Apple’s Visionary
Redefined Digital Age
October 5, 2011
By JOHN MARKOFF
Steven
P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who
helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural
transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were
experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.
The death was announced by Apple, the
company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in
a suburban California garage. A friend of the family said the cause was
complications of pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Jobs had waged a long and public
struggle with the disease, remaining the face of the company even as he
underwent treatment, introducing new products for a global market in his
trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.
He underwent surgery in 2004, received a
liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s
chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to
Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still
engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley
executive only weeks earlier.
“I have always said that if there ever came
a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O.,
I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by
the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”
By then, having mastered digital technology
and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to
define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and
entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very
rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.
Tributes to Mr. Jobs flowed quickly on
Wednesday evening, in formal statements and in the flow of social networks,
with President Obama, technology industry leaders and legions of Apple fans
weighing in.
“For those of us lucky enough to get
to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor,” said Bill Gates, the
Microsoft co-founder. “I will miss Steve immensely.”
A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote:
“R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it
beautiful.”
Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs
led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making
personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company,
prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he
returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after
another — the iPod,
the iPhone and
the iPad.
These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones
but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.
During his years outside Apple, he bought a
tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team
of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation
Studios.
Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar
produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and
technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a
mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.
Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer
nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He
considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible,
encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.
It was an executive style that had evolved.
In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues,
and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit
extraordinary loyalty.
“He was the most passionate leader one
could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author
of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac.
“Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”
“Toy Story,” for example, took four years
to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues.
“‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief
and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and
a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to
make the next big step forward.”
Mr. Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple
products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed
out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third, and began
shipping it in June 2007.
To his understanding of technology he
brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella
Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the
’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the
adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school
in Cupertino in 1972, he said, ”the very strong scent of the 1960s was still
there.”
After dropping out of Reed College, a
stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a
countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one
of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said
there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people
who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.
Decades later he flew around the world in
his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which
he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said.
When discussing the Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he
mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole
Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication.
Apple’s very name reflected his unconventionality.
In an era when engineers and hobbyists tended to describe their machines with
model numbers, he chose the name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary
habits at the time.
Coming on the scene just as computing began
to move beyond the walls of research laboratories and corporations in the
1970s, Mr. Jobs saw that computing was becoming personal — that it could do
more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and business problems — and that
it could even be a force for social and economic change. And at a time when
hobbyist computers were boxy wooden affairs with metal chassis, he designed the
Apple II as a sleek, low-slung plastic package intended for the den or the
kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital lifestyle.
He put much stock in the notion of “taste,”
a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that
looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a
triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have
done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”
Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley
marketing executive to whom Mr. Jobs turned in the late 1970s to help shape the
Apple brand, said Mr. Jobs’s genius lay in his ability to simplify complex,
highly engineered products, “to strip away the excess layers of business,
design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.”
Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not
focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the
iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they
want.”
Early
Interests
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco
on Feb. 24, 1955, and surrendered for adoption by his biological parents,
Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a graduate student from Syria
who became a political science professor. He was adopted by Paul and Clara
Jobs.
The elder Mr. Jobs, who worked in finance
and real estate before returning to his original trade as a machinist, moved
his family down the San Francisco Peninsula to Mountain View and then to Los
Altos in the 1960s.
Mr. Jobs developed an early interest in
electronics. He was mentored by a neighbor, an electronics hobbyist, who built
Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics projects. He was brash from an early age.
As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a
frequency counter he was assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the
co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes,
prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer
intern.
Mr. Jobs met Mr. Wozniak while attending
Homestead High School in neighboring Cupertino. The two took an introductory
electronics class there.
The spark that ignited their partnership
was provided by Mr. Wozniak’s mother. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high
school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent
him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article,
“Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground
hobbyist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illicitly
exploring the nation’s phone system.
Mr. Wozniak shared the article with Mr.
Jobs, and the two set out to track down an elusive figure identified in the
article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken the name from his discovery that a
whistle that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that
made it possible to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whistle
next to a phone handset.
