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Issue 5
The Forward Thinker's Newsletter - Steve Jobs
Spiritual enlightenment and capitalistic genius rarely go hand in hand, but Steve Jobs, founder of Apple computers would be forced to disagree.
Jobs went to school in 1972 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He dropped out after one semester. Jobs then traveled to India with college friend Daniel Kottke for spiritual enlightenment. Two years later he arrived in America with a shaved head wearing traditional Buddhist clothing.
Jobs started the company Apple in the 70’s by co-founding it with Stephen Wozniak, a co-worker he met while working at Hewlett Packer Electronics.
Wozniak and Jobs designed the Apple I computer in Job’s bedroom and they built the prototype in the Jobs' garage. The Apple computer was a revolutionary design because it was the one of the first commercially available computers for average consumers. They sold the first Apple computers for $666.
The Apple was a massive hit, and when the machine was introduced to the public on Super Bowl Sunday it was, as Apple Chairman Steve Jobs described it, "kind of like watching the gladiator going into the arena and saying, 'Here it is." The Apple Company experienced growth for the next 10 years and eventually came out with the Apple II & III computer models.
Unfortunately, the glory days came to an end for Steve Jobs. In the mid-80’s his company board was convinced that he was more harm to the company than help and stripped him of his supervisory position. Steve Jobs declared his new office, “Siberia”, and soon enough grew tired of his weak position within the company.
He spent his days bicycling along the beach, and having lost his purpose, toured Paris and Italy. Thankfully, Jobs found purpose in his next idea called NextStep, which was aimed at developing computers for education. Then, in 1985 Steve Jobs resigned from Apple, taking took 5 of Apple’s key employees with him. Apple then began litigation against Jobs for serving as Apple's chairman while planning to start a new company and falsely representing his intentions to the board. They did not succeed in court against Jobs.
In 1986 Steve also bought The Graphics Group (Pixar Studios), which was originally designed to produce graphic chips, but after making an agreement with Disney Studios turned out to create eight of the most successful animated films of all time such as Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Monsters Inc.
Job’s NextStep Company ended up as a financial drop, and in fact lost $250 million dollars in sales over 8 long years. In 1993 NextStep had to shut down its hardware division after only selling 50,000 NextStep computers. Jobs then turned his company’s attention to software, and developed NextStep/Intel. Although NextStep was not topping the charts, users enjoyed NextStep’s software that allowed programmers to ‘write’ their own programs with ease. Jobs marketed to the scientific/academic fields because of user’s ability to customize complex programs.
In 1995, Apple announced its decision to buy NextStep for $429 million. This brought Jobs back onto the board and into action. Apple apparently had become unconfident in its current CEO Gil Amelio and ousted him from the board.
- John Gallagher
