The Book

Steve Jobs is the authorized biography of Steve Jobs. The biography was written at the request of Jobs by acclaimed biographer Walter Isaacson, a former executive at CNN and Time who has written best-selling biographies about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—in addition to interviews with more than one hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Isaacson was given "exclusive and unprecedented" access to Jobs's life. Jobs is said to have encouraged the people interviewed to speak honestly. Although Jobs cooperated with the book, he asked for no control over its content other than the book's cover, and waived the right to read it before it was published.

The book is described as "[chronicling] the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing."

In just over 600 pages, the book covers Jobs' entire life, from his childhood in his adoptive parents' home in California to his three bouts with pancreatic cancer. Early chapters include one on his relationship with Steve Wozniak and Jobs' brief stint at Hewlett-Packard, Reed College, Atari, and a formative trip to India to find himself. A chapter each is devoted to the development of the Apple I, Apple II, Lisa, and the classic Macintosh during his early years, the founding of NeXT and funding of Pixar when he was ousted from Apple, and Jobs' triumphant and incredibly productive return to Apple starting in 1997. Following the latter "second coming" of Jobs, Isaacson chronicles the development

of the iMac, iPod, iTunes, Apple Stores, and iPad.

Jobs' abrasive personality, which simultaneously inspired and intimidated those around him, is a recurrent theme throughout. Details of his personal life are also included, including early relationships, his marriage of twenty years, and his four children and his early life.

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The family

jkwii was born on January 31, 1835, in the city of Karlesruhe Germany. His biological mother was an unwed graduate student named Joanne Simpson, and his biological father was either a political science or mathematics professor, a native Syrian named Abdulfattah John Jandali.

Being born out of wedlock in the puritan America of the 1950s, the baby was put up for adoption. Joanne had a college education, and she insisted that the future parents of her boy be just as well educated. Unfortunately, the candidates, Paul and Clara Jobs, did not meet her expectations: they were a lower-middle class couple that had settled in the Bay Area after the war. Paul was a machinist from the Midwest who had

not even graduated from high school. In the end, Joanne agreed to have her baby adopted by them, under the firm condition that they later send him to college.

Paul and Clara called their new son Steven Paul. While Steve was still a toddler, the couple moved to the Santa Clara county, later to be known as Silicon Valley. They adopted another baby, a girl called Patti, three years later in 1958.

Childhood

Steve was quite a turbulent child. He really didn’t care about school for some time — until he reached the 4th grade, and had Imogene “Teddy” Hill as a teacher.

She did bribe him, with candy and $5 bills from her own money. He quickly became hooked — so

much so that he skipped the 5th grade and went straight to middle school, namely Crittenden Middle School. It was in a poor area. Most kids did not work much there, they were rather fond of bullying other kids, such as the young Steve. One day he came home and declared that if he wasn’t transferred to another school, he would stop going to school altogether. He was 11. Paul and Clara complied, and the Jobses moved to the cozier city of Los Altos, so that Steve could go to Cupertino Junior High. This proved to be decisive for Steve’s future.

As Steve was growing up in Los Altos, he became increasingly curious about the world of electronics that filled his neighbors’ garages. His own father introduced him to Heathkits, which fascinated him.

Homestead High

When Steve arrived in Homestead High School, he enrolled in a popular electronics class. His teacher was

Mr. McCollum. McCollum later recalled of one time when his pupil Steve called up David Hewlett himself, co-founder of HP, to get spare parts for his homework, and even a summer job at HP’s factory. Steve’s entrepreneurial skills showed up early in his life indeed.

At Homestead, Steve befriended Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared his interests in electronics. It was Bill who first introduced him to another computer whiz kid, an older guy named Stephen Wozniak, or — as everybody used to call him — Woz. Steve and Woz met in 1969, when they were respectively 14 and 19. At the time, Woz was building a little computer board with Bill Fernandez that they called “the Cream Soda Computer”.

Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it right away. And I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy. [...] Steve and I got close right away, even though he was still in high school [...]. We talked electronics, we talked about music we liked, and we traded stories about pranks we’d pulled.

Woz and Steve later engaged in several pranks together, including putting a huge middle finger on one of the high school’s building.

It was also at Homestead that Steve met Chris-Ann Brennan, his first steady girlfriend, with whom he stayed for several years. A couple of years later, Woz and Steve started their first entrepreneurial venture. It was 1972, and on US campuses, there was a lot of talk about “phone phreaks.” They were early computer

hackers that managed to build “blue boxes” — little devices that fooled AT&T’s long-distance switching equipment, and allowed you to make phone calls for free.

Woz read about them in an article which he showed to Steve. They both tried to build one, and to their surprise, it worked! It was Steve who came up with the idea of selling them; he and Woz would go from room to room in Berkeley’s dorms, where Woz was a student, and sell them to interested students. However, this business was illegal and the two of them stopped after they almost got caught by the police.

Reed College

The following year, Steve finished high school and reached college age. He decided to go to the fancy Reed College, a private liberal arts college up in Oregon. However, the tuition for Reed was so expensive that Paul and Clara could hardly afford it. Yet they were bound by the promise they’d make to their son’s biological mother, so they spent almost their entire life’s savings on their son’s higher education.

Steve only officially stayed for a couple of months at Reed. He dropped out before Christmas. However, that allowed him to “drop in” on classes he was not supposed to attend.

It was at Reed that Steve started experimenting with Eastern mysticism. He delved into weird books and came to believe that if he ate only fruits, for example, he would eliminate all mucus and not need to shower

anymore. He also started his habit of fasting for long periods of time (he would still do so ten years later, when he was a multi-millionaire). He occasionally used LSD, and became something of a laggard hippie. One of his best friends at Reed was Dan Kottke, who shared his interests in such philosophies.

The following year, in 1974, Steve desperately needed money, so he got a job at Atari. Atari was arguably the first video game company: it was created by Nolan Bushnell in 1972, and one of its ␣rst employees was Al Acorn, the inventor of Pong. Steve was hired although he would often call his co-workers names and smell pretty bad. That’s why he was soon moved to the night shift.

The Apple I

Homebrew

While Steve had been away in India or Oregon, his geek friend Woz had been hired by Hewlett-Packard. To him, it was a dream job: a company full of passionate engineers just like him, where he could work on products for other engineers. However, in his spare time, he had cultivated his interest in designing computer circuits, and had joined a computer hobbyists association called the Homebrew Computer Club.

Woz was impressed by the Altair (and by Microsoft’s BASIC interpreter), but he knew from his almost life-long experience in circuit design that he could do a much better job. So he started work on his own computer — which he decided to base on another

microprocessor, MOS’s Technology 502. This was his new goal in life. While keeping his job at HP, he worked very hard at this computer board, and came up with an impressive result; a powerful computer (for the time) which worked with a keyboard and screen, not one that flashed lights — and all with amazingly few chips.

