Table of Contents

Sr. No. Topic

1 INTRODUCTION
2 EARLY LIFE
3 CAREER
4 APPLE COMPUTER
5 NEXT COMPUTER
6 PIXAR AND DISNEY
7 RETURN TO APPLE
8 INNOVATIONS AND DESIGN
9 RESIGNATION
10 HONOURS AND PUBLIC RECOGNITION
10 STEVE JOBS 10 MOST INNOVATIVE CREATIONS
11 BIBLOGRAPHY

Introduction

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (February 24, 1955 October 5, 2011) was an American
entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor, who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple
Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a charismatic and design-driven pioneer of
the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and
consumer electronics fields, transforming "one industry after another, from computers and
smart phones to music and movies." Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of
Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney
Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar. Jobs was among the first to see the
commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to
the creation of the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh. He also played a role in
introducing the LaserWriter, one of the first widely available laser printers, to the market.

After a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded
NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and
business markets. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which
was spun off as Pixar. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He
served as CEO and majority shareholder until Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006. In 1996,
after Apple had failed to deliver its operating system, Copland, Gil Amelio turned to NeXT
Computer, and the NeXTSTEP platform became the foundation for the Mac OS X.[14] Jobs
returned to Apple as an advisor, and took control of the company as an interim CEO. Jobs
brought Apple from near bankruptcy to profitability by 1998.

As the new CEO of the company, Jobs oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod,
iPhone, and iPad, and on the services side, the company's Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Store
and the App Store. The success of these products and services provided several years of
stable financial returns, and propelled Apple to become the world's most valuable publicly
traded company in 2011. The reinvigoration of the company is regarded by many
commentators as one of the greatest turnarounds in business history.


In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreas neuroendocrine tumour. Though it was
initially treated, he reported a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and
appeared progressively thinner as his health declined. On medical leave for most of 2011,
Jobs resigned in August that year, and was elected Chairman of the Board. He died of
respiratory arrest related to the tumour on October 5, 2011.

Jobs received a number of honours and public recognition for his influence in the
technology and music industries. He has been referred to as "legendary", a "futurist" and a
"visionary", and has been described as the "Father of the Digital Revolution," a "master of
innovation, the master evangelist of the digital age" and a "design perfectionist."







Early life

Jobs was born in San Francisco, California on February 24, 1955. He was adopted at birth
by Paul Reinhold Jobs (19221993) and Clara Jobs (ne Hagopian) (19241986), an
Armenian American. Paul and Clara had gotten married in March 1946, ten days after they
met. Clara had an ectopic pregnancy and couldn't bear children. In 1955, nine years after
their marriage, they decided to adopt a child. According to Steve Jobs's commencement
address at Stanford, Schieble wanted Jobs to be adopted only by a college graduate couple.
Schieble learned that Clara Jobs had not graduated from college and Paul Jobs had only
attended high school, but signed final adoption papers after they promised her that the child
would definitely be encouraged and supported to attend college. Later, when asked about
his "adoptive parents", Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my
parents." He stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%." Walter
Isaacson wrote in his authorized biography about Steve Jobs that Steve had told him, "Paul
and Clara are 100% my parents. And Joanna and Abdulfatahare only a sperm and an egg
bank. It's not rude, it is the truth."

Unknown to him, his biological parents would subsequently marry (December 1955), have a
second child, novelist Mona Simpson, in 1957, and divorce in 1962.

The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Jobs was
five years old. The parents later adopted a daughter, Patty.Paul worked as a mechanic and a
carpenter, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. Paul
showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son
how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, he
became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering.

Clara was an accountant who taught him to read before he went to school. Clara Jobs had
been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became
known as Silicon Valley.


Jobs's youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma
Elementary school in Mountain View, he frequently played pranks on others. Though
school officials recommended that he skip two grades on account of his test scores, his
parents elected for him only to skip one grade.

Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino,
California. At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared
the same interests in electronics. Fernandez introduced Jobs to his neighbor, Steve Wozniak,
a computer and electronics whiz kid, who was also known as "Woz". In 1969 Wozniak
started building a little computer board with Fernandez that they named "The Cream Soda
Computer", which they showed to Jobs; he seemed really interested. Wozniak has stated
that they called it the Cream Soda Computer because he and Fernandez drank cream soda
all the time whilst they worked on it and that he and Jobs had gone to the same high school,
although they did not know each other there.

Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford. They were
spending much of their life savings on their son's higher education. Jobs dropped out of
college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes,
including a course on calligraphy. In the commencement address he gave at Stanford, Jobs
said that, while he continued to audit classes at Reed, he slept on the floor in friends' dorm
rooms, returned Coke bottles for food money, and got weekly free meals at the local Hare
Krishna temple. In that same speech, Jobs said: "If I had never dropped in on that single
calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts.
Career
Early work

In 1972, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game, Pong. After
finishing it, Wozniak gave the board to Jobs, who then took the game down to Atari, Inc. in
Los Gatos, California. Atari thought that Jobs had built it and gave him a job as a
technician. Atari's co-founder Nolan Bushnell later described him as "difficult but valuable",
pointing out that "he was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people
know that".
Jobs travelled to India in mid-1974 to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi ashram with a
Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of
spiritual enlightenment. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted
because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973. Then they made a long trek up a
dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji. In India, they spent a lot of time on bus
rides from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh.

After staying for seven months, Jobs left India and returned to the US ahead of Daniel
Kottke. Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved and he wore traditional
Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his
LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".
He also became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, engaged in lengthy meditation
retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest St Zen monastery in the US. He
considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan, and maintained a lifelong
appreciation for Zen. Jobs would later say that people around him who did not share his
countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.

Jobs then returned to Atari, and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video
game Breakout. According to Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was
eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board design and
made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize
the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the
number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly
line.[further explanation needed] According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them
only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.Wozniak
did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him
about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.

Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to
manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Jobs decided that they
could make money selling it. The clandestine sales of the illegal "blue boxes" went well,
and perhaps planted the seed in Jobs's mind that electronics could be fun and profitable.
Jobs, in a 1994 interview, recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to figure out
how to build the blue boxes. Jobs said that if not for the blue boxes, there would have been
no Apple. He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them.

Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak in 1975. He
greatly admired Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder of
Polaroid Corporation, and would explicitly model his own career after that of Land's.

In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own business, which they named "Apple Computer
Company" in remembrance of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. At first they
started off selling circuit boards.
Apple Computer



In 1976, Wozniak single-handedly invented the Apple I computer. After Wozniak showed it
to Jobs, who suggested that they sell it, they and Ronald Wayne formed Apple Computer in
the garage of Jobs's parents in order to sell it. Wayne stayed only a short time leaving Jobs
and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company. They received funding from a
then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula. Scott
McNealy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, said that Jobs broke a "glass age
ceiling" in Silicon Valley because he'd created a very successful company at a young age.

In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what
turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-
Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling
sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"

In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox
PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa.
A year later, Apple completed the Macintosh.

The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial titled "1984". At
Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the
Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as
"pandemonium".

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees
from that time described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. Disappointing sales
caused a deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley, which devolved into a
power struggle between the two. Jobs kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy
faxes, then called new meetings at 7:00 am.


During an April 10 & 11 board meeting, Apple's board of directors gave Sculley the
authority to remove Jobs from all roles, except chairman, to reassign him to an
undetermined position. John delayed a reassignment. But when Sculley learned that Jobs
who believed Sculley to be "bad for Apple" and the wrong person to lead the company
had been attempting to organize a boardroom coup, on May 24, 1985, called a board
meeting to resolve the matter. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley once again and
removed Jobs from his managerial duties as head of the Macintosh division. With no duties
and exiled from the rest of the company to an otherwise-empty building, Jobs stopped
coming to work and later resigned as chairman. After unsuccessfully applying to fly on the
Space Shuttle as a civilian astronaut, and briefly considering starting a computer company
in the Soviet Union, he resigned from Apple five months later.

