Re: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dead at 56
Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Steve Jobs, who built the world’s
most valuable technology company by creating devices that
changed how people use electronics and revolutionized the
computer, music and mobile-phone industries, died. He was 56.
Jobs, who resigned as Apple Inc. chief executive officer on
Aug. 24, 2011, passed away today, the Cupertino, California-based
company said. He was diagnosed in 2003 with a neuroendocrine
tumor, a rare form of pancreatic cancer, and had a liver
transplant in 2009.
Jobs embodied the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He was a
long-haired counterculture technophile who dropped out of
college and started a computer company in his parents’
garage on April Fools' Day, 1976. He had no formal technical
training and no real business experience.
What he had instead was an appreciation of technology’s
elegance and a notion that computers could be more than a
hobbyist’s toy or a corporation’s workhorse. These machines
could be indispensable tools. A computer could be, he often
said, “a bicycle for our minds.” He was right -- owing largely
to a revolution he started.
Visionary to Virtuoso
On his watch, Apple came to dominate the digital age, first
through the creation of the Macintosh computer and later through
the iPod digital music player, the iPhone wireless handset and
more recently, the iPad tablet.
With each product, Jobs confronted new adversaries --from
International Business Machines Corp. in computers to Microsoft
Corp. in operating systems, to Sony Corp. in music players and
Google Inc. in mobile software.
And Jobs would prove himself not just a techie visionary,
but the virtuoso executive who built the world’s second-most
valuable company after Exxon Mobil Corp.
The opening act of Jobs’s professional ascent stretched
from 1976 to 1984. He scored his first hit with the Apple II
computer, a device that resonated with schools and some
consumers and small businesses, and made Apple an alluring
alternative to IBM, then the world’s largest computer maker.
Apple had its initial public offering in 1980 and the graphical
Macintosh was born just over three years later.
During his second act, from 1984 to 1997, Jobs’s star
dimmed. In 1985, he was fired after a power struggle with
Apple’s board. He started another computer company, NeXT
Computer Inc., and bought a digital animation studio from
filmmaker George Lucas. The firm later took the name Pixar.
String of Hits
Apple’s purchase of NeXT in 1997 brought Jobs back to the
computer maker he helped found and commenced his career’s third
act. The company was foundering. He ignited a flurry of
innovation and growth -- and achieved what may be the greatest
comeback in business history.
Whether he was working on the Mac or the iPhone or backing
the computer animation that yielded an unbroken string of Pixar
hits, Jobs proved that complex technologies could be designed
into simple, beautiful products that people would find
irresistible.
His meticulous attention to product detail carried over to
his public image, which grew inseparable from the Apple brand.
In public he wore beltless jeans and a black mock-turtleneck.
On the few occasions he granted interviews --appearing on
the covers of Time, Fortune or BusinessWeek, for instance -- he
fretted over such minutiae as which photographer would take his
picture. The reclusiveness only added to his mystique.
Wonder of Mystery
“The mystery is actually wonderful,” said Regis McKenna,
a computer-industry marketing consultant who first worked with
Apple in the 1980s. “You want to know more about this company
the more mysterious it is.”
Another way Jobs manufactured his aura was with product
unveilings. He obsessively prepared for the choreographed
occasions, often at Apple’s Cupertino campus or San Francisco’s
Moscone Center, rehearsing his delivery
many times over. He would scrap presentations wholesale,
even at the last minute, if they weren’t up to snuff.
He captivated audiences, and the gadgets he introduced
resonated with consumers the world over, adding billions of
dollars in revenue. Sales surged 82 percent to a record $28.6
billion in the June 2011 period, the last full quarter before
Jobs resigned, and the stock closed at $376.18 on Aug. 24,
before the move was announced. That gave Apple a market value of
$348.8 billion.
‘Park Different’
All that success came with an ego to match. Jobs was a
notorious control-freak with authority issues, associates and
former employees say. He came close to breaking securities laws
by backdating employee stock options. Even his worsening health
-- or his non-disclosure of his illness to shareholders -- drew
scrutiny from authorities.
In Apple’s parking lot, people often noticed Jobs’ silver
Mercedes-Benz SL 55 AMG parked in the handicapped spaces. His
cars were easy to spot because he refused to put license plates
on them. “It’s a little game I play,” he told Fortune in 2001.
Employees stuck notes under the car’s windshield wipers,
encouraging Jobs to “Park Different,” a play on the “Think
Different” Apple advertising slogan.