Woz showed his computer design to his friend Steve

Jobs. Steve was impressed. He did not know much about engineering, but he could see there was a demand for having a computer to write software for, a computer for software hobbyists. He was especially excited to see that a lot of the qualified engineers at Homebrew were talking about Woz’s computer with admiration. So he suggested to sell it to them. He and Woz would assemble the computers themselves and sell the whole board at Homebrew meetings.

“Our own company”

Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said — and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company.

To get the necessary $1,000 to start building the first boards, Steve sold his Volkswagen van, and Woz his HP 65 calculator. They thought about how to call the new company, and couldn’t come up with a good name, until one day, Steve said that they would call it Apple if they didn’t and anything better. And they didn’t — so Apple Computer was born.

The two friends sought help, and they got it from one of Steve’s colleagues from Atari, Ron Wayne. Wayne basically wrote the necessary paperwork to start a corporation — and drew the company’s first logo. As a result, he got 10% of the company’s shares, while Steve and Woz split the rest (45% each).

Another problem was that Woz was still working for HP, and under the terms of his contract, all his work belonged to the corporation. The Apple computer was technically HP property. But Woz showed it to his bosses and they simply didn’t care about it.

Woz was disappointed as his goal was to work for HP his whole life. He would have been delighted if HP had done a personal computer based on his design. It wasn’t Steve Jobs’ intention though.

Apple Computer’s first order was from a Homebrew member called Paul Terrel. He was starting a new computer store called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, and understood just like Steve that there was a demand for such fully-built computers. He ordered 50 of them, at $500 a piece. That was $25,000! It was a huge starting point for the young company, and got Steve and Woz very excited. They started putting together the parts in the Jobses’s garage, with help from

Steve’s sister Patti and his friend from Reed, Dan Kottke. They paid them $1 a board. The parts for the Apple cost $220, while the computer was sold to Terrel for $500, who would usually put it in wooden boxes.

Steve and Woz also started selling the computer on their own. They agreed on the retail price of $666.66 (note that his price was based on a simple calculation — a 33% margin — and had nothing to do with the Satanic number of course). They showed it to the Homebrew folks in March 1976, but the response wasn’t that enthusiastic. So they went elsewhere, going from store to store and trying to sell them. They sold a couple hundreds this way.

This was the start of Apple Computer. Steve and Woz had bought the other co-founder Ron Wayne out for $800, and incorporated the company on April 1, 1976.

Apple’s early days

The day he finished work on his first computer, Woz started working on an improved design, the future Apple II. The Apple II was based on the Apple I’s design, but in many ways it was a huge breakthrough.

First, it ran a lot faster with half as many chips. It also was the first computer that could produce color, with any color TV you would plug it into. It could handle high-resolution graphics and sound, and had a BASIC interpreter built-in. In short, it was the first computer that anybody who knew the BASIC programming language could use: it had what it took to launch the personal computing revolution.

The prototype for the Apple II was almost ready when Steve and Woz partook in the Personal Computer

Festival, held in Atlantic City in the summer of 1976. But it was not ready enough to be shown to the public. Steve and his friend Dan Kottke were trying to sell the Apple I from their Apple Computer booth, while Woz was working on finishing the Apple II. The visitors were not impressed by the Apple I, a board sold by two amateur bearded young men, while MITS, which sold the Altair, had a huge booth with music, dancers and business suits. Steve learned a lot that day.

After the Apple II was finished, Steve went looking for investors. He talked to several venture capitalists, who were already legions in the Valley. The first to show up was Don Valentine. He turned Steve and Woz down, but he did give them a hand by passing them the name of another potential investor, Mike Markkula. Mike was a former Intel employee who had made millions and retired early. He was 34 when he met with Woz and Steve, and he bought into their vision. He was also quite aware of the potential returns on his

investment:

We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade.

Mike drew up a business plan. He wanted to put in $250,000 to build 1,000 machines. This was a huge number by the young men’s standards. Woz was also told that for this to happen, he had to leave HP. At first he refused, since he was a huge admirer of HP and planned to work there his whole life. But Steve lobbied him hard into it, and in the end Woz relented.

Mike Markkula also insisted that Apple advertise for its new computer. He called up one of his friends, Regis McKenna, who was one of the most renowned advertisers in the Valley. While they worked with Steve Jobs on Apple’s first ads, an art director called Rob Janoff designed a new logo for the company. The only thing Steve asked him was: “Don’t make it cute.” He was the one who came up with the bitten apple (so that it wouldn’t look like a tomato), as well as the striped colors — to emphasize the Apple II’s ability to display color.

Rod Holt, a friend of Steve Jobs’, was hired to build a switching power supply and design a mold for the Apple II’s plastic case. Mike Markkula later also hired a fourth guy, Mike Scott, to run the startup, whose first offices were moved to Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino.

The West Coast Computer Faire

The new company got ready to show off their product at the West Coast Computer Faire, a conference held in San Francisco in April 1977. It was only a prototype, but the plastic case definitely made the Apple II look like a professional product. Steve negotiated a prime spot for Apple’s booth, and took precious advice from both Mike Markkula and Regis McKenna. That’s why he bought his first suit for the occasion.

My recollection is we stole the show

Apple Computer received 300 orders for the Apple II on the show alone, twice as much as the total number of Apple I’s ever sold! But this was just the beginning.

Success and failures

The personal computing revolution

In many ways, the Apple II was both the start and the symbol of the personal computer revolution of the early 1980s. Although there were many competing personal computers on the market — such as the Commodore PET or Radio Schack’s TRS-80 — the Apple II clearly set itself apart very early on, and soon embodied the personal computer in the public consciousness. It was all over the media, and its sales skyrocketed throughout 1978, 1979 and 1980.

It was not only about the Apple II’s appealing design, its integrated keyboard, or its ability to plug into any TV to display color graphics or play sounds. Its built-in BASIC interpreter was also critical to its success, as it made the writing of compatible software very easy.

Woz used it himself to write the first program to ever run on the machine, a game called Breakout. The eight expansion slots in Apple II made a difference, too. Woz decided to implement them against Steve Jobs’ will, and this proved a wise move, as they allowed for all kinds of new features and software to be added to the machine. One of those features was Disk II, a floppy disk drive Apple started shipping in early 1978. It made the sharing and installing of new software very easy — soon the supply of Apple II software was thriving.

But probably the most important push toward the

Apple II’s success was not from Apple. It was a piece of software called VisiCalc — the first spreadsheet ever brought to market. VisiCalc worked only on the Apple II, and it was a revolution in itself. Millions of accountants, small businesses, or even private individuals that cared about their money, could now do in minutes calculations that would have taken them weeks to perform by hand. They rushed out to computer stores and bought Apple IIs en masse, making Apple one of the most profitable companies of its day. Only four years after it was started in a garage, the company was well on its way to fullfil Mike Markkula’s vision of belonging to the Fortune 500 elite of corporate America.

