Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is the visionary who helped create computers for everyday people and not just technophiles, developed highly stylized and hugely successful devices such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and engendered a cult-like following among product enthusiasts worldwide.
The 56-year-old, a millionaire in his 20s, ousted from Apple at 30, and reinstated as the company’s CEO in his early 40s, rebuilt and expanded Apple as a company and brand that is among the most respected, admired and watched in the world.
"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. Unfortunately, that day has come," Jobs said in a letter to Apple's board of directors Wednesday. "I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee."
Jobs, who was treated for a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004, and had a liver transplant in 2009, said last January that he would take a leave of absence for an unspecified period. Even so, he has continued to introduce new Apple products at public events throughout this year.
His gaunt appearance has worried Apple fans and followers for awhile now. Many have dreaded this day, but expected it would come.
Jobs' health has been an ongoing issue. In September 2008, a very thin Jobs went on stage at an Apple event with these words, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” on the screen behind him, a play on Mark Twain’s quote more than a century earlier when his obituary was mistakenly published. But there would be no questions answered about Jobs’ physical well-being, or whether pancreatic cancer had returned.
It was a rare reference by Jobs to his health, and in turn, his private life, an area he has guarded as closely as the company secrets he held for more than 30 years.
In January 2009, after declining to speak at the annual Macworld conference, Jobs said a "hormonal imbalance" was the cause of his weight loss, but that the treatment was "relatively simple," and he expected to be better by spring. In a sharp turnabout a week later, in an email to employees, Jobs announced he was taking a medical leave until June. He had learned in the past week, he wrote, "that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.”
It was the second time he named Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, as acting CEO, a role Cook had before when Jobs was recovering from cancer surgery in 2004.
Continuing questions about Jobs’ health, and the debate about whether he had a fiduciary responsibility to disclose a serious illness to stockholders led to much public debate, exactly the kind of thing Jobs did not want. There was also a report by Bloomberg that he was considering a liver transplant to deal with complications tied to his 2004 surgery.
When asked by a Bloomberg reporter about his health, Jobs replied: "Why don't you guys leave me alone — why is this important?"
Exacting, exasperating, brilliant
Jobs has been deemed arrogant, exacting, exasperating — and brilliant.
“He was the first to really visualize that the computing experience needed to be easier for the consumer,” said Tim Bajarin, a technology consultant who attended the Apple shareholders’ meeting in January 1984, where the first Macintosh was unveiled.
“He introduced the graphical user interface, he introduced the mouse and he introduced the floppy storage drive” to everyday consumers.
At that time, Apple’s sole adversary was IBM, which entered the personal computer field with machines running Microsoft’s MS-DOS, which seemingly required an engineering degree to decipher and operate, used complicated lines of computer code for every step, and presented screens with blinking cursors demanding input, rather than icons for clicking. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
The Mac’s user-friendly operating system was mimicked by Microsoft when it introduced a version of Windows in 1985 that had some of the same elements as the Mac’s OS.
While Windows, loaded onto IBM computers, would ultimately dominate the PC landscape, especially in the workplace, Jobs also saw the power of the computer as a tool for design and publishing.
“It was Steve’s vision to support Adobe’s PostScript printing architecture that allowed Apple to become a major force in desktop publishing, and with the Mac, laid the groundwork for what eventually became multimedia computing," Bajarin said.
Elegance 'a mania'
Elegance outside, as well as inside, the products Jobs created is paramount to him, in fact, “a mania,” wrote Steven Levy, author of “Insanely Great,” about the development of the Mac.
Jobs’ sense of what consumers should want to buy — not just want to buy — and how the products should look, from the first Mac in 1984 to the first iPhone in 2007, is precise and almost always spot-on. His marketing savvy in presentations, with long walkups to the crescendo of a new product announcement, is also legendary.
“Steve Jobs is Apple’s lead, one might say, only, pitchman and without him products like the iPhone and iPods probably wouldn’t have sold anywhere near as well,” said Rob Enderle of The Enderle Group consulting firm.
"This is not only a sad day for Apple," he said Wednesday. "It is a sad day for tech, because a magical lightning bolt like this doesn't strike often or in the same place. Ever."
'Usable out of the box'
Jobs was 22, a college dropout who worked at Atari when he co-founded Apple in 1976 with high school friend Steve Wozniak, the two working together at Jobs’ parents’ house in Cupertino, Calif.
The Apple I was largely a prototype for the Apple II in 1977. It had a price tag of less than $1,500 and was the company’s first commercially successful product.
“Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions,” wrote Wozniak in a 1996 piece for Newsweek.
Apple’s computers “were usable out of the box. Our vision was that people would find computers useful at home, for ‘people things’ like balancing checkbooks, keeping address lists and typing letters.”
Passionate, but autocratic, leadership
Wozniak left Apple in 1985, but Jobs was forced out that year after clashes with members of Apple’s board of directors, including John Sculley, the former PepsiCo president he brought to Apple to help run the company.
While Jobs wanted fresh thinking about technology, he was an autocrat in the corporate environment. He did not play well with others. His withering stare and searing comments could offend even the toughest of adversaries and crumple mere mortals who worked for him.
“On the one hand, he was the most passionate leader one could hope for,” Levy wrote in his book. “But every subordinate … also saw his down side,” with criticism in “the form of acid humiliation.”
In a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs said being fired from his own company was “devastating.”
But, he noted, “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, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
That included co-founding Pixar, the computer animation studio that created film hits like “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life.” Disney acquired Pixar in 2006. Prior to that, he also started NeXT, a computer company that was later acquired by Apple.
During the 12 years Jobs was gone from Apple, the company and its products, a series of largely lackluster Macintoshes, meandered and foundered financially.
“There has been a literal deathwatch on Apple in recent weeks,” reported Time magazine in 1997, before Jobs returned to the company.
When he did, he fostered new and popular products like the iMac, released in 1998, the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. There were also some duds, including the round, hockey puck-shaped mouse that came with the first iMac and in 2000, the G4 Cube Mac, a computer that resembled a large box of Kleenex.
Software and online efforts key
But in addition to the hardware, Jobs’ focus on Apple’s software — the continual improvements to the Mac operating system and the launch of the online iTunes Store as well as the App Store for the iPhone — was crucial to Apple’s rebound and growth.
A decade or so ago, digital music files, available via the Internet, were just starting to flourish, and so were piracy sites such as the former Napster and Kazaa.
No one imagined that a computer company would sell music — but Jobs did. The iTunes Store launched in 2003, making it easy, legal and cheap, at 99 cents a song, to download songs. It, in turn, fueled sales of the iPod, which continues to dominate as the digital music player of choice, with more than 70 percent of the market in the United States. The iTunes Store has also expanded to include movie rentals and downloads.
Apple made its presence felt not only online but with its Apple Stores nationwide in shopping malls, with the first store opening in 2001. The stores’ sophisticated yet simple appearance and the inclusion of a “genius bar” where customers could belly up and get help from Apple staff, was marketing maven-ry at its best.
'Halo effect' from iPod
The retail stores and the iPod, in particular, helped fuel sales of Apple computers. “The popularity of other Apple products, particularly the iPod, has drawn more users to the Apple platform,” said Charles Smulders of Gartner, describing the iPod's "halo effect."
In January 2007, Jobs unveiled the iPhone, a first-of-its-kind, sleek slab cell phone with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, using the Mac OS for easy email and Web access.
When the iPhone went on sale six months later, eager buyers around the country lined up days in advance to buy the device which has now become one of the best-selling phones ever. It has spawned dozens of imitators, and captured the imagination of consumers, who view it more as a mobile computing device than just a cell phone.
That’s certainly the way Jobs wanted the public to see it. When he announced the iPhone in 2007, he also said that Apple Computer would be changing its name to Apple to reflect the company’s shift from being considered a computer maker to a consumer electronics company.
That shift was reinforced with Apple’s introduction in 2008 of the iPhone’s App Store, part of the iTunes Store, which has also brought imitators from other companies and operating systems, as well as the addition of the iPad in 2010.
It too, has been imitated by other manufacturers. The tablet with a seemingly strange name that was made fun of 18 months ago is selling like hotcakes.
“Steve is deeply involved in product development, and his personal sense of technology and style has been crucial to Apple’s direction,” said Avi Greengart of Current Analysis’ research firm.
While Jobs has been considered a superb showman and icon for Apple, he “does not get enough credit for being a keen technologist, building platforms such as iTunes and (the Mac) OS X that can be leveraged in multiple ways across the PC and device spectrum," Greengart said.
"I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role," Jobs said in his letter Wednesday. "I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you."
Related links:
- Challenges of an Apple without Jobs
- 7 products Steve Jobs got wrong
- Jobs steps down, says can no longer serve
- Cook has the skills to lead Apple, observers say
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