Jobs was known to praise people one minute and belittle
them the next. According to “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs”
by Alan Deutschman, this management style was known at Apple as
the “hero-shithead roller coaster.” No one was immune from
Jobs’s tirades, and he had strained relationships with
colleagues, friends, and family throughout his life.
“Steve Jobs is a bit like a campfire,” Neil Sims, a
headhunter who helped recruit executives for Jobs, said in an
interview in October 2008. “Everyone wants to be close enough
to stay warm. No one wants to get close enough to get burned.”
Growing Up
Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco,
to unwed college graduate students Joanne Carole Schieble and
Syrian emigrant Abdulfattah “John” Jandali. He was adopted by
Clara and Paul Jobs, who raised Steve in the middle-class
enclaves of Mountain View and Los Altos in California.
“That was right in the heart of Silicon Valley, so there
were engineers all around,” Jobs said in a 1995 interview
conducted by the Smithsonian Institution. “It was really the
most wonderful place in the world to grow up.”
Jobs took advantage of the local technological ferment. His
father had a workshop in the garage, and created a space for his
son to tinker. A neighbor, who was a ham radio operator and
Hewlett-Packard employee, taught him about electronics. Young
Steve loved figuring out how things worked.
Self-Confidence
“It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence,” Jobs
said in the Smithsonian interview. “Through exploration and
learning one could understand seemingly very complex things.”
That self-confidence was on full display before he hit high
school. As Jobs once told BusinessWeek, at age 12 he
called William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co.,
about some parts for a frequency counter he was trying to build.
Hewlett stayed on the phone 20 minutes; Jobs got the parts he
needed -- and eventually, a summer gig at Hewlett-Packard.
Catherine Lawler Jacobs, who lived around the block from
the Jobs family, said she remembers Steve as a teen. Jobs
appeared in her driveway one day, asking for her help setting up
an office in his parents’ house. She’d been earning money
selling turquoise jewelry and a neighbor recommended her as
someone who knew a little about business. Jobs had no money to
pay her but offered her shares in his new company.
“I said, and I remember this exactly, ‘I don’t want any
phony shares. I want to get paid,’” Jacobs recalled in an
interview. “You see, I wasn’t going to be burned by some nerd
who was always hanging out in his garage.”
In 1972 Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in
Cupertino, also the alma mater of his future business partner,
Steve Wozniak, Class of 1968. He then headed north to attend
Reed College, a liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, famous
for its Bohemian atmosphere. He dropped out after six months.
5-Cent Deposits
He didn’t leave right away, though. He stuck around campus
for another year and a half, sleeping on friends’ floors and
living off the money he raised by collecting bottles for 5-cent
deposits. He listened in on classes, too, including one that
would inspire a lifelong mission of elegant design -- a course
on calligraphy.
“It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a
way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating,”
Jobs said in a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University.
As Jobs told those Stanford grads, he “connected the
dots” between this developing aesthetic sense and his technical
understanding. He realized that technology and artistry could be
complementary. More than that, the new world of computers
offered a new medium for creativity.
Back in California
By late 1974, Jobs was back in California, immersed in the
technology-tinged counterculture of Silicon Valley. He traveled
to India, became a Buddhist, experimented with LSD. He also hung
out with his friend Wozniak -- they’d met a few years earlier
through a fellow electronics enthusiast -- at the Homebrew
Computer Club, a group of engineers and hobbyists who would meet
to swap parts and ideas.
The two started working together on projects, with Woz the
tech genius and Jobs the brash idea man. An early effort was a
“blue box” -- a hacker’s term for a device that taps into the
phone system to make free long-distance calls. It worked.
“What we learned was that we could build something
ourselves that could control billions of dollars worth of
infrastructure in the world,” Jobs said in the 1996 PBS
documentary “Triumph of the Nerds.” “That was an incredible
lesson. I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple
computer had there not been blue boxes.”
Wozniak began putting together a contraption he and Jobs
could show off to their Homebrew buddies. The Apple I was little
more than a motherboard, the main circuit board in a personal
computer. Whoever bought one -- Woz and Jobs sold 50 to a local
hobby store -- had to supply their own case to hold the
circuitry, not to mention a keyboard and monitor. It may have
been primitive, but it was the proof of concept they needed.
They knew they could build a better computer, and Jobs knew
people would buy it.
Apple’s Start
The pair officially began Apple Computer on April 1, 1976.