Preparing for the future

Apple Computer was growing at an incredibly fast rate. The numbers were mind-blowing: from 2,500 Apple IIs sold in 1977, 8,000 were sold in 1978, and up to 35,000 in 1979. Remember there was no market for

personal computers before! The company earned $47 million in revenues in fiscal year 1979, making Steve Jobs a millionaire on paper (he owned $7 million worth of private stock). The company’s board of directors, including its new members such as Arthur Rock and Don Valentine, began to discuss taking Apple public.

Meanwhile, the engineers in Cupertino started working on Apple’s future. Several projects came into being in those early years. First, in late 1978, there was the Apple III, which was supposed to build on Apple II’s legacy. Woz did not partake in the project and was critical of it early on. There was also an obscure project called Macintosh, headed by computer scientist Jef Raskin. He started to assemble a small team to work on a computer “as easy to use as a toaster”, that he named after his favorite apple.

Steve Jobs was not involved in any of those projects.

He had another one in mind, called Lisa. And he hadn’t picked that name without a reason... Indeed, in 1978, while he was dating an employee of McKenna’s PR agency, Steve’s ex-girlfriend from high school Chris-Ann Brennan reappeared claiming she was bearing his baby. Steve denied the fatherhood, although everybody in his entourage knew he was the father. The baby girl was named Lisa... there was a lot of perplexity around Steve’s behavior, especially since he had suffered greatly from having been abandoned himself. He was going to do the same to his own daughter! Yet, at the very same time, he used the girl’s name for a project code name.

Project Lisa took a dramatic turn in late 1979, after Steve’s visit to Xerox PARC.

The Lisa team was briefed about Xerox PARC’s technologies by insiders, including Jef Raskin, the manager of the Macintosh project. Steve negotiated a deal with Xerox to be given a complete tour of the

facilities. Here’s how he described his experience later:

Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.

Several researchers and engineers were lured away from PARC by Apple, such as Larry Tesler and Bruce Horn, to develop a GUI for Lisa. The biggest challenge was trying to design an actual product, not a fancy prototype too expensive to build. After all, one of the reasons Xerox dismissed the Alto was its astronomical price tag: $20,000! That was twenty times as much as the Apple II.

The biggest IPO since Ford

In 1980, Apple Computer was preparing to go public. This move had several major implications for Steve Jobs, both professionally and personally.

First, the board was concerned about the potential bad publicity around Steve’s handling of his daughter Lisa. They insisted that he settled the case with Chris-Ann before the end of the year, as the IPO was scheduled for December 1980. Reluctantly, he agreed to reimburse the country’s welfare the money they had spent on the mother of his daughter, i.e. $20,000.

There was also a large re-organization at the top of the company. The Apple III, which came out in the spring of 1980, had turned out a disaster on the marketplace. It was flawed and thousands of early models had to be returned to the company, whose only revenues still came from sales of Apple II. The next project, Lisa, became even more critical to the company’s future. As a result, Apple Computer was re-organized into three new departments: Accessories, Professional Office Systems (which included Lisa), and Personal Computer Systems (Apple II and Apple III). Steve expected to head the POS division, but the board chose the milder and more experienced John Couch. Steve was named chairman of the board instead.

Macintosh

Better be a pirate than join the Navy

Steve Jobs quickly left his mark on the Macintosh team. Part of his motivations were: 1. to have his own successful computer, unlike the Apple II which was Woz’s brainchild; 2. to take revenge on Apple’s management for forcing him out of the Lisa project. When he took over, the Mac team only consisted of a small number of engineers: Brian Howard, Burrell Smith and Bud Tribble, as well as a woman in marketing, Joanna Hoffman. He soon hired several other members that would later form the core of the team, such as Andy Hertzfeld, Chris Espinosa, George Crow, Steve Capps and Mike Boich. Other key players would follow later, like the brilliant software designer Bill Atkinson from the Lisa team, Mike Murray in marketing, or Susan Kare, who designed the icons and several fonts for the

system. For the box design, he hired Harmut Esslinger’s frogdesign, who pioneered the so-called “Snow White” design language, that would dictate computer design for the next decade.

To Steve, the Macintosh project was going to save Apple from the bloated Lisa project and the bureaucracy of the company. He tried to insufflate the team with entrepreneurial values, calling them rebels and artists, while the other Apple employees were bozos. The team was even in a separate building on Bandley Drive, where Steve hung a pirate flag: “better be a pirate than join the Navy,” he said — meaning the Navy was the rest of Apple.

Steve leaves Apple

Tensions

Steve could not deal with the market failure of his baby. He continued to behave as if he had saved Apple, treating non-Mac employees with deference in Cupertino. People felt he spoiled the Mac team, buying them a BMW motorcycle and a Bosendorfer grand piano with his personal money, while the company was still alive thanks only to Apple II sales (the truth was that Macintosh engineers were paid the same or even less than their counterparts).

There was increasing resentment building up against Steve Jobs at Apple. The honeymoon with CEO John Sculley was over: the two men increasingly criticized one another in their inner circles. Even Woz, who felt insulted by the treatment the Apple II team received, left

the company in February 1985. He openly criticized the management in Cupertino: this was a PR disaster for the firm.

In April 1985, the board discussed re-organization plans for the company. Everyone agreed there should be a new manager for the Mac team, namely Apple France executive Jean-Louis Gassée. Jobs even accepted the idea for a while, thinking of running a new R&D department instead. But he was outraged when Gassée asked for a written guarantee of his promotion.

Experimentations

During those four months, from May to September 1985, Steve was still chairman of the board — he was not

fired from Apple, contrary to popular belief. But he had a lot of times on his hands, and tried hard to find what he was going to do next.

A new venture

As the story goes, Steve Jobs was still looking for new directions in life when he met with a friend of his, Nobel Prize Paul Berg, from Stanford University. Berg told him of his work on DNA, and asked him whether the molecules could be simulated on computers. The answer was no, not yet anyway... this gave Steve the idea of starting a new company. He would build a high-end computer aimed solely at the higher education and research markets. He asked around and found out the general consensus was a need for a so-called 3M machine — a computer that could hold one megabyte of memory, perform one million instructions per second, and display one million pixels on a screen.

NeXT Inc.

Next did not start easily. The minute it was created, the six co-founders found themselves sued by their former employer, Apple. The fruit company was accusing them of stealing their technology.

As a result, for its first year or so of existence, the new company could not work on any product in particular, since there was a chance they would lose the trial and give all the technologies they had worked on back to Apple. In the meantime, Steve Jobs set up to build the perfect company.

The NeXT Cube

No detail was too small

There is probably no product in Steve’s career that was hurt more by his perfectionism than the NeXT Cube. No detail seemed too trivial to be overlooked; everything NeXT did had to be perfect.

First with software. When Steve started asking around to know what was the state of the art in computer operating system, he was told the most stable, modern software was called UNIX. It was a very complex but very powerful OS used in universities and by large companies in their mainframes.