In a speech Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, he said being fired from Apple was
the best thing that could have happened to him; "The heaviness of being successful was
replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me
to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." And he added, "I'm pretty sure none of
this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine,
but I guess the patient needed it."
NeXT Computer





Jobs founded NeXT Inc. in 1985 after his resignation with $7 million. A year later he was
running out of money, and with no product on the horizon, he sought venture capital.
Eventually, Jobs attracted the attention of billionaire Ross Perot who invested heavily in the
company. NeXT workstations were first released in 1990, priced at $9,999. Like the Apple
Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was largely dismissed as
cost-prohibitive by the educational sector for which it was designed. The NeXT workstation
was known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software
development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the financial, scientific, and
academic community, highlighting its innovative, experimental new technologies, such as
the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. Tim
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer at CERN.

The revised, second generation NeXTcube was released in 1990, also. Jobs touted it as the
first "interpersonal" computer that would replace the personal computer. With its innovative
NeXTMail multimedia email system, NeXTcube could share voice, image, graphics, and
video in email for the first time. "Interpersonal computing is going to revolutionize human
communications and groupwork", Jobs told reporters.
Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the development
of and attention to NeXTcube's magnesium case. This put considerable strain on NeXT's
hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned
fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel.
The company reported its first profit of $1.03 million in 1994. In 1996, NeXT Software, Inc.
released WebObjects, a framework for Web application development. After NeXT was
acquired by Apple Inc. in 1997, WebObjects was used to build and run the Apple Store,
MobileMe services, and the iTunes Store.
Pixar and Disney





In 1986, Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer
graphics division for the price of $10 million, $5 million of which was given to the
company as capital.

The first film produced by the partnership, Toy Story (1995), with Jobs credited as
executive producer, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released.
Over the next 15 years, under Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter, the company produced
box-office hits A Bug's Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding
Nemo (2003); The Incredibles (2004); Cars (2006); Ratatouille (2007); WALL-E (2008);
Up (2009); and Toy Story 3 (2010). Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E,
Up and Toy Story 3 each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an
award introduced in 2001.

In 2003 and 2004, as Pixar's contract with Disney was running out, Jobs and Disney chief
executive Michael Eisner tried but failed to negotiate a new partnership, and in early 2004,

Jobs announced that Pixar would seek a new partner to distribute its films after its contract
with Disney expired.

In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to mend
relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that Disney
had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. When the deal
closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder with
approximately seven percent of the company's stock.





Return to Apple

In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for $427 million. The deal was finalized
in February 1997, bringing Jobs back to the company he co-founded. Jobs became de facto
chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997. He was formally named interim
chief executive in September.[105] In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on
returning to profitability, Jobs terminated a number of projects, such as Newton, Cyberdog,
and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering
Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors
opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims
was enough to terrorize a whole company." Jobs also changed the licensing program for
Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making machines.

With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple
products, most notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs's guidance,
the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new
products; since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple.
At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the "interim" modifier from his title at
Apple and became permanent CEO. Jobs quipped at the time that he would be using the title
"iCEO".

The company subsequently branched out, introducing and improving upon other digital
appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music
software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and
music distribution. On June 29, 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the
introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, which also included the
features of an iPod and, with its own mobile browser, revolutionized the mobile browsing
scene. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminded his employees that "real artists
ship".


Jobs was both admired and criticized for his consummate skill at persuasion and
salesmanship, which has been dubbed the "reality distortion field" and was particularly
evident during his keynote speeches (colloquially known as "Stevenotes") at Macworld
Expos and at Apple Worldwide Developers Conferences.

In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of Apple's poor recycling programs for e-waste in the
US by lashing out at environmental and other advocates at Apple's Annual Meeting in
Cupertino in April. A few weeks later, Apple announced it would take back iPods for free at
its retail stores. The Computer TakeBack Campaign responded by flying a banner from a
plane over the Stanford University graduation at which Jobs was the commencement
speaker. The banner read "Steve, don't be a mini-playerrecycle all e-waste".

In 2006, he further expanded Apple's recycling programs to any US customer who buys a
new Mac. This program includes shipping and "environmentally friendly disposal" of their
old systems.



Innovations and designs



Jobs's design aesthetic was influenced by the modernist architectural style of Joseph Eichler
and the industrial designs of Braun's Dieter Rams. His design sense was also greatly
influenced by the Buddhism which he experienced in India while on his seven-month
spiritual journey, and his sense of intuition was influenced by the spiritual people with
whom he studied.