Twelve months later the company introduced the Apple II. It was
a hit and became the first widely used home computer. The
company’s sales reached $117 million in
fiscal 1980, the year the company went public.
The Apple II was hardly a technological great leap forward.
Yet unlike its predecessor, it did come with a keyboard and was
housed in a plastic case. Nor was it alone in the marketplace.
Commodore and RadioShack Corp. also came out with early home-
computer models around the same time; the Altair 8800 had been
introduced in 1975.
IBM entered the market in 1981 with its own PC, using
software from a tiny startup called Microsoft Corp. rather than
building its own operating system. Jobs professed to be
unconcerned, even running a full-page ad in the Wall Street
Journal, saying “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.”
‘Bad Guys’
The Mac’s slow start gave IBM and other machines running
Microsoft software and Intel Corp. chips a chance to win
adherents and build an ecosystem.
What set Apple apart was its charismatic frontman, Jobs,
who was rapidly turning into a business superstar. He hyped. He
dated Joan Baez and Diane Keaton. He saw himself and his company
as an anti-establishment force, waging a noble campaign to
battle the faceless power of IBM.
“You always need to have bad guys and good guys in
America,” said McKenna, the technology marketing expert.
“Apple was thumbing its nose at this big world of monolithic
standards. It became a rebel. It became a symbol of fast growth,
youth.”
Us-versus-IBM was the guiding worldview behind the famous
TV commercial that introduced Apple’s next major product, the
Macintosh. The 60-second spot, directed by Ridley Scott, ran
only once, during the 1984 Super Bowl. It depicted an Orwellian
world of grim conformity. A lone woman wearing a tank top
sprints through the grayness and throws a hammer through a giant
screen, shattering the droning visage of Big Brother.
‘Down to Taste’
The Mac, with its mouse and graphics, demonstrated Jobs’s
ability to see the potential of new technologies and package
them in a way that would appeal to the most demanding aesthete
he could imagine: himself.
Jobs had first seen a graphical user interface prototype a
few years earlier on a visit to Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research
Center, and immediately knew it was the future of computing. He
had no compunction about copying the idea.
“Ultimately it comes down to taste,” Jobs said in
“Triumph of the Nerds.” “It comes down to trying to expose
yourself to the best things that humans have done and then
trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean,
Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy. Great artists
steal.’”
Inscrutable Autocrat
The Mac project showed another side of Jobs: the
inscrutable autocrat. He could be charming and rude almost in
the same sentence, leaving underlings scared or dazzled or both.
People who worked for Jobs called his powers of persuasion the
“reality distortion field.” Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple
engineer, described the phenomenon in “Revolution in the
Valley,” his 2005 book about the development of the Macintosh
computer.
“The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of
a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will and an
eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,”
Hertzfeld wrote. “If one line of argument failed to persuade,
he would deftly switch to another.”
Jobs’s Intolerance
Andrea Cunningham, who worked with McKenna on marketing
the Mac in the 1980s, said that Jobs’ intolerance of aesthetic
infractions never let up. Cunningham was with Jobs in his room
at The Carlyle hotel in New York City for a magazine cover
shoot. Jobs, who Cunningham said “always had to have the
environment exactly right,” began yelling about a particular
flower he wanted -- a calla lily.
“He was being such a pill,” said Cunningham, who is now
head of marketing of Rearden Commerce in Foster City,
California. “Where do you get a calla lily in New York in
December at 11 at night? I found a florist. I found the calla
lilies. And the next thing was a bowl of strawberries on the
piano. And a separate bowl of whipped cream. We spent three or
four hours doing this.”
Jobs could bewitch too, as he did when he hired PepsiCo
Inc. executive John Sculley to be Apple’s CEO in 1983. Jobs
famously asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the
rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the
world?”
Uncontrollable
“He looked up at me and just stared at me with the stare
that only Steve Jobs has,” Sculley recalled in “Triumph of the
Nerds.” “I just gulped because I knew I would wonder for the
rest of my life what I would have missed.”
Not long after the launch of the Mac, Jobs’ relationship
with Sculley and Apple’s board soured. Arthur Rock, the Silicon
Valley venture capitalist and early Apple board member, said
Jobs’s obsessions and unyielding personality got the best of
him.
“Back then he was uncontrollable,” Rock said in a 2007
interview with Institutional Investor. “He got ideas in his
head, and the hell with what anybody else wanted to do. Being a
founder of the company, he went off and did them regardless of
whether it ended up being good for the company.”