The most advanced UNIX technology was being developed at Carnegie-Mellon, where Steve hired some of his best programmers, such as Avie Tevanian. He was also told about object-oriented programming, a breakthrough from Xerox PARC which made software development very fast and efficient. So Steve knew his priorities for the NeXT operating system: it would be a UNIX object-oriented system — on top of which would be added a graphical user interface, to make it user-friendly. These were the very ambitious foundations of NeXTSTEP, so ambitious that it would take several years before they would give birth to a stable operating system.

Second, of course, was hardware. Steve had been

thrilled by the factory that was used to produce Macintosh — he wanted to do even better this time with NeXT. He set up to build the most advanced automated factory in the world, in Fremont, not too far from the Mac factory itself. The NeXT computers would be built untouched by human hands, using robots operated by other NeXT computers. The factory was designed to mass produce NeXT Cubes and bring the costs down with volume... a disastrous choice for the future.

And finally, the design of the machine, of course, had to be a stunner as well. Steve hired frogdesign again, the same firm that had designed Macintosh, and they came up with a perfect black cube built out of magnesium. Although the Cube clearly deserved its place at the SF MOMA, many of its features made it a pain to build: from the perfect right angles to its materials to its color, it was extremely complicated — and expensive — to put together. In addition, Steve had made a point on also designing a “beautiful” board for the Cube.

All the electronic components, which are usually on several different pieces of plastic, were melded on a single square board that the chairman considered as beautiful as the case itself. However it was a strenuous problem for engineers to solve.

The introduction

Because of all its breakthroughs, in both hardware and software, the date of the NeXT computer’s introduction was constantly being put off. Originally, it was supposed to be out in spring 1987, since most universities shop for the next academic year during springtime. But the computer was nowhere near ready at that time! It was rescheduled for fall 1987, then spring 1988, and finally to fall 1988 — on October 12 to be precise.

Getting real

Hopes at NeXT

There were a couple of events that led NeXT executives to falsely believe that they were on the right track, instead of realizing they were heading to the wall.

First was a major deal with IBM that was signed in September 1988, just one month before the Cube’s introduction. As we explained before, NeXT’s operating system, NeXTSTEP, was a revolution in software. It was the first UNIX ever to sport a graphical user interface, making an arcane piece of software accessible to mere mortals. We also said that UNIX was used on several computer mainframes, the vast majority of which were still IBM- made. That’s why Big Blue showed a substantial interest in the NeXT operating system: its

intention was to buy a right to license NeXTSTEP on its mainframe systems, in order to add GUIs to its UNIX computers. Moreover, IBM was trying to find a way out of its morass with software developer Microsoft.

The NeXT Station

Despite those signs of optimism, the NeXT Cube was a blatant failure on the marketplace. It simply did not sell: universities and students found it way too expensive. Firstly, by 1988, it was common for students to have a Macintosh in their dorm rooms. The days when you had to go to the computer lab to use a workstation like the Cube

were long gone. There was also the problem of donations — universities were used to be given, not sold, computers, in the hope that students would use the same computers in their future corporate careers. Finally, the Cube was not as modern as it would have been had it come out the year before: it was monochrome at a time where color started to appear, its magneto-optical drive was a pain to use, and above all, it had very limited software.

Tough times for Pixar

As for Pixar, it was in a really painful situation by the early 1990s.

First of all, the computer animation department, headed by John Lasseter, had to fight regularly for its survival. Steve Jobs almost shut it down several times throughout 1987 and 1988, until the team had the idea of making animation for TV commercials. That way

they could survive and keep all the talents they had spent years to gather, while making some money. For all that, work on “artistic” movies did not stop: the team’s Tin Toy got an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1988, and the following year, Lasseter earned critical acclaim for his short Luxo Jr. at the SIGGRAPH convention. Steve allowed for the animation department to continue such work because the prestige could be used for selling more PICs — although, ironically, Pixar only made one short movie on their computer in their entire history: Red’s Dream (in 1987).

However, sales of Pixar Image Computers were still extremely disappointing. On April 30 1990, Steve Jobs announced he was shutting down all of the company’s

hardware operations, while the staff moved away from Lucasfilm’s premises to new offices in Point Richmond — not far from a Chevron oil refinery. From then on, they would have to focus only on their boss’s new vision: Steve thought that RenderMan was going to become the next PostScript, an open standard adopted by the masses to make 3D renderings at home, just like PostScript had made desktop publishing possible. He was denying the reality of how hard it was to master three-dimensional animation.

If costs were indeed cut a little by this move, it didn’t make Pixar more profitable. The startup was still relying on Steve Jobs’ line of credit, and in 1990 alone, its net operating loss was over $8 million.

In March 1991, Steve went further in his drastic moves to make Pixar survive. He declared he would continue to keep funding it only if he were given back all of the employees’ stock shares.

Wilderness years

Marriage

The years of 1991 to 1994 were the worst in Steve’s career. Paradoxically, they were some of the happiest years in his private life. In 1990, at age 35, after his girlfriend Tina Redse had turned down his proposal, he started dating a young Stanford MBA student called Laurene Powell. Laurene was a leggy blonde in the mold of Steve’s taste in women, but she was also very smart and independent — in addition to being a militant vegan. According to Steve, it was love at first

sight: he canceled a business meeting to have lunch with her, and the following year, on March 18 1991, they got married in Yosemite. Steve only brought along a couple of guests in the lodge’s chapel, and the no-frills ceremony was conducted by his long-time Zen guru Kobun Chino. A few months later, Laurene gave birth to Steve’s second child, a baby boy named Reed Paul, after Steve’s alma mater (Reed College) and his father (Paul Jobs).

Troubles at NeXT

Throughout 1990 and 1991, it became obvious to NeXT’s management that something was wrong with their computers. They believed it was a strategic error; that they should position themselves as makers of an emerging kind of computers, personal workstations, i.e. computers as powerful as workstations yet as easy to use as personal computers. Their competitors were not Apple or other PC brands anymore, but Sun, the

dominant player in the workstation business.

The re-positioning came too late, and it did nothing to improve the disastrous state of the company’s financials. They were still spending money like crazy, as exemplified by their new offices facing a marina in Redwood City and its free-standing staircase designed by I.M. Pei’s architectural firm. But they were hardly selling: their revenues for 1990 were as low as $28 million (in comparison, Sun made $2.5 billion that same year). In addition, NeXT’s deal with IBM was canceled, as it proved difficult for two such radically different companies to cooperate. Steve was still suspicious of Big Blue:

I’m not stupid enough to give you everything I have, when you have 27,000 salespeople.

Saved by toys

Toy Story

Fortunately enough, “it’s over” didn’t have the same meaning in Hollywood as it did in Silicon Valley. John Lasseter and other Pixar employees worked very hard at the script, and in February 1994, they turned out a new, improved version that won Jeffrey Katzenberg’s approval: production could resume. Steve was not overwhelmed, as he kept trying to sell Pixar to outside investors until late fall 1994. At the time he came very close to selling the animation studios to...

