run turned out to be another wise decision. Not only did it
make Macs more efficient, and pave the way for the super slim MacBook
Air notebooks, but it also opened up a whole new set of customers of
Apple. Intel Macs could run both Mac OS X (and its UNIX terminal) and
Windows, and became the platform of choice for the majority of
developers. All Macs were running Intel less than a year after the
announcement.
Steve Jobs and Intel CEO Paul Otellini at Macworld 2006
Apple Inc.
iPod made Steve Jobs realize that Apple could become the greatest
consumer electronics company on the planet. Around 2003, he started a
secret project to develop a tablet. But in 2004-2005, he realized that
the technology that this group had developed, including a revolutionary
touch-screen technology, could be used in a phone rather than a tablet.
After two more years of development, including a harsh internal
competition to prove that it was possible to make Mac OS X run on the
phone, iPhone was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007. This
keynote is often considered the best and most memorable of all of Steve
Jobs's career.
iPhone was not only a breakthrough digital convergence device ("an
iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator" all in one), it was also a
force of disruption of the traditional phone business. Just like for the
iTunes Store, Steve Jobs had negotiated landmark deals with wireless
carrier AT&T before he introduced iPhone — without ever showing it
to them! In exchange for exclusivity, the carrier would pay Apple a
share of all their iPhone subscription revenues. And of course, AT&T
could not put any software on the iPhone, and no logo either. This was
an inversion of the traditional master-slave relationship that carriers
entertained with phone manufacturers. In the long run, it really put the
phone industry upside down.
Unlike iPod, all of Apple understood that iPhone would be a
successful and rules-changing device, starting with their own company.
That's why Steve Jobs announced that its name would change from Apple
Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. Macs still mattered, but accounted for a
minority of Apple's revenues already, and this decline would not stop
any time soon. Apple had become the most prominent digital device
company.
The original iPhone was successful already: despite its $399 price
tag, Apple sold 6 million of them during its existence. But sales really
started to skyrocket in 2008, after Apple introduced the cheaper iPhone
3G (at a subsidized $199 price) and the App Store. Just like the
Windows-compatible iPod, Steve Jobs was originally opposed to letting
third-party software on the iPhone. But the demand was so high that he
eventually relented, and introduced the iPhone SDK and the App Store in
March 2008.
It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the iPhone App Store,
which ushered in a new era in mobile software. Thousands of developers
started writing apps for the iPhone platform, which became a competitive
advantage for Apple that no other company has been able to catch up
with to this day. Apple proudly showed off this rich choice of software
in its TV ad campaign 'There's an app for that' that ran for over two
years.
Health concerns
Unfortunately, while he had never been so successful professionally,
Steve Jobs had to start fighting cancer with renewed intensity.
In late 2003, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer of a rare
kind, that could potentially be cured by surgery. However, against
everyone's advice, he refused to have the surgery for nine long months.
Instead, true to the ideals of his youth, he tried alternative diets and
treatments, including acupuncture and seeing a psychic. Only in July
2004 did he agree to have the surgery. He looked healthy for the next
five years, and spoke publicly of being 'cured' of cancer at his famous
Stanford speech in 2005.
Yet at the WWDC keynote in June 2008, few observers failed to notice
how thin he appeared on stage, and concerns about his health started
popping up again. They became increasingly frequent until December 2008,
when Apple made a shocking announcement that Jobs would not be the
keynote speaker at Macworld 2009, and that he was taking a medical leave
of absence for six months. Although he publicly denied it, the truth
was of course that his cancer had come back. He was actually weeks away
from death when he received a liver transplant in April 2009. But he
came back to Apple, as planned, in late summer 2009, healthier though
still very frail in appearance. He was eager to bring the finishing
touches to a new project very dear to his heart.
Ushering in the Post-PC era
WWDC 2011
The iPhone had spun off the idea for a tablet device back in 2005,
and it was time to restart that project, which of course led to the
introduction of iPad. Although some speculated it would run Mac OS X, it
was decided that iPad would in fact run the same operating system as
iPhone, now called iOS. It would therefore benefit from the rich variety
of apps already present in the iPhone App Store.
Although iPad was welcomed by mixed reviews when it was introduced in
January 2010 (some dubbed it a "larger iPod touch"), it was always
clear to Steve Jobs that it was 'the biggest thing [he'd] ever done' —
the ultimate post-PC device, an eventual replacement of PCs for the
average user. He laid out his vision clearly at the D8 conference in May
2010, where he compared PCs to trucks, which still existed after cars
were invented but were only for professional, niche use. This
perspective on iPad was reiterated in a series of TV commercials where
the narrator, the 'Apple voice', explained how revolutionary iPad was
and how the revolution had 'only just begun'.
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs' health, which had seem to recover
throughout 2010, started declining again. In January 2011, he announced
he was taking a new medical leave of absence, this time without saying
when it would end. Everybody started talking about his upcoming
departure. However, he deemed iPad and iOS so important that he still
made two major public presentations at Apple event. The first one was
the introduction of iPad 2 in March 2011, and the second one was WWDC,
in June 2011, where he introduced iCloud.
In many ways, the iCloud announcement was of similar importance as
the Digital Hub Strategy introduction ten years before. It was not only a
product, but a master plan to get consumers to adopt iOS devices and
lock them into the Apple ecosystem. The iCloud introduced in 2011, which
allowed users to sync email, documents, and media across their Macs,
iPhones, iPod touches, iPads and Apple TVs, was only the first step in
that direction. It was crucial to Steve Jobs who clearly put iOS as the
most important part of Apple and the key to its future.
Building his legacy
The resurgence of Steve's cancer was a painful reminder that it was
time to 'put his affairs in order' before his passing — and he did.
He made sure that Apple was ready to operate without him: in late
2008, he hired the dean of the Yale School of Management to create
'Apple University', a sort of internal business track to groom future
Apple executives by exposing them to the Apple ways of doing business,
through actual case studies in the history of the company. He also
consolidated his executive team and agreed with the board that his
natural successor would be his second in command, COO Tim Cook. Finally,
at his last public appearance in June 2011, he unveiled his plans for
the future Apple campus in Cupertino, a huge spaceship-sized building in
the shape of a perfect circle. All of this was in place when, because
of his increasingly deteriorating health, he resigned as Apple CEO on
August 24, 2011.
Jobs also prepared his personal legacy. In 2009, he finally started
giving interviews to journalist Walter Isaacson to prepare for his first
and only authorized biography, giving him his perspective on his life
and career. He also spent his last days designing a boat for his family
on which he hoped to travel the world. Unfortunately, death took him too
soon, and he died peacefully at home on October 5, 2011, surrounded by
his family — the day following the introduction of the iPhone 4S, an
Apple event that he watched from his deathbed.
The future Apple spaceship campus
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