Captain Crunch was John Draper, a former
Air Force electronic technician, and finding him took several weeks. Learning
that the two young hobbyists were searching for him, Mr. Draper had arranged to
come to Mr. Wozniak’s Berkeley dormitory room. Mr. Jobs, who was still in high
school, had traveled to Berkeley for the meeting. When Mr. Draper arrived, he
entered the room saying simply, “It is I!”
Based on information they gleaned from Mr.
Draper, Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs later collaborated on building and selling
blue boxes, devices that were widely used for making free — and illegal — phone
calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort.
After enrolling at Reed College in 1972,
Mr. Jobs left after one semester, but remained in Portland for another 18
months auditing classes. In a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005,
he said he had decided to leave college because it was consuming all of his
parents’ savings.
Leaving school, however, also freed his
curiosity to follow his interests. “I didn’t have a dorm room,” he said in his
Stanford speech, “so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke
bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven
miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare
Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my
curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”
He returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and
took a job there as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. Still
searching for his calling, he left after several months and traveled to India
with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, who would later become an early Apple
employee. Mr. Jobs returned to Atari that fall. In 1975, he and Mr. Wozniak,
then working as an engineer at H.P., began attending meetings of the Homebrew
Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center in Menlo Park, Calif. Personal computing had been pioneered at research
laboratories adjacent to Stanford, and it was spreading to the outside world.
“What I remember is how intense he looked,”
said Lee Felsenstein, a computer designer who was a Homebrew member. “He was
everywhere, and he seemed to be trying to hear everything people had to say.”
Mr. Wozniak designed the original Apple I
computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs
who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product.
In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using
their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later
gained the backing of a former Intel executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them
$250,000. Mr. Wozniak would be the technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing
half of the original Apple I Computer. Starting out in the Jobs family garage
in Los Altos, they moved the company to a small office in Cupertino shortly
thereafter.
In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak
introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It
created a sensation. Faced with a gaggle of small and large competitors in the
emerging computer market, Apple, with its Apple II, had figured out a way to
straddle the business and consumer markets by building a computer that could be
customized for specific applications.
Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977
to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in
the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.
The Apple III, introduced in May 1980, was
intended to dominate the desktop computer market. I.B.M. would not introduce
its original personal computer until 1981. But the Apple III had a host of
technical problems, and Mr. Jobs shifted his focus to a new and ultimately
short-lived project, an office workstation computer code-named Lisa.
An Apocalyptic Moment
By then Mr. Jobs had made his
much-chronicled 1979 visit to Xerox’s research center in Palo Alto, where he
saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer system that foreshadowed modern
desktop computing. The Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of
the first computers to employ a graphical video display, which presented the
user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the metaphor of an office
desktop.
“It was one of those sort of apocalyptic
moments,” Mr. Jobs said of his visit in a 1995 oral history interview for the
Smithsonian Institution. “I remember within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical
user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way
someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn’t require tremendous
intellect. It was so clear.”
In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple
engineers pursuing a separate project, a lower-cost system code-named
Macintosh. The machine was introduced in January 1984 and trumpeted during the
Super Bowl telecast by a 60-second
commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, that linked
I.B.M., then the dominant PC maker, with Orwell’s Big Brother.
A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr.
Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief
executive, Mr. Sculley was impressed by Mr. Jobs’s pitch: “Do you want to spend
the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change
the world?”
He went on to help Mr. Jobs introduce a
number of new computer models, including an advanced version of the Apple II
and later the Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers. Through them Mr. Jobs
popularized the graphical user interface, which, based on a mouse pointing
device, would become the standard way to control computers.
But when the Lisa failed commercially and
early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, the two men became estranged and a
power struggle ensued, and Mr. Jobs lost control of the Lisa project. The board
ultimately stripped him of his operational role, taking control of the Lisa
project away from him, and 1,200 Apple employees were laid off. He left Apple
in 1985.
“I don’t wear the right kind of pants to
run this company,” he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left,
according to a member of the original Macintosh development team. He was
barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans.