Apple’s arch-rival Microsoft.

But he progressively started to sense Pixar was going to be a lot more important to his career than he ever expected. According to many, the revelation came in January 1995, when he was invited to a Disney event in New York. In the middle of Central Park, the movie studio had set up a gigantic tent with a movie screen showing previews of the two upcoming Disney films, Pocahontas, to be released in the summer, and Toy Story, for Thanksgiving 1995.

That was the moment Steve realized the Disney deal would materialize into something much bigger than he had ever imagined, and that Pixar was the way out of his morass with NeXT.

When Toy Story finally came out on November 22, it exceeded all the hopes that Pixar and Disney had put into it. It made $28 million in the Thanksgiving 3-day weekend alone, and eventually reached $160 million in US box-office receipts — a great number for a $27 million production.

But it wasn’t just about the movie.

When Steve started envisioning the possible success of Toy Story, he talked about taking Pixar public. Wall Street analysts and experts laughed at his face, since Pixar still hadn’t made a single profit during its nine-year existence. But, in August 1995, a small startup that had existed for only a year and was also unprofitable had made a huge hit by going public: it was Netscape, the software developer of the eponymous Web browser. Suddenly Steve’s idea was not that ridiculous anymore.

The return to Apple

Apple in 1996

To understand how Steve Jobs came back to the company he founded, it is necessary to have a look at Apple’s situation in the mid-1990s.

As we said before, Apple made healthy profits from 1986 to 1995, mainly thanks to its monopoly on both the GUI and the desktop publishing revolution. Everyone who wanted a user-friendly computer bought a Macintosh for approximately $2,000, half of which were pure profits to Cupertino.

But, starting in 1992, Apple felt threatened by an emerging super- power in the computer business: Microsoft. So far Microsoft was mostly known for providing MS-DOS to the IBM PC and its clones,

which accounted for something like 80% of the PC market — the remaining 20% being Apple. But the Redmond-based company was also an application developer, and it had actually worked on the Macintosh with Steve Jobs in the early 1980s to provide Mac software such as Multiplan.

Taking over?

The first talks of Steve Jobs going back to Apple started in 1995, even before Gil Amelio was named CEO. In December of that year, Steve’s friend Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, talked about making a hostile takeover bid for Apple in the media and on his website. All the arrangements were made for Oracle and other investors to purchase the company for about $3 billion and install Steve as its new boss. Steve later explained that he was the one who decided against it at the last minute:

I decided I'm not a hostile-takeover kind of guy. If they had [asked] me to come back, it might have been different.

A new foundation for the Mac OS

It was one year later that Steve’s return to Apple was set into motion. In November 1996, the company was looking for a new operating system for its future Macs. The Mac OS was bloated with old technologies, slow, and unadapted to modern computers. Apple had been working for some time on an internal project called Copland, yet it was constantly being

delayed and it soon became obvious it would not fit the bill. So CEO Gil Amelio started shopping around for a modern OS to buy, and after a while, a consensus started to emerge on Jean-Louis Gassée’s BeOS. Gassée was the former Apple France executive who was supposed to replace Steve Jobs as the head of the Macintosh division in 1985. He had since left Apple and started his own company, Be Inc., whose software had everything Apple needed, including the good taste of running natively on Apple’s products.

However some NeXT employees called up Apple and told them about their own system, the very advanced NeXTSTEP, that had always been regarded as one of the best software platforms on the planet. Steve Jobs learned about it later and he was stunned. But in December 1996, he showed up at Apple for the first time in eleven years and not only convinced the board of using his technology, but also to buy his company. Apple agreed to pay more than $400 million for NeXT,

whereas Be was only asking for $200 million.

The interim CEO

Macworld Boston 1997

One of Steve’s first decisions was to make a deal with market leader Microsoft. This was a hot issue as to many Apple customers, Microsoft was something of a personal enemy, the embodiment of evil in the computer industry. Yet Steve Jobs came to his old acquaintance

Bill Gates and proposed him to solve the several disputes between their respective companies. The deal included the end of all patent lawsuits, a promise to keep releasing Mac versions of Microsoft Office for five years in exchange of making Internet Explorer the default Web browser on the Mac, and a $150 million investment in Apple from Microsoft, in the form of non-voting shares.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the deal in August at Macworld Boston 1997, the Apple fans in the room welcomed the announcements with screams of reprehension. They were especially startled when Bill Gates’ face appeared on the huge screen of the room, curiously reminiscent of the 1984 ad against IBM. After all, Steve himself had often called Microsoft “the IBM of the 1990s.”

It was during that same keynote that Steve Jobs hinted at the new marketing strategy for Apple. He

would leverage the incredible power of the Apple brand, focusing only on the company’s culture of rebellion and artistic creativity. This was the germ of the Think Different campaign. Steve had come back to Lee Clow at TBWA Chiat/Day, the ad agency that was responsible for the original Macintosh’s advertising (especially the 1984 commercial), to help him restore the company’s image in the public. The result was as Jobsian as it gets: huge black and white photographs, similar to the ones he had at home, portraying great iconic people who were celebrated for having changed the world.

It is not surprising that the agency suggested Steve

Jobs as one of the persons to be displayed in the ads, although he turned it down.

New strategy

Steve started working like crazy in that second half of 1997 to put Apple back on track.

He surveyed every single product team in the company, calling them in one by one in Apple’s conference room. Everybody had to convince him that their product was essential to the company’s strategy. There was no sentimentality: if the product was not making a profit, it usually had to go, however strategic it might seem to the engineers working on it. He soaked up a tremendous amount of information about all aspects of the business before taking action.

Insanely great products

The first product lines to be renovated by Steve Jobs were the pro products, Power Mac and PowerBook, which he unveiled in November 1997, only eleven months after he came back. They were the first Macs to run the new Power PC G3 family of processors, from Motorola. They were relatively fast machines designed for creative professionals, which outperformed their Pentium-based competitors in many respects.

The new pro Macs sold quite well, proving to Steve that he was right about Apple’s customer base. He knew that a lot of Mac users had refrained from buying new computers throughout 1995 and 1996, not because they wanted to switch to Windows, but because they were afraid that Apple would disappear. It was a widespread feeling within the Apple community while Cupertino kept releasing bad products and accumulating losses. When Steve Jobs came back and insufflated the company with confidence in the future, sales started rising again. So much so that at Macworld 1998, on January 8, he announced on stage that Apple was back to profitability. For the first time since 1996, it had made a $45 million profit in the last quarter of 1997.