30 and Devastated
The Mac didn’t sell well during the 1984 holiday shopping
season, and Sculley demanded in April 1985 that Jobs be relieved
of day-to-day duties and serve as a non-executive chairman,
playing the role of outside spokesman. Jobs hated the idea and
tried to get the backing of Apple’s directors. The board sided
with Sculley and Jobs was out.
Jobs was 30 years old and devastated, but not for long.
“I didn’t see it then,” Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford
speech, “but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was
the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The
heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of
being a beginner again.”
In 1985 he founded NeXT, which developed a powerful
computer based on the Unix operating system. The sleek, black
machines earned a reputation for elegant design and high
performance; Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web on a
NeXT workstation.
‘Toy Story’
NeXT was hardly a success. The computers were too expensive
to gain a wide following. Still, the software developed at NeXT
would later provide the technological underpinnings for Apple
machines.
The following year, Jobs bought George Lucas’s computer-
graphics shop for $10 million and renamed it Pixar. The studio’s
first feature film, “Toy Story,” was the top-grossing film of
1995, and kicked off an unbroken string of hits. Walt Disney Co.
bought Pixar in 2006 for $8.06 billion and gave Jobs a seat on
the company’s board. He became Disney’s largest shareholder.
In his personal life, Jobs settled down. He married Laurene
Powell in 1991 in a Buddhist ceremony at the Ahwahnee Hotel in
Yosemite National Park, according to biographer Deutschman. The
couple have three children.
He also reconciled with his illegitimate daughter, Lisa
Brennan-Jobs, who was born in 1978 to his then girlfriend
Chrisann Brennan. Chrisann raised Lisa mainly on her own. By the
time Lisa was a teenager and before she attended Harvard
University, she moved into her father’s home.
‘More Glamorous World’
“In California, my mother had raised me mostly alone,”
Lisa wrote in an article for Vogue in 2008. “We didn’t have
many things, but she is warm and we were happy. We moved a lot.
We rented. My father was rich and renowned, and later, as I got
to know him, went on vacations with him, and then lived with him
for a few years, I saw another, more glamorous world.”
Neither Lisa Brennan-Jobs nor Chrisann Brennan, now a
painter in San Francisco, would comment.
Jobs didn’t get in touch with his biological father, John
Jandali, a onetime academic who went on to run beverage services
at the Boomtown Casino in Reno, Nevada. Jandali and Schieble had
another child after putting Steve up for adoption, a daughter
named Mona Simpson, now a novelist. Jandali left the mother of
his child. Schieble raised the girl alone.
“I’m proud of the fact that he’s my biological son, even
though I cannot take credit for anything he’s done,” Jandali
said in an interview at the Boomtown Casino in April 2009. He
said he had never spoken to Steve.
Ascendance of Gates
Jobs’s absence from Apple coincided with the ascendance of
Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp., developer of a graphics-driven
operating system of its own called Windows. Apple filed, and
eventually lost, a lawsuit against Microsoft, arguing that
Windows was a Mac knockoff.
When Jobs got wind of Microsoft’s plans for what would
become Windows, he screamed at Gates about ripping Apple off,
according to a 1983 essay by Andy Hertzfeld, the Mac’s chief
software designer.
Gates coolly replied, “It’s more like we both had this
rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal
the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it,” wrote
Hertzfeld, who witnessed the interchange.
Meanwhile, Apple was dying. By late 1997, it had racked up
two years of losses and the Mac’s share of the PC market was in
the single digits and falling. On stage at a conference that
year, Michael Dell was asked how he would revive Apple if he
were CEO.
‘Shut It Down’
“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back
to the shareholders,” he said. Jobs would later say the company
was 90 days from bankruptcy.
In desperation, Apple agreed to buy NeXT for $400 million
in late 1996, and Jobs accepted a role as adviser to then-CEO
Gil Amelio. Within seven months, Amelio was gone and Jobs was
once again running the company.
One of the first things Jobs did upon retaking the reins
was fire all but two of Apple’s board members. His handpicked
replacements were Bill Campbell, a former Apple executive and
then-CEO of Intuit; Jerome York, former IBM CFO and onetime
adviser to Tracinda Corp. CEO Kirk Kerkorian; and Jobs’ longtime
friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Ellison left the board in
2002; York died in 2010. Campbell is still a director.