That September he announced a new venture,
NeXT Inc. The aim was to build a workstation computer for the higher-education
market. The next year, the Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot invested $20
million in the effort. But it did not achieve Mr. Jobs’s goals.
Mr. Jobs also established a personal
philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple but soon had a change of heart,
deciding instead to spend much of his fortune — $10 million — on acquiring
Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing company owned by the filmmaker George
Lucas.
The purchase was a significant gamble;
there was little market at the time for computer-animated movies. But that
changed in 1995, when the company, with Walt Disney Pictures, released “Toy
Story.” That film’s box-office receipts ultimately reached $362 million, and
when Pixar went public in a record-breaking offering, Mr. Jobs emerged a
billionaire. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4
billion. The sale made Mr. Jobs Disney’s largest single shareholder, with about
7 percent of the company’s stock.
His personal life also became more public.
He had a number of well-publicized romantic relationships, including one with
the folk singer Joan Baez, before marrying Laurene Powell. In 1996, his sister
Mona Simpson, a novelist, threw a spotlight on her relationship with Mr. Jobs
in the novel “A Regular Guy.” The two did not meet until they were adults. The
novel centered on a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bore a close resemblance to
Mr. Jobs. It was not an entirely flattering portrait. Mr. Jobs said about a
quarter of it was accurate.
His wife and Ms. Simpson survive him, as do
his three children with Ms. Powell, his daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs
and a son, Reed; another daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with
Chrisann Brennan; and another sister, Patti Jobs.
Return
to Apple
Eventually, Mr. Jobs refocused NeXT from
the education to the business market and dropped the hardware part of the
company, deciding to sell just an operating system. Although NeXT never became
a significant computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young
programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version
of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics research center CERN in 1990.
In 1996, after unsuccessful efforts to
develop next-generation operating systems, Apple, with Gilbert Amelio now in
command, acquired NeXT for $430 million. The next year, Mr. Jobs returned to
Apple as an adviser. He became chief executive again in 2000.
Shortly after returning, Mr. Jobs publicly
ended Apple’s long feud with its archrival Microsoft, which agreed to continue
developing its Office software for the Macintosh and invested $150 million in
Apple.
Once in control of Apple again, Mr. Jobs
set out to reshape the consumer electronics industry. He pushed the company
into the digital music business, introducing first iTunes and then the iPod MP3
player. The music arm grew rapidly, reaching almost 50 percent of the company’s
revenue by June 2008.
In 2005, Mr. Jobs announced that he would
end Apple’s business relationship with I.B.M. and Motorola and build Macintosh
computers based on Intel microprocessors.
His fight with cancer was now publicly
known. Apple had announced in 2004 that Mr. Jobs had a rare but curable form of
pancreatic cancer and that he had undergone successful surgery. Four years
later, questions about his health returned when he appeared at a company event
looking gaunt. Afterward, he said he had suffered from a “common bug.” Privately,
he said his cancer surgery had created digestive problems but insisted they
were not life-threatening.
Apple began selling the iPhone in June
2007. Mr. Jobs’s goal was to sell 10 million of the handsets in 2008,
equivalent to 1 percent of the global cellphone market. The company sold 11.6
million.
Although smartphones were already
commonplace, the iPhone dispensed with a stylus and pioneered a touch-screen
interface that quickly set the standard for the mobile computing market. Rolled
out with much anticipation and fanfare, iPhone rocketed to popularity; by the
end of 2010 the company had sold almost 90 million units.
Although Mr. Jobs took just a nominal $1
salary when he returned to Apple, his compensation became the source of a
Silicon Valley scandal in 2006 over the backdating of millions of shares of
stock options. But after a company investigation and one by the Securities and
Exchange Commission, he was found not to have benefited financially from the
backdating and no charges were brought.
The episode did little to taint Mr. Jobs’s
standing in the business and technology world. As the gravity of his illness
became known, and particularly after he announced he was stepping down, he was
increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend
product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented
software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business
strategies in a way that has not been matched.
If he had a motto, it may have come from “The
Whole Earth Catalog,” which he said had deeply influenced him as a young man.
The book, he said in his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with
the admonition “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
“I have always wished that for myself,” he
said.