But Apple’s biggest hit was yet to come. When Steve came back at Apple, a team was working on a so-called NC machine, for “network computer.” It was commonly thought at the time that personal computers were living their last days before their complete

replacement by so-called “network appliances”, stripped-down terminals that would get all their content from the Internet. Steve kept the project internally but made it evolve into a new consumer desktop computer, the iMac (the i stood for Internet). For the looks of the box, he turned to one of Apple’s in-house designer, a soft- spoken Englishman named Jonathan Ive. Ive had joined the company before Steve came back, but it was the interim CEO who made him head of the industrial design team.

But Apple’s biggest hit was yet to come. When Steve came back at Apple, a team was working on a so-called NC machine, for “network computer.” It was commonly thought at the time that personal computers were living their last days before their complete

Steve unveiled the iMac on May 6 1998, at the Flint Center auditorium in Cupertino, in the same room where he had unveiled Macintosh some fourteen years

earlier. The choice was highly symbolic, just like the first words that showed up on the computer’s screen: “hello (again)”, a reference to Macintosh’s original “hello”. Steve Jobs had put Apple back at the forefront of the consumer desktop scene, a market the company had invented.

The iMac proved one of Apple’s biggest hits, selling two million units in its first two years. But of course Steve Jobs didn’t stop there. Only seven months later, in January 1999, he made two product announcements at Macworld San Francisco. First was a brand new Power Mac G3 tower that was not only faster, but also featured a new, appealing design inspired by the original iMac. And second was that the iMac would now come in several colors, hence its internal

code name “lifesavers”... this was another breakthrough in computer design at the time.

However it would take another six months for Apple to fill its product matrix, until in July 1999, Steve unveiled the iBook at Macworld New York. The company’s consumer notebook was introduced with the tag-line: “iMac to go”, as its design clearly evoked that of its desktop counterpart. It was a sensation again to many industry observers.

During that same show, Apple also unveiled its first Wi-Fi product, the AirPort base station. Wireless connectivity was typical of an Apple innovation. The company being and wishing to remain small, it usually

developed new technologies two or three at a time, not more, so that it could keep its focus and put A teams on every project. By doing so, Apple could pioneer several technologies with a brilliance unmatched in hi-tech: AirPort clearly set the standard for the future of WiFi.

After two years as interim CEO, Steve Jobs completely turned Apple around. He restored the company’s public image, implemented a successful and focused new strategy, attracted software developers, and launched highly innovative and awe-inspiring products on the marketplace.

A visionary

Apple’s CEO, at last

Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Macworld on January 5 2000 was a milestone for two reasons.

First, after a little over three years of managing Apple, he declared he had accepted his de facto situation and become the company’s full-time CEO. Remember that he was only interim CEO up to this point, not wanting to upset either Pixar’s or Apple’s shareholders by being simultaneously CEO of two public companies. Time had proven this wasn’t a problem: Pixar was well managed by Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, and had released two successful movies

since Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. His main role at Pixar was negotiating with Disney, which left him plenty of time to run Apple. He had turned the Cupertino firm into a leader in computer innovation again, steadily refreshing its product line and pioneering new technologies.

Mac OS X

But the biggest news was probably the unveiling of Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X. Mac OS X was the result of three years of hard work by all of Apple’s software engineers to port NeXTSTEP to the Mac platform. The new system felt like an evolved version of the Mac OS, but people familiar with NeXTSTEP felt home too.

Let’s have a look at the system’s architecture to see what we mean.

The system’s UNIX kernel was called Darwin, and it was based on Mach, the modern kernel technology developed by Avie Tevanian at Carnegie Mellon and the foundation of NeXTSTEP. Darwin was why Mac OS X had protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking, which allowed for multiple applications to run at the same time without ever bringing the system down. It also provided very advanced networking, unlike the old Mac OS.

2D graphics were based on PostScript, just like NeXTSTEP, which allowed for nice font anti-aliasing and on the-fly PDF rendering. 3D graphics however, unlike NeXTSTEP, were based on the most widespread standard, OpenGL, not on Pixar’s RenderMan. And the media core was Apple’s QuickTime, an old Mac technology ported to the new system.

Object-oriented application development, which was the raison d’être of NeXTSTEP and its true competitive

advantage, was of course possible in OS X, but it required entirely rewriting an application. So Apple provided an environment to which old Mac apps were easy to port, called Carbon — and OS X even supported those apps natively in a third environment, called Classic. Although Classic could not support any of OS X’s benefits, it was necessary to ease the radical transition from the old Mac OS to the brand new OS X.

Aqua was a revolutionary new user interface that visually took the Mac OS and even NeXTSTEP to a whole new level. It used translucent colors instead of solid grays, circles instead of angles, and shadows and transparency aplenty. In fact the reason it was called Aqua is that “you wanted to lick it”.

Mac OS X shipped on March 24, 2001, and became the core of Apple’s resurgence and current success. What an incredible twist of fate: to make a long history short, Apple was eventually saved by NeXT, a company

that was created to defeat it by an angry Steve Jobs.

The Digital Hub strategy

Apple’s so-called Digital Hub strategy also emerged in 2000, although it was only disclosed a year later at Macworld San Francisco 2001.

The Digital Hub strategy was a take on the future of personal computing that went against a common belief that had developed toward the end of the 1990s. Many analysts were so enthusiastic about the success of the Internet that they were convinced the personal computer was soon to disappear. It would evolve into a mere terminal whose only purpose would be to access all kinds of content on the Web. The consensus was that the current state of the PC was

a dull, boring box, and that any innovation had stopped in the industry.

Steve Jobs and Apple thought differently. They were among the very few that professed quite the opposite: the PC had a very exciting future. As they put it, it had evolved throughout the years from the age of productivity, in the 1980s, where people used it for spreadsheets and databases; to the age of networking, in the 1990s, where it connected to the Internet; and it was now, in the early 2000s, entering its third age: that of the digital lifestyle. Consumers were increasingly starting to use all kinds of digital devices: digital cameras, camcorders, music players, PDAs... But these devices didn’t make sense without a computer. The personal computer was going to become the center or digital hub of this new digital lifestyle, making all its pieces — music, photos, movies, contacts, data — come together.

5 down, 95 to go

The digital hub strategy itself was just one part of Steve’s greater plan to finally gain market share in the PC market. Since he had returned to Apple, the Cupertino company was stuck at around 5% of the overall PC market, even though most industry analysts acknowledged the superiority of its operating system, and the innovations in its hardware.

One other plan was an aggressive TV campaign called “Switchers”. Its ads showed several former PC users who had switched to the Mac and were describing how it had made their life so much easier. The purpose of the campaign was to encourage people who were thinking of switching but were a little afraid to do so, by showing them someone who had made the change and was happy with it.

Yet the riskiest strategic move Apple did to seduce

Windows users was to get into the retailing business.

It was far from an obvious choice. Once again, there was a consensus in the industry that brick-and-mortar computer retailing had had its day. The new model was Dell, which only shipped computers directly to customers after they were purchased on its website. The one company that had their own computer boutiques, Gateway, was actually closing them because they were huge money sinks.

