Steven P. Jobs, the visionary 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, Jobs' company and his school friend Stephen Wozniak began in 1976 in suburban California garage.
Jobs had fought a long and public battle against cancer left in the face of the company as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global brand in their blue jeans as he grew thin and fragile.
He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three leaves of absence of doctors as chief executive of Apple, until his resignation in August and hand over to Timothy D. Cook, director of operations. When he left, he still engaged in the affairs of the company, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive just weeks before.
"I always said that if he ever came a day when he could no longer fulfill my duties and expectations as CEO of Apple, I would be the first to know," Jobs said in a letter published by the company. "Unfortunately, that day has come."
By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive sense of marketing, Jobs had come to define much of the personal computer industry and a wide range of digital consumer and entertainment businesses focused on the Internet. It had also become a very wealthy man, worth an estimated $ 8.3 billion.
Eight years after founding Apple, Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in the manufacture of personal computers easier to use. After separation of the company 12 years, driven by a bitter dispute with its chief executive, John Sculley, returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of innovative digital device after another - the iPod, iPhone and iPad. They become not only the product categories such as music players and mobile phones, but also entire industries, such as music and mobile communications.
During his years out of Apple, he bought a small computer graphics spinoff director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and entertainers who became Pixar Animation Studios.
Starting with "Toy Story" in 1995, Pixar produced a series of successful films, won several Academy Awards for artistic excellence and technology, and made the full-length computer-animated film an art form enjoyed by conventional children and adults around the world.
Jobs was not a hardware engineer or a software programmer, nor himself as an administrator. He was considered a leader in technology, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and stimulating them, and make the final call on product design.
He was an executive style had developed. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in the details colleagues crazy, and acerbic criticism can be humiliating yet. But he failed to win the loyalty extraordinary.
"He was the most passionate leader could be expected, an unparalleled driving force," wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book "incredibly bright", which chronicles the creation of the Mac "Tom Sawyer might have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs. "
"Toy Story", for example, took four years, while Pixar struggled, however, Jobs never let their colleagues. "" It takes a lot more than vision - it takes a stubbornness, tenacity, faith and patience to stay the course ", said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar." In the case of Steve, which pushes up the edge, to try to make the next big step forward. "
Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products and their standards were. In the course of a year was launched two prototypes of iPhone, for example, before approving the third, and began selling in June 2007.
For your understanding of the technology that brought an immersion in popular culture. In 20 years, hung out with Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald singing in his birthday party 30. Their world view was shaped by the 60's counterculture in San Francisco Bay, where he grew up, the adopted son of an engineer in Silicon Valley. When he graduated from high school in Los Altos in 