According to Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak "Steve didn't ever code. He wasn't an
engineer and he didn't do any original design..." Daniel Kottke, one of Apple's earliest
employees and a college friend of Jobs's, stated that "Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the
innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person."

He is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 346 United States patents or patent
applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer and portable devices to
user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases,
clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages. Jobs's contributions to most of his patents were to
"the look and feel of the product". His industrial design chief Jonathan Ive had his name
along with him for 200 of the patents. Most of these are design patents (specific product
designs; for example, Jobs listed as primary inventor in patents for both original and lamp-
style iMacs, as well as PowerBook G4 Titanium) as opposed to utility patents (inventions).
He has 43 issued US patents on inventions. The patent on the Mac OS X Dock user
interface with "magnification" feature was issued the day before he died. Although Jobs had
little involvement in the engineering and technical side of the original Apple computers,
Jobs later used his CEO position to directly involve himself with product design.

Even while terminally ill in the hospital, Jobs sketched new devices that would hold the
iPad in a hospital bed. He also despised the oxygen monitor on his finger and suggested
ways to revise the design for simplicity.








Resignation

In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, but remained with the company as
chairman of its board. Hours after the announcement, Apple Inc. (AAPL) shares dropped
five percent in after-hours trading. This relatively small drop, when considering the
importance of Jobs to Apple, was associated with the fact that his health had been in the
news for several years, and he had been on medical leave since January 2011. It was
believed, according to Forbes, that the impact would be felt in a negative way beyond
Apple, including at The Walt Disney Company where Jobs served as director. In after-hours
trading on the day of the announcement, Walt Disney Co. (DIS) shares dropped 1.5 percent.





Honours and public recognition

After Apple's founding, Jobs became a symbol of his company and industry. When Time
named the computer as the 1982 "Machine of the Year", the magazine published a long
profile of Jobs as "the most famous maestro of the micro".

Jobs was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Ronald Reagan in 1985,
with Steve Wozniak (among the first people to ever receive the honor), and a Jefferson
Award for Public Service in the category "Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years
or Under" (also known as the Samuel S. Beard Award) in 1987. On November 27, 2007,
Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine. On December
5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver
inducted Jobs into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for
History, Women and the Arts.

In August 2009, Jobs was selected as the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers in a
survey by Junior Achievement, having previously been named Entrepreneur of the Decade
20 years earlier in 1989, by Inc. Magazine. On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the
CEO of the decade by Fortune magazine.

In November 2010, Jobs was ranked No.17 on Forbes: The World's Most Powerful People.
In December 2010, the Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010, ending
its essay by stating, "In his autobiography, John Sculley, the former PepsiCo executive who
once ran Apple, said this of the ambitions of the man he had pushed out: 'Apple was
supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company. This was a lunatic plan.
High-tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product.'" The Financial Times
closed by rhetorically asking of this quote, "How wrong can you be."

On December 21, 2011, Graphisoft company in Budapest presented the world's first bronze
statue of Steve Jobs, calling him one of the greatest personalities of the modern age.


In January 2012, when young adults (ages 16 25) were asked to identify the greatest
innovator of all time, Steve Jobs placed second behind Thomas Edison.

On February 12, 2012, Jobs was posthumously awarded the Grammy Trustees Award, an
award for those who have influenced the music industry in areas unrelated to performance.

In March 2012, global business magazine Fortune named Steve Jobs the "greatest
entrepreneur of our time", describing him as "brilliant, visionary, inspiring", and "the
quintessential entrepreneur of our generation".

Two films, Disney's John Carter and Pixar's Brave, are dedicated to Jobs.

Steve Jobs was posthumously inducted as a Disney Legend on August 10, 2013.

In February 2014, and according to a list of upcoming subjects published by The
Washington Post, U.S. Postal Service approved that Steve Jobs will get a limited release
postage stamp in 2015.

In an interview with Tim Cook in September 2014, he revealed that Jobs' main office, and
even nameplate, still remains as it was in 2011.
Steve Jobs' 10 Most Innovative Creations

When he died on Oct. 5, 2011 at the age of 56, Steve Jobs, co-founder and chief executive
officer of Apple, had 241 patents registered in his name or as co-inventor. The most
successful and revolutionary of these innovations have become indispensable to millions of
people worldwide for their work, for their leisure time, for the way they interact with
others.

