Jobs and Wozniak put together their first computer, called the Apple I. They marketed it in 1976 at a price of $666. The Apple I was the first single-board computer with built-in video interface, and on-board ROM, which told the machine how to load other programs from an external source. Jobs was marketing the Apple I at hobbyists like members of the Homebrew Computer Club who could now perform their own operations on their personal computers. Jobs and Wozniak managed to earn $774,000 from the sales of the Apple I. The following year, Jobs and Wozniak developed the general purpose Apple II. The design of the Apple II did not depart from Apple I's simplistic and compactness design. The Apple II was the Volkswagon of computers. The Apple II had built-in circuitry allowing it to interface directly to a color video monitor. Jobs encouraged independent programmers to invent applications for Apple II. The result was a library of some 16,000 software programs. For the Apple II computer to compete against IBM, Jobs needed better marketing skills. To increase his marketing edge he brought Regis McKenna and Nolan Bushnell into the company. McKenna was the foremost public relations man in the Silicon Valley. Nolan Bushnell was Jobs's former supervisor at Atari. Bushnell put Jobs in touch with Don Valentine, a venture capitalist, who told Markkula, the former marketing manager at Intel, that Apple was worth looking into. Buying into Apple with an investment variously estimated between $91,000 and $250,000, Markkula became chairman of the company in May 1977. The following month Michael Scott, who was director of manufacturing at Semi-Conductor Inc., became president of Apple. Through Markkula, Apple accumulated a line of credit with the Bank of America and $600,000 in venture capital from the Rockefellers and Arthur Roch. Quickly setting the standard in personal computers, the Apple II had earnings of $139,000,000 within three years, a growth of 700 percent. Impressed with that growth, and a trend indicating an additional worth of 35 to 40 percent, the cautious underwriting firm of Hambrecht & Quist in cooperation with Wall Street's prestigious Morgan Stanley, Inc., took Apple public in 1980. The underwriters price of $22 per share went up to $29 the first day of trading, bringing the market value of Apple to $1.2 billion. In 1982 Apple had sales of $583,000,000 up 74 percent from 1981. Its net earnings were $1.06 a share, up 55 percent, and as of December 1982, the company's stock was selling for approximately $30 a share. Over the past seven years of Apple's creation, Jobs had created a strong productive company with a growth curve like a straight line North with no serious competitors. From 1978 to 1983, its compound growth rate was over 150% a year. Then IBM muscled into the personal computer business. Two years after introducing its PC, IBM passed Apple in dollar sales of the machines. IBM's dominance had made its operating system an industry standard which was not compatible with Apple's products. Jobs knew in order to compete with IBM, he would have to make the Apple compatible with IBM computers and needed to introduce new computers that could be marketed in the business world which IBM controlled. To help him market these new computers Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pesi Cola for a position as president at Apple. Jobs enticed Scully to Apple with a challenge: "If you stay at Pepsi, five years from now all you'll have accomplished is selling a lot more sugar water to kids. If you come to Apple you can change the world."
Two years after building the Apple I, Jobs introduced the Apple II. The Apple II was the best buy in personal computers for home and small business throughout the following five years. When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it was marketed towards medium and large businesses. The Macintosh took the first major step in adapting the personal computer to the needs of the corporate work force. Workers lacking computer knowledge accomplished daily office activities through the Macintosh's user-friendly windows interface. Steve Jobs was considered a brilliant young man in Silicon Valley, because he saw the future demands of the computer industry. He was able to build a personal computer and market the product. "The personal computer was created by the hardware revolution of the 1970's and the next dramatic change will come from a software revolution," said Jobs. His innovative ideas of user-friendly software for the Macintosh changed the design and functionality of software interfaces created for computers. The Macintosh's interface allowed people to interact easier with computers, because they used a mouse to click on objects displayed on the screen to perform some function. The Macintosh got ride of the computer command lines that intemidated people from using computers. After resigning from Apple Inc., Jobs would continue challenging himself to develop computers and software for education and research by starting a new company that would eventually develop the NextStep computer.Jobs in 1981 introduced the Apple III, which had never fully recovered from its traumatic introduction, because Apple had to recall the first 14,000 units to remedy design flaws, and then had trouble selling the re-engineered version. Another Apple failure was the mouse-controlled Lisa, announced to stockholders in 1983. It should have been a world beater, because Lisa was the first personal computer controlled by a mouse which made it have a user-friendly interface, but had an un-friendly price of $10,000. The worst thing about Apple's development of computers was they lacked coherence. Each of Apple's three computers used a separate operating system.Jobs designed the Macintosh to compete with the PC and, in turn, make Apple's new products a success. In an effort to revitalize the company and prevent it from falling victim to corporate bureaucracy, Jobs launched a campaign to bring back the values and entrepreneurial spirit that characterized Apple in its garage shop days. In developing the Macintosh, he tried to re-create an atmosphere in which the computer industry's highly individualistic, talented, and often eccentric software and hardware designers could flourish. The Macintosh had 128K of memory, twice that of the PC, and the memory could be expandable up to192K. The Mac's 32-bit microprocessor did more things and out performed the PC's 16-bit microprocessor. The larger concern of management concerning the Macintosh was not IBM compatible. This caused an uphill fight for Apple in trying to sell Macintosh to big corporations that where IBM territory. "We have thought about this very hard and it old be easy for us to come out with an IBM look-alike product, and put the Apple logo on it, and sell a lot of Apples. Our earning per share would go up and our stock holders would be happy, but we think that would be the wrong thing to do," says Jobs. The strengths of Macintosh design was not memory, power, or manipulative ability, but friendliness, flexibility, and adaptability to perform creative work. The Macintosh held the moments possibility that computer technology would evolve beyond the mindless crunching of numbers for legions of corporate bean-counters. As the print campaign claimed, the Macintosh was the computer "for the rest of us."The strategy Jobs used to introduce the Macintosh in 1984 was radical. The Macintosh, with all its apparent vulnerability, was a revolutionary act infused with altruism, a technological bomb-throwing. When the machine was introduced to the public on Super Bowl Sunday it was, as Apple Chairman Steve Jobs described it, "kind of like watching the gladiator going into the arena and saying, 'Here it is." The commercial had a young woman athlete being chased by faceless storm-troopers who raced past hundreds of vacant eyed workers and hurled a sledgehammer into the image of a menacing voice. A transcendent blast. Then a calm, cultivated speaker assured the astonished multitudes that 1984 would not be like 1984. Macintosh had entered the arena. That week, countless newspapers and magazines ran stories with titles like "What were you doing when the '1984' commercial ran?"Jobs' invocation of the gladiator image is not incidental here. Throughout the development of the Macintosh, he had fanned the fervor of the design team by characterizing them as brilliant, committed marhinals. He repeatedly clothed both public and private statements about the machine in revolutionary, sometimes violent imagery, first encouraging his compatriots to see themselves as outlaws, and then target the audience to imagine themselves as revolutionaries. Jobs, like all those who worked on the project, saw the Macintosh as something that would change the world. Jobs described his Macintosh developing team as souls who were "well grounded in the philosophical traditions of the last 100 years and the sociological traditions of the 60's. The Macintosh team pursued their project through grueling hours and against formidable odds. A reporter who interviewed the team wrote: "The machine's development was, in turn, traumatic, joyful, grueling, lunatic, rewarding and ultimately the major event in the lives of almost everyone involved". The image Jobs wanted the public to have of the Macintosh was young, wears blue jeans, and lives in an 80's version of the 60's counterculture. Macintosh was impatient, uncomfortable, and contemptuous of everything that was conventional or hierarchical. He/she was both creative and committed, believing strongly that his/her work ultimately matters. Even if we counted beans for a living, we secretly saw ourselves as Romantic poets. Jobs approach in developing the Macintosh was like the history of telephones. When the telegraph became popular for communication a century ago, some people suggested putting a telegraph machine on everyone's desk, but everyone would have had to learn Morse code. Just a few years later Alexander Graham Bell filed his first patents for the telephone, and that easy-to-use technology became the standard means of communication. "We're at same juncture; people just are not going to be willing to spend the time learning Morse code, or reading a 400-page manual on word processing. The current generation of personal computers just will not any longer. We want to make a product like the first telephone. We want to make mass market appliances. What we are trying to develop is a computer that can do all those things that you might expect, but we also offer a much higher performance which takes the form of a very easy-to-use product." As the Macintosh took off in sales and became a big hit, John Sculley felt Jobs was hurting the company, and persuaded the board to strip him of power. John Sculley tried to change the discipline of the company by controlling costs, reducing overhead, rationalizing product lines to an organization that some in the industry called Camp Runamok.Sculley came to the conclusion that "we could run a lot better with Steve out of operations," he says. Jobs tended to value technological "elegance" over customer needs which is a costly luxury at a time of slowing sales. And Jobs's intense involvement with the Macintosh project had a demoralizing effect on Apple's other divisions. Jobs was exiled to an office in an auxiliary building that he nicknamed "Siberia." Jobs says he did not get any assignments and gradually found that important company documents no longer landed on his desk. He told every member of the executive staff that he wanted to be helpful in any way he could, and he made sure each had his home phone number. Few ever called back. "It was very clear there was nothing for me to do," he says, "I need a purpose to make me go." He soon came to believe that he would find no purpose within Apple. In July, Sculley had told security analysts in a meeting that Jobs would have no role in the operations of the company "now or in the future." When Jobs heard of the message he said, "You've probably had somebody punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind out you and you cannot breathe. The harder you try to breathe, the more you cannot breathe. And you know that the only thing you can do is just relax so you can start breathing again." Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personel computer led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. When Jobs was twenty one, he and a friend, Wozniak, built a personel computer called the Apple. The Apple changed people's idea of a computer from a gigantic and inscrutable mass of vacuum tubes only used by big business and the government to a small box used by ordinary people. No company has done more to democratize the computer and make it user-friendly than Apple Computer Inc. Jobs software development for the Macintosh re-introduced windows interface and mouse technology which set a standard for all applications interface in software.
How did the creation of Apple and NextStep develop Steve Jobs's managing skills? Jobs has been criticized as America's roughest, toughest, most intimidating bosses. Ever since Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer when he was 21, the meditating computer mogul was known as the terrible infant of Silicon Valley. Now, as head of NextStep, the 38-year-old Jobs is no longer an infant, but according to those who have worked with him, he still is terrible.Many colleagues describe Jobs as a brilliant man who can be a great motivater and positively charming. At the same time his drive for perfection is so strong that employees who do not meet his demands are faced with blistering verbal attacks that can eventually burn out even the most motivated of people. Jobs pushed his workers to the heights of unethical work conditions. In the late 1980's, two NextStep engineers had been slaving nights and weekends for 15 months to meet an important and impossible deadline for a new state-of-the-art chip. No one had ever designed such a thing before, and the strain was incredible. At a weekend off-site meeting Jobs publicly and viciously berated them before the entire company for not working faster, even after all their effort they put into building the chip. Out of pride they finished the project, but one of them quit soon thereafter. A NextStep employee describes his attitude: "You've been on it a week, and you're supposed to be brilliant. So what have you done? That's why so many people are afraid of him." Jobs's drive for perfection often lead him to be ignorant to other people's ideas. One ex-employee recalls how Jobs was demanding that, on principle, he would often reject anyone's work the first time it was shown to him. To cope with this unreasonableness, workers deliberately presented their worst work first, saving their best for a subsequent presentation, when it could have a better chance of satisfying the boss's expectations. Several employees felt Jobs is going through a major personality change and becoming much more of a consensus manager and team player.Steve Jobs, a college dropout who experimented with drugs and Eastern religions before turning to computer design was an unlikely candidate to have become the prototype of America's computer industry entrepreneur. The accomplishments Steve Jobs had on the computer industry while at Apple was introducing the personal computer. Jobs was bona fide visionary, who created the personal computer, Apple, in his garage. The Apple changed people's view on operations a computer could perform. From computers performing bean counter operations and federal taxes to executing individual's personal business operations. Jobs lead a hardware revolution by reducing the size of computers to small boxes.His development of the Macintosh re-introduced Xerox's innovative idea of user-friendly interface using a mouse. The Macintosh used a windows interface which contained picture-like icons representing a function or a program to be executed. The user would use a mouse to move a cursor onto the icon and press a mouse button to execute the function or program. Companies witness the success of the Macintosh's user-friendly interface and copied its style to develop their software. Jobs, in the nineties, will try to lead another revolution in software development for corporate developers to use the OOP paradigm to solve the massive time and money problems it takes to develop software.
Died at the age of 56 in oct 5,2011 . He changed our lyf to a large extent.He had health problem of rare type of pancreatic cancer for past few yrs
REST IN PEACE
-In the memories ,STEVE JOBS
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