Rebuilding the Team
Jobs also rebuilt the executive team, installing key
technical managers from NeXT who would help him guide Apple’s
strategy over the next decade. They included Jon Rubinstein, who
had run NeXT’s hardware engineering, and Avie Tevanian, the
young software engineer who helped create NeXT’s operating
system.
Rubinstein went on to lead Apple’s iPod division before
departing for smartphone maker Palm Inc., while Tevanian served
as chief software technology officer. Jobs also found talent
within Apple, singling out a British-born designer named
Jonathan Ive to lead industrial design.
As a show of Jobs’s not-in-it-for-the-money drive to fix
Apple, he insisted on getting paid $1 a year, a salary package
that continued for the remainder of his career.
Jobs’s remuneration instead came mainly from stock options,
restricted stock and an $84 million Gulfstream V jet, given to
him by the board in 2000.
Jobs’s Worth
Jobs’s net worth was at least $6.7 billion as of Sept. 6,
according to Bloomberg estimates. His 7.4 percent Disney stake
was worth $4.4 billion, and his 5.5 million shares of Apple were
worth $2.1 billion. Jobs’s 138 million shares of Disney had paid
him at least $242 million in dividends before taxes since 2006,
according to Bloomberg data.
Stock options let holders buy shares later, usually at the
trading price on the day the options were granted. Like other
Silicon Valley executives, Jobs viewed the securities as a
necessary incentive to keep valuable employees.
“That’s the key asset Apple has -- is its talent,” Jobs
would later say in a March 2008 deposition with the Securities
and Exchange Commission. “I was very concerned that Apple
could really suffer some big losses on its executive team with
the business environment we were in, and the competitors coming
after our people.”
Backdating Options
And like hundreds of other technology companies, Apple
engaged in “backdating,” or retroactively changing grant dates
to those with lower stock prices. The practice could
artificially boost employee compensation and ran the risk of
shielding compensation costs from investors. It came under
scrutiny by the SEC.
Jobs admitted in 2006 to recommending some favorable dates
on options other than his own. A special committee of Apple’s
board exonerated him of any misconduct, and the SEC said in
April 2007 that Apple wouldn’t be sanctioned.
“Jobs was one of these CEOs who ran the company like he
wanted to -- he believed he knew more about it than anyone else,
and he probably did,” Arthur Levitt, a former chairman of the
SEC, said in a February 2009 interview.
Levitt said that around the time of the two grants that got
Apple in trouble, Jobs invited him to join the company’s board -
- then disinvited him because his views on corporate governance
were “too independent, too doctrinaire” for Jobs.
Levitt also praised Jobs.
“He’s among the best CEOs I’ve ever known, in spite of his
irreverence, irascibility and ego,” Levitt said.
Jobs’s Return
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he was still an
exacting connoisseur of design. Only now, he demonstrated an
understanding that he needed to place his bets carefully. He
culled the company’s product line, killing money-losing projects
such as the Newton personal digital assistant. He ended the Mac
“clone” program that let other computer makers install Apple’s
operating system on their machines; he called the welcoming of
clones an “ill-conceived” move that undercut Apple’s own Mac
hardware sales.
“We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter,”
Jobs told BusinessWeek magazine in 2004. “But it’s only by
saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really
important.”
“How he looked at things from a product perspective is
very rare,” said Ed Zander, a CEO of Motorola Inc. before it
split into two companies. “You don’t find many CEOs who have
the attention to detail from the product experience point of
view -- and understand the business side of the house.”
IMac Unveiled
The first tangible result of Jobs’ return was the iMac,
which he introduced at the Flint Center in Cupertino,
California, in 1998. The iMac looked like no other computer: It
was a bulbous, sci-fi looking number encased in translucent
plastic. The unveiling that day had all the usual language of a
Jobs keynote -- the iMac was “beautiful,” “cool,” and “a
really big deal.”
The iMac would become Apple’s best-selling desktop ever,
according to the company. The decision to offer the computer in
five colors flew in the face of the then-common industry
practice of packaging machines in easy-to-manufacture -- if dull
-- beige boxes.
“I remember scratching my head at the time, when Apple
first came out with those first little colored desktop Macs, the
iMacs,” said Blake Johnson, an assistant professor in
engineering at Stanford University. “But the message and splash
of five different colors was a conscious decision -- okay, we
have some supply chain inefficiencies, but those are more than
offset by the positive impact on customers.”