Regarded as a genius on par with such influential inventors as Thomas Edison or Alexander
Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, Jobs was also a miraculously successful executive.
From its inauspicious origins in his parents' Los Altos, California, garage in 1976, Jobs built
his company Apple into one of the world's most valuable corporations in dollar terms today.
The lives of so many of us have been irreversibly changed for the better by the innovations
of Steve Jobs.

Among his most famous innovations are:

Apple I
Jobs and his co-founder Steve Wozniak created the Apple I, a personal computer with no
monitor, no keyboard and no mouse. The original selling price when it was launched in
1976 was $666.66.

Apple II
Launched in 1977, Apple II was an improved and updated version of the previous model,
this time with a keyboard, monitor and a new operating system. Wozniak had contributed
much to its design and new features which made it easier to use and expandable. The Apple
II was one of the first mass-produced, widely popular and profitable personal
microcomputers.

The Macintosh
With the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, called Mac for short, personal computing
took a giant leap forward with its innovative graphics interface and mouse, an efficient,
easy-to-use substitute for the keyboard, although the keyboard was also part of the package.
The Mac was not initially a commercial success, but several other enhanced, expanded and
improved models of the Mac, including a portable, were launched in the ensuing years with
huge profitability. (To learn more about innovation and its effect on a company, see Which
Is Better: Dominance Or Innovation?)

Pixar
Ever restless and looking for new opportunities, Jobs bought an obscure computer graphics
firm from the director of "Star Wars," George Lucas. Branding the firm Pixar, Jobs retooled
the company as an animated film studio. Pixar went on to win 26 Academy Awards and
numerous other honors for the production of such films as "Toy Story," "Wall-E" and
"Finding Nemo," all major box office successes. In 2006, Jobs sold Pixar to The Walt
Disney Company for $7.4 billion, thus making him the largest Disney stockholder.

NeXT



In one of those rare ironies in the business world, Steve Jobs was fired in 1985 from his own
company by John Scully, the executive Jobs hired to manage the firm. While Jobs
concentrated on the development of new products, Scully won a power struggle and ousted
his former boss. Jobs, however, launched a new firm NeXT producing innovative
computer workstations and accompanying operating systems, and power graphics. Marketed
especially to students and universities, the firm was not successful. Apple struggled in the
absence of Jobs, bought NeXT for $429 million in 1996 and rehired Jobs in 1997 as CEO.

The Cube
Nothing like it had ever been seen before: a compact desktop computer contained in a clear
plastic cube. Launched in 2000, a major innovation on The Cube, besides the design, was
the absence of a cooling fan. The heat generated by the Cube was dissipated from the top of
the encasement. Although it won awards for its design, The Cube provided nothing by way
of benefits or features than what was available on other competing personal computers.

The iPod
The iPod, launched in 2001, was basically a computer hard drive with some functional
embellishments, with a set of earbuds and a control system. It enabled its users to store and
playback music and songs on its hard drive. The songs could be bought online at the iTunes
retailer for as little as 99 cents. (For more on Apple, check out The Apple Ecosystem.)

The MacBook
Launched in 2006, the MacBook laptop computer had all the capabilities of a desktop
computer. Eventually, the MacBook outsold all competing laptops.

The iPhone
Fitting snugly into the palm of your hand, the iPhone, released in 2007, could send and
receive telephone calls, play movies, retrieve your e-mail, surf the net, and send and receive
text messages. Numerous other smart phone applications were added as subsequent models
were released.

The iPad Tablet
Another revolutionary innovation by Steve Jobs, the iPad tablet had many of the capabilities
of a laptop computer. The iPad is thin and lightweight, with a touch-screen interface, audio
capability and internet connectivity.

The Bottom Line
Not since Edison has an American inventor so widely and profoundly influenced our lives
with his innovations. We may now carry with us in a convenient, highly portable device, the
iPad, one of Jobs' latest ideas, which gives us access to movies, books, newspapers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
http://www.biography.com/people/steve-jobs-9354805
https://www.apple.com/stevejobs/
http://allaboutstevejobs.com/
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/steve-jobs