Apple
Computer – Steve Jobs' Success Story
"We started out to get a computer in the hands of everyday
people, and we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."
- Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computer Inc., 1976.
Steve Jobs was adopted to a family in Mountain
View, California.
While still in high school, Jobs interest in electronics prompted him to call
William Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard to ask for some parts for a school
project. Hewlett provided the parts and then made an offer to Jobs to intern
at Hewlett-Packard for a summer. There, Jobs met Steve Wozniak, a talented
and knowledgeable engineer five years older than the high school student.
Their friendship would eventually be the foundation on which Apple was built.
Jobs dropped out of Reed
College after one
semester and went to work for Atari designing games. He carefully saved the
money he earned while working at Atari so that he could take a trip to India and
sate his bourgeoning interest in the spiritualism of the East.
After returning home from India, Jobs
and Wozniak renewed their friendship. Jobs was shown a small computer that
Wozniak had been working on as a hobby, but Jobs saw its potential
immediately and persuaded Wozniak to go into business with him. In 1975, at
the age of 20, Jobs went to work in his parents' garage with Wozniak working
on the Apple I prototype.
The Apple I sold modestly, but well enough to be able to go to work on the
Apple II. In 1977, the new model was put on sale. With a keyboard, colour
monitors and user-friendly software, Apple became a success. The company made
$3 million in their first year and had surpassed $200 million in their third.
However, in addition to the Apple III and
its successor the LISA not selling as well as had been hoped and a marked
increase in competition in the sale of PCs, 1980 saw Apple lose almost half
of its sales to IBM. Things got worse for Jobs in 1983 when a fight with the
directors got him kicked off the board by the CEO, John Sculley, whom Jobs
himself had hired.
In 1984, as a
response to the sharp decline in sales, Jobs released the Apple Macintosh which introduced
the world to the point-and-click simplicity of the mouse. The marketing for
the Mac was handled poorly and with a price tag of $2,500, it was not finding
its way into the homes for which it had been designed. Jobs tried to
repackage the Mac as a business computer, but without a hard-drive or networking
capabilities, not to mention only a small capacity for memory, corporations
were not interested. In 1985, without any power in his own company, Jobs sold
his stock in Apple and resigned.
Later in 1985, Jobs began NeXT Computer Co. with the money he'd made from the
sale of his stock in Apple. He planned to build a computer to change the way
research was done. The NeXT computer, though complete with processing speeds
previously unseen, unmatched graphics, and an optical disk drive, at $9,950
each, sold poorly.
Persistent after the failures of the NeXT venture, Jobs began toying with
software and started to focus his attention on a company he'd bought from
George Lucas in 1986, Pixar Animation Studios. Jobs signed a three-picture
deal with Disney, and began working on the first computer-animated feature.
Released in the fall of 1995, it had taken "Toy Story" four years to
be made. But the work had been well worth it, the film was an incredible
success. Pixar went public in 1996, and in one day of trading, Jobs 80% share
had become worth $1 billion.
Apple was struggling, having failed to design a new Macintosh operating
system, and the company
only held 5% of the PC market. Days after Pixar went public, Apple bought
NeXT for $400 million and renamed Jobs to the board of directors to advise
Gilbert F. Amelio, the chairman and CEO. However, in March of 1997, Apple
recorded a quarterly loss of $708 million, and Amelio resigned a few months
later. Jobs was left in charge as interim CEO and it was up to him to keep
the same company he had started and which had ousted him alive. So he made a
deal with Microsoft. With an investment $150 million for a small stake in
Apple, Apple and Microsoft
would "cooperate on several sales and technology fronts", and Apple
would be assured their continuation in the PC market.
Jobs also went to work improving the quality of the Apple computers. The
introduction of the G3 Power PC microprocessor made the Apple faster than
those computers operating on Pentium processors. Apple also turned its
energies toward producing an inexpensive desktop,
the iMac, that was another hit for the company. With Jobs once again in
control, Apple was able to quickly turn itself around, and by the end of
1998, was bringing in $5.9 billion in sales. Jobs had returned to his first
love, a little older and a little wiser. He had made Apple healthy again and
returned it to a place where it was contributing new and innovative
technologies to the computer world.
Article by Evan is an entrepreneur and international speaker. At the age of
19, he became an owner and Chief Operating Officer in Redasoft, a
biotechnology software company.
The company quickly grew to over 300 organizations as clients, including NASA
and Johnson & Johnson, in 30 countries. He started Evan Carmichael &
Associates with the goal to give entrepreneurs the Inspiration to follow
their passion and the strategies they need to succeed. Evan has delivered
over 100 keynote presentations to entrepreneurs in North America, Europe, and
Asia. He has been interviewed by newspapers,
radio stations, and television stations including The Globe and Mail, CHUM
FM, CityTV, Global TV, OMNI TV, Enterprise,
and the Toronto
Sun.
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