« Steve Jobs: The Man The Myth The Legend
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Born 1955 in Los Altos, California. Evalangic Bad boy who, with Steve Wozniak, co-founded Apple Computer corporation and became a multimillinaire before the age of 30. 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.Quickly setting the standard in personal computers, the Apple 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. [Halliday, 1983, p. 206]
After leaving Apple, Jobs' new revolutionary ideas were not in hardware but in software of the computer industry. In 1989 Jobs tried to do it all over again with a new company called NextStep. He planned to build the next generation of personal computers that would put Apple to shame. It did not happen. After eight long years of struggle and after running through some $250 million, NextStep closed down its hardware division in 1993. Jobs realized that he was not going to revolutionize the hardware. He turned his attention to the software side of the computer industry. 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. [Dumaine, 1993, p. 40]
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.
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