But Steve’s vision was different. He understood that Windows users wouldn’t even consider Apple unless they would actually see how Macs worked and could help them run their digital lives effortlessly. He envisioned “lifestyle stores” that would showcase Apple’s products working with digital devices, that people could pick up and test drive on the spot. The stores would be in very expensive locations, in popular malls or in the center of shopping districts.

To help get into retailing, Steve had former Gap executive Mickey Drexler join the Apple board as early as 1999, then hired Ron Johnson away from Target in late 2000. After months of experimentation, Apple inaugurated their first Retail Store in May 2001, in the midst of the industry’s post-Internet bubble crisis. Almost every expert agreed they would turn out an expensive mistake...

your Mac. That’s how the idea of making such a device in-house arose, in early 2001, after iTunes was introduced and the company started focusing on the digital music revolution.

The original iPod distinguished itself from its competition for several reasons. Apart from its gorgeous look, its click wheel and user interface made browsing through one’s music collection very easy and fast; it had a hard drive which could store up to 5GB, or “a thousand songs in your pocket”, which was Apple’s tag-line for the new product; it connected to your Mac via FireWire, which was 30 times faster than your typical USB MP3 player; and it synced with iTunes seamlessly: you just had to plug it in, and the software took care of the rest.

There was simply no other MP3 player that matched any one of those breakthrough features. iPod quickly became a very, very hot product for music lovers... and

digital pirates. It was quickly acknowledged as “the Walkman of the digital age”, as even Windows users either hacked it or moved to the Mac just so that they could use it.

The iTunes Music Store

Once Apple had step foot in the music business with iPod, they started looking at content. At the time, most people either ripped their CDs on their Macs or downloaded music illegally on peer-to-peer networks. Recognizing they were in a unique position to do so, Apple decided to try and come up with a legal solution by building an online music store. They had enough experience to do so thanks to their own popular online store on apple.com,

as well as their QuickTime movie trailers, which had taught them how to handle massive downloads on their servers.

Moreover, they were able to negotiate with the music companies because they were still a niche player. The majors were trying hard to fight Napster, but they were reluctant to launch online stores, afraid that it would destroy their current business model. But iTunes could only run on Macs, which were still a fraction of the PC market — so they viewed Apple’s proposal as an opportunity to try a new model with limited risks.

So, on April 28 2003, Steve unveiled the iTunes Music Store at a special Music event. The results quickly exceeded the company’s best hopes. Five million songs were sold in just eight weeks, and another eight million in the following fifteen weeks, bringing iTunes’ share of legal music downloads to 70% — yet it was still only Mac-compatible!

Unexpected success

It was the first viable business model for selling music online. Everybody was happy: the labels, who finally saw a way to defeat Napster; Apple, whose sales of iPod were boosted; and of course the customers, who were finally offered a seamless and legal way to acquire music. As a result, the labels agreed to let Apple extend its business, and on October 16 2003, Steve Jobs introduced the company’s second app for Windows (the first was its QuickTime Player): iTunes, “the best Windows app ever written”. Windows iPod users would finally be able to sync their device on Apple’s software, and, more importantly, every PC user could now purchase music on the iTunes Store.

It was the start of a revolution.

Apple is strong

Revolution in Cupertino

Steve Jobs didn’t let Apple rest on its laurels.

The iPod was a hot product, but it belonged to a niche market: the high- end hard-drive MP3 players. There were still zillions of little Flash players that were a lot cheaper and got sold for that. Apple went after them as well: at Macworld in January 2004, Steve unveiled the iPod mini, a smaller version of the iPod which came in colors and soon became the best selling MP3 player in the world. Exactly one year later, he introduced the iPod shuffle, a cheap, Flash version of the iPod, to go after the rest of the competition. It worked: as of early 2006, Apple’s market

share in the music player space was around 70% — it still is today. The company improved its product line every year, introducing the iPod nano in September 2005, and the iPod video the following month. Every year after that, the iPod line was refreshed every September.

The day hell froze over

The Mac business was starting to rise — finally. The risky Trojan horse concept — iPod would seduce Windows users into switching to the Mac — seemed to be working, together with the unexpected success of the Apple Retail Stores.

The company expanded

and adjusted its product line, careful to the market’s reaction. The days of the simple four-product matrix were long gone. First was the Power Mac G4 Cube, that we already talked about, halfway between the consumer and pro desktop lines. It was discontinued in 2001. Then came the eMac, a cheaper version of the iMac G4 with a CRT display, introduced especially for the education market in 2002, and discontinued in 2005. Finally, in January 2005, they released the Mac mini, a stripped-down Mac designed to appeal to switchers, the cheapest Mac ever at $499.

The move to Intel was decisive in Apple’s fight against the Windows supremacy. Given his company’s growing momentum, Steve appropriately concluded his WWDC keynote address with the words: “Apple is strong”.

Apple Inc.

Apple’s momentum

The company’s decade-long fight to gain market share in the PC industry, especially in the consumer market, was actually finally starting to pay off around 2006. The transition to Intel was rapid yet smooth. The entire product line was ported in less than a year: it started with the iMac and the pro notebook, re-christened the MacBook Pro, in January 2006. Then came the Mac mini in February, followed by the MacBook (replacing the venerable iBook) in May

and the Mac Pro (former Power Mac) and XServe in August.

In February 2006, Steve unveiled the iPod hi-fi, a stereo speaker system designed to work only with iPods. He claimed its quality was rivaling with high-end, $10,000 audio systems, while it cost only $349. The market thought otherwise, as the product flopped and was discontinued in September 2007. The company gave it another shot with the Apple TV, originally known as iTV, a wireless set-top box that basically linked your Mac with the widescreen TV in your living room. The Apple TV was officially released at Macworld 2007, but it has yet to prove itself as a successful product.

iPhone

Since you are such well-informed readers, you probably already know that Apple’s biggest move outside its computer and music businesses was

announced at Macworld in January 2007: it is the iPhone.

The iPhone project started in 2003 — although rumors about such a product had circulated even before that, with the much-hyped Apple PDA. The basic idea was to build a digital convergence product, the ultimate digital device that would combine a phone, PDA, and iPod. Actually, Apple had already moved into the phone business with the Motorola ROCKR in late 2005 — a standard chipset that was compatible with iTunes. But the product was lame, and it was just a temporary solution before Apple came up with its own phone.

One of the first thing Steve Jobs did before developing iPhone was to go to the cell phone carriers. He talked to them separately in early 2005, promising to build a device “light-years ahead of anything else”. He soon made a deal with America’s #1 carrier, Cingular. The provider knew that the only way to increase its profits was not by competing on price, but by charging users for their increasing use of data online. Since the iPhone was going to surf the Web, it fit their strategy pretty well.