Series of Blockbusters
Apple was profitable again by 1998, and over the next
decade released a series of blockbusters that went beyond
traditional computing. The iPod media player and the iPhone were
beautiful objects that ignited consumer lust in Apple’s sparsely
elegant -- and typically crowded -- retail stores. Jobs dropped
“Computer” from the company name in 2007 at the time he
unveiled the iPhone.
Beneath the contours of Ive’s designs were two less obvious
achievements. The first was the software that made all those
devices work together. All of it was rooted in a single
operating system, OS X, which had its beginnings in Tevanian’s
work at NeXT. Apple’s great strength, Jobs would say repeatedly,
was that it was a software company.
“An iPod is really just software,” Jobs said at the All
Things D technology conference in 2007. “It’s in a beautiful
box -- but it’s software. If you look at what a Mac is, it’s OS
X. It’s in a beautiful box, but it’s OS X. And if you look at
what an iPhone will hopefully be, it’s software.”
Doing Jobs’s Bidding
The other big achievement was Jobs’ ability to create hits
by getting industry partners to do his bidding. For the iTunes
music store, he not only demanded that the major music labels
sell their product over the Internet, but do so at a single
price, 99 cents a song. He convinced AT&T Inc. to modify its
network to handle the iPhone’s many features in exchange for
exclusive rights to sell the iPhone to U.S. buyers. Verizon
Communications Inc.’s wireless division started selling the
iPhone in February 2011.
“The AT&Ts and Verizons of the world want to control the
software, product, the brand, the colors, where the keyboard
goes, the pricing, the distribution,” said Zander, the former
Motorola CEO, who partnered with Jobs on an early music-playing
phone. “Here comes Steve and he says to AT&T, you get the
product but I get the brand, I get the colors, I get the
software, I get the distribution pretty much, I get the
pricing.”
Apple’s iPhone became the world’s best-selling smartphone
in the second quarter of 2011.
Cancer Diagnosis
Jobs said in 2004 that he had been diagnosed and treated
for a neuroendocrine tumor in his pancreas. After surgery to
remove an islet cell tumor, he took a month off to recuperate
and declared himself healthy and cancer free.
For a few years he looked that way. He was thinner, which
was no surprise after what he’d been through. One person who
knew him well said that the cancer scare didn’t slow him down,
convince him to spend more time with family or reconnect with
friends. If anything, Jobs seemed to get even more engaged with
work, said this person, who wished to remain anonymous because
the matter was private.
During the 2005 Stanford commencement address, Jobs
described how the inevitability of death was a motivating force
in his life.
‘Follow Your Heart’
“Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know
to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You
are already naked; there is no reason not to follow your
heart,” he said.
Jobs’s appearance changed noticeably by early 2008. He
started looking gaunt. Tech blogs bubbled with discussion about
what was going on. Typical headlines: “The Incredible Shrinking
Apple CEO,” and “Why Does Steve Jobs Look So Thin?”
When he took the stage at Apple events, Jobs joked about
his health. In August of that year, Bloomberg News erroneously
published an obituary; at a product launch a month later he
recited the Mark Twain line that reports of his death were
greatly exaggerated. At another event that year, he projected a
slide of his blood pressure.
In January 2009, Jobs said that his weight loss was caused
by a “hormone imbalance”; nine days later, he began a five-
month medical leave, handing control of the company to his COO,
Tim Cook. Later that year, he underwent a liver transplant at
Methodist University Hospital in Memphis.
Lack of Disclosure
Apple’s disclosures -- or lack thereof -- around Jobs’s
health became a matter of debate among investors and corporate
governance experts. Some said that because his health was
critical to the company’s success, Apple should have said more,
sooner. The counterargument: privacy laws trump investors’ right
to know the details of his health. U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission officials examined in 2009 whether the company
violated disclosure rules regarding Jobs’s medical status, a
person familiar with the matter said at the time. No legal
action was taken.
While Jobs was on leave that year, Apple came under
competitive pressure from an unexpected source: Google Inc. The
search giant, whose then-CEO Eric Schmidt was an Apple board
member, had gotten into the smartphone business with its Android
operating system.
Unlike the iPhone, Android phones were made by multiple
manufacturers. The budding rivalry evoked the Mac vs. PC
showdowns of the 1980s. It pitted a company -- Apple -- that
made one kind of device against an array of manufacturers
orbiting around a software operating system
-- in this case, Google’s Android.
