Jobs, Steven P.

▪ American businessman

in full  Steven Paul Jobs 

born Feb. 24, 1955, California

      cofounder of Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), and a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era.

      Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California, located in what is now known as Silicon Valley. Though he was interested in engineering, his passions of youth varied. He dropped out of Reed College, Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer early in 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism.

 Back in Silicon Valley in the autumn of 1974, Jobs reconnected with Stephen Wozniak (Wozniak, Stephen Gary), a former high school friend who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company. When Wozniak told Jobs of his progress in designing his own computer logic board, Jobs suggested that they go into business together, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak's design in 1976. The Apple I, as they called the logic board, was built in the Jobses' family garage with money they obtained by selling Jobs's Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak's programmable calculator. (See the photograph—>.)

      Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to a broad audience, at least if it did not appear to belong in a junior high school science fair. With Jobs's encouragement, Wozniak designed an improved model, the Apple II, complete with a keyboard, and they arranged to have a sleek, molded plastic case manufactured to enclose the unit.

      Though Jobs had long, unkempt hair and eschewed business garb, he managed to obtain financing, distribution, and publicity for the company, Apple Computer, incorporated in 1977—the same year that the Apple II was completed. The machine was an immediate success, becoming synonymous with the boom in personal computers. In 1981 the company had a record-setting public stock offering and, in 1983, made the quickest entrance (to that time) into the Fortune 500 list of America's top companies. In 1983 the company recruited PepsiCo, Inc., president John Sculley to be its chief executive officer and, implicitly, Jobs's mentor in the fine points of running a large corporation. Jobs had convinced Sculley to accept the position by challenging him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” The line was shrewdly effective, but it also revealed Jobs's own near-messianic belief in the computer revolution.

      During that same period, Jobs was heading the most important project in the company's history. In 1979 he led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology demonstration at the Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to see how the graphical user interface could make computers easier to use and more efficient. Soon afterward, Jobs left the engineering team that was designing Lisa, a business computer, to head a smaller group building a lower-cost computer. Both computers were redesigned to exploit and refine the PARC ideas, but Jobs was explicit in favouring the Macintosh, or Mac, as the new computer became known. Jobs coddled his engineers and referred to them as artists, but his style was uncompromising; at one point he demanded a redesign of an internal circuit board simply because he considered it unattractive. He would later be renowned for his insistence that the Macintosh be not merely great but “insanely great.” In January 1984 Jobs himself introduced the Macintosh in a brilliantly choreographed demonstration that was the centrepiece of an extraordinary publicity campaign. It would later be pointed to as the archetype of “event marketing.”

      However, the first Macs were underpowered and expensive, and they had few software applications—all of which resulted in disappointing sales. Apple steadily improved the machine, so that it eventually became the company's lifeblood as well as the model for all subsequent computer interfaces. But Jobs's apparent failure to correct the problem quickly led to tensions in the company, and in 1985 Sculley convinced Apple's board of directors to remove the company's famous cofounder.

      Jobs quickly started another firm, the NeXT Corporation, designing powerful workstation computers for the education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc., a Japanese electronics company. Although the Next computer was notable for its engineering design, it was eclipsed by less costly computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Inc. In the early 1990s, Jobs focused the company on its innovative software system, NextStep.

      Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs bought Pixar Animation Studios, a computer-graphics firm founded by Hollywood movie director George Lucas. Over the following decade Jobs built Pixar into a major animation studio that, among other achievements, produced the first full-length feature film to be completely computer-animated, Toy Story, in 1995. Also in 1995, Pixar's public stock offering made Jobs, for the first time, a billionaire.

      In late 1996, Apple, saddled by huge financial losses and on the verge of collapse, hired a new chief executive, semiconductor executive Gilbert Amelio. When Amelio learned that the company, following intense and prolonged research efforts, had failed to develop an acceptable replacement for the Macintosh's aging operating system, he chose NextStep, buying Jobs' company for over $400 million—and bringing Jobs back to Apple as a consultant. However, Apple's board of directors soon became disenchanted with Amelio's inability to turn the company's finances around and in June 1997 requested Apple's prodigal cofounder to lead the company once again. Jobs quickly forged an alliance with Apple's erstwhile foe, the Microsoft Corporation, scrapped Amelio's Mac-clone agreements, and simplified the company's product line. He also engineered an award-winning advertising campaign that urged potential customers to “think different” and buy Macintoshes. Just as important is what he did not do: he resisted the temptation to make machines that ran Microsoft's Windows operating system; nor did he, as some urged, spin off Apple as a software-only company. Jobs believed that Apple, as the only major personal computer maker with its own operating system, was in a unique position to innovate.

      Innovate he did. In 1998, Jobs introduced the iMac, an egg-shaped, one-piece computer that offered high-speed processing at a relatively modest price and initiated a trend of high-fashion computers. (Subsequent models sported five different bright colours.) By the end of the year, the iMac was the nation's highest-selling personal computer, and Jobs was able to announce consistent profits for the once-moribund company. The following year, he triumphed once more with the stylish iBook, a laptop computer built with students in mind, and the G4, a desktop computer sufficiently powerful that (so Apple boasted) it could not be exported under certain circumstances because it qualified as a supercomputer. Though Apple did not regain the industry dominance it once had, Steve Jobs had saved his company, and in the process reestablished himself as a master high-technology marketer and visionary.

Additional Reading

Jeffrey S. Young, Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward (1988), is a somewhat critical biography of Steve Jobs up to the early days of Next.Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything (1994), is a brief history of the Macintosh computer and the graphical user interface.Michael S. Malone, Infinite Loop: How the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (1999), by a veteran Silicon Valley writer, is the most recent of many corporate histories of Apple.Steven Levy

* * *