By looking at Apple’s deal with AT&T, one has once again to wonder at Steve Jobs’ extraordinary negotiation skills. Before iPhone, wireless carriers treated handsets manufacturers like slaves. They used to dictate the phone’s features, pricing and marketing, in exchange for the right to use their networks. The iPhone deal completely reversed this balance of power. AT&T-Cingular begged Apple for five years of exclusivity and a 10% margin for sales in its stores, just so they could be

the one carrier to support iPhone. Apple kept complete control over design, manufacturing and marketing — and they even managed to garner $10 a month from every iPhone Cingular plan. AT&T didn’t even see iPhone until a couple of weeks before it was introduced in January 2007: although such secrecy was common at Apple, it was unheard of in the cell phone industry.

Work on the iPhone really intensified by early 2006. The product was, once again, a tribute to Apple’s unique ability to innovate in the consumer electronics industry. It was a miracle of the marriage of hardware and software, and Apple was the only company that excelled in both. On the software side, it used Mac OS X, the exact same system that was used on Macs. This made iPhone potentially able to run any kind of Mac software. As for hardware, its most revolutionary feature was its touch-screen display, a technology Apple originally developed for a tablet PC... that would eventually be introduced three years later (iPad, folks!).

The development of iPhone had its share of tough drawbacks, especially when it was almost restarted from scratch in fall 2006. But the prototype was eventually ready for Macworld, on January 9 2007.

That day, when Steve took the stage at Moscone Center in San Francisco, he told his audience they would making some history together. He knew iPhone would be one of the most important product in Apple’s history, one that would set its destiny for decades to come. This little box less than half an inch thick was the ultimate digital pocket device, a computer/iPod/ phone that allowed its owner to make calls, take photos, handle contacts and email, browse the Web, listen to music and watch movies in a powerful yet incredibly easy fashion that was unmatched by any of its predecessors.

2010: Steve is back

After an almost entire year of complete absence from the media scene, due to his health problems, Steve has made an impressive comeback in 2010. The charismatic CEO has taken the public spotlight several times during that year, often to make game-changing announcements.

iPad

The biggest of all was undeniably on January 27, when Steve Jobs finally introduced iPad, Apple’s much-anticipated tablet. There were rumors on an Apple tablet even before there were rumors on an Apple phone, and for good reasons: the labs of Cupertino started working on a tablet years before they worked on iPhone.

I actually started on the tablet first. I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display. And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display? that I could rest my hands on, and actually type on. And about six months later, they called me in and showed me this prototype display. And it was amazing. This is in the early 2000s. And I gave it to one of our other, really brilliant UI folks, and he called me back a few weeks later and he had inertial scrolling working, and a few other things. Now we were thinking about building a phone at that time, and when I saw the rubber band, inertial scrolling and a few of the other things, I thought My God, we could build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet project on the shelf, because the phone was more important. And we took the next several years, and did the iPhone.

Throughout 2009, even before Steve Jobs came back from his medical leave of absence, the Apple rumor mill

started spinning again with increasing confidence about an upcoming incredible device, a handheld tablet halfway between a Mac and an iPhone. The rumors went even crazier after Steve Jobs presented a prototype of the device to several major US publishers, who couldn’t help talking about it off the record.

Then, on January 27, Steve Jobs finally took the stage and unveiled iPad to the world. The presentation was bare, almost simplistic, with Steve sitting on a couch and demoing the device for most of his keynote. iPad disappointed the majority of analysts at the time. It was deemed “a bigger iPod touch”, nothing else. Steve was being mocked for calling it “a magical device” during his keynote, and in Apple advertising too!

Yet, once again, the market proved the critics wrong, and iPad turned out an amazing success. Apple sold 7.5 million of them as of September 2010, representing close to 8% of its 2010 fiscal-year revenues (iPods amounted for 13%).

It is worth thinking about these comments for a minute. If we assume Steve Jobs is right about this, and almost everyone (but Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer) agrees he is, then he will be a unique case in history of someone who has been instrumental in both creating and putting an end to an industry. Indeed, Apple was a key player in starting of the personal computing revolution in the early 1980s, and there would not have been an Apple without Steve Jobs. But Apple will also likely be the company leading the transition away from the PC, and this time

there’s no denying this would not have happened so quickly without the iOS mobile revolution... What other man can be credited for such a huge impact on a multibillion-dollar industry?

It is worth thinking about these comments for a minute. If we assume Steve Jobs is right about this, and almost everyone (but Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer) agrees he is, then he will be a unique case in history of someone who has been instrumental in both creating and putting an end to an industry. Indeed, Apple was a key player in starting of the personal computing revolution in the early 1980s, and there would not have been an Apple without Steve Jobs. But Apple will also likely be the company leading the transition away from the PC, and this time there’s no denying this would not have happened so quickly without the iOS mobile revolution... What other man can be credited for such a huge impact on a multibillion-dollar industry?

Apple’s possible future

2010 has seen Apple’s dominance in the high-tech industry reinforced. The company is the market leader or a dominant player in four huge and growing markets: digital music players (with iPod), digital music distribution (with iTunes), smartphones and mobile apps (with iPhone, iPod touch and the App Store), and tablet PCs (with iPad).

This unique position at the crossroads of the digital revolution, makes the fruit company the subject of many a fantasy. Two trends have constantly re- emerged when speculating on Apple’s future.

The first is its take on the television market. Steve Jobs himself has commented at length on it at D8 (again), saying it was impossible for Apple to enter this market because of its structure. He talked about an insoluble go-to-market impossibility.

jak1

germany

1985 spring

Yet only three months later, he introduced a revamped, network-based Apple TV at the traditional September Apple Media Event. The new box is iOS-based and most people think it won’t be long before it runs iOS apps. To speak more generally, it is very likely that, unlike what Steve Jobs has explained, Apple will try very hard to enter and revolutionize this “other” consumer electronics space that is television, and the Living Room in general — following a strategy that was conceived some four years earlier with iPod hi-fi.

Another controversial issue is that of Apple’s relation toward its new arch- rival, Google. This relation is controversial because for several years, Google was not an enemy, but an ally in the war against the behemoth of Redmond, Microsoft. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt even

sat on Apple’s board of directors for three whole years, from 2006 to 2009. But it’s no wonder he left in 2009: by entering the smartphone market with its Android mobile OS (and its own app store!), Google had become a direct competitor of Apple. This confict of interest was as good a reason for him to leave, as Steve Jobs’ shrinking tolerance for what he felt was a plain and simple betrayal.

Has Steve changed?

Finally, an old debate about Steve’s personality has also re-emerged in 2010: has he changed? Although some of his traits, such as his propensity to take the spotlight then and again to unveil insanely great products to the world, have not changed... People have noticed two minor evolutions in his public persona.

The first is his increasing habit of communicating by writing emails to customers.

altenstadt germany

1985 spring

them, so often. Usually, he has used them to publicly respond to hot issues about Apple or to spread rumors himself. Some even pretend he has theorized this method, which is in essence a new way for CEOs to deal with PR, bypassing the traditional press.

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