Return to Work
By the time Jobs returned to work in June, several Android
devices were on the market. Google’s Schmidt resigned from
Apple’s board in August, acknowledging the escalating tension
between the two companies.
Jobs the following year introduced his next epoch-making
product: the iPad. The run-up was full of the buzz that greeted
past products. What would it look like? What would it do? Only a
select handful of developers and media companies got access to
pre-release versions of the iPad, and then only under strict
conditions. Recipients had to agree to keep the devices tethered
to a fixed object in rooms that blacked-out windows.
‘Antennagate’
At the product unveiling, Jobs said that the tablet
computer would go on sale later that year, calling it
“magical.” The public agreed: Apple sold more than 300,000
iPads on day one, and within a few months the device had a near
monopoly share of the tablet market that companies led by
Microsoft had failed to crack for a decade.
Another momentous product was in store for 2010. The iPhone
4 boasted a glass front and back and a brushed-steel band around
the edge. It also came with a front-facing camera that would
allow mobile videoconferencing.
While the iPhone 4 was destined for success, this time
there was a glitch. Customers who held the phone a certain way
experienced dropped phone calls -- the “death grip,” it was
called. At first, Apple denied anything was wrong and suggested
that customers were holding the phone incorrectly. The flaw
snowballed into a public-relations crisis that came to be known
as “Antennagate,” stoked by longtime grumbling over service
quality on the network of AT&T, then the only U.S. iPhone
carrier.
New Leave
By July, Jobs had changed his tune. He apologized to
customers and offered free “bumpers,” rubber cases that fit
around the metal edge of the phone, so that fingertips wouldn’t
cause any antenna interference.
The imbroglio had little impact on iPhone demand. Apple
sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s during the first three days it was on
sale; by the end of the year, the iPhone would represent nearly
40 percent of revenue.
During the introduction of a new MacBook Air in October
2010, Jobs appeared thinner than ever. Three months later, Jobs
said he would be taking a new leave of absence to “focus
on my health.” “I love Apple so much and hope to be back as
soon as I can,” he said.
For the third time since 2004, Cook took over day-to-day
operations. He oversaw the introduction of the second version of
the iPad and introduced a music-storage service called iCloud.
He traveled to China to discuss the iPhone with China Mobile
Ltd., the country’s largest mobile-phone carrier.
‘Day Has Come’
Jobs announced his resignation Aug. 24. “I have always
said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my
duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to
let you know,” Jobs said in a statement. “Unfortunately, that
day has come.”
In the weeks preceding his resignation, Jobs was largely
housebound, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“Under Steve’s leadership Apple has not only
revolutionized the computer industry but also transformed how
the world communicates, plays, shops and works,” Frank
Quattrone, CEO of Qatalyst Partners LLP, a Silicon Valley
investment bank, said at the time. “In the entrepreneur hall of
fame, he is the charter member. He is, and will remain, an
inspiration to the world.”
Cook became CEO for good. While Cook had mastered an
expanding list of operational roles, including manufacturing,
distribution, sales and customer service, he hadn’t demonstrated
Jobs’s penchant for product vision.
Post-Jobs Era
In the post-Jobs era, that role would lie more squarely
with head product designer Ive, who oversaw the development of
devices including the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Rounding out
the executive team are Scott Forstall, who is in charge of the
iOS software that powers the iPhone and iPad; Philip Schiller,
who leads product marketing; Bob Mansfield, who heads Mac
hardware engineering; and Chief Financial Officer Peter
Oppenheimer, who is tasked with overseeing Apple’s more than $75
billion in cash and long-term holdings.
Jobs left a company with a market value larger than that of
Microsoft and Dell combined. Apple’s revenue reached a record
$65 billion in fiscal 2010, with analysts predicting that they
will exceed $100 billion in 2011.
‘Magical’ Thinking
Besides relying on surging demand for the iPhone and iPad,
Apple is also counting on growth in China. “We’re just
scratching the surface right now,” Cook said of the region in
July. The company is also due to sell a new service called
iCloud that will let users access photos, videos and other
content across an array of Apple products.
The Apple Jobs left behind was well suited to confront the
challenges it then faced, including the Google threat, largely
because of a product lineup Jobs set in motion, analysts and
investors said at the time of his resignation. The concern is
whether the company can produce industry-disrupting devices long
after Jobs’s influence recedes.
“I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste,” Bill Gates said
during the 2007 All Things D conference. “The way he does
things is just different and, you know, I think it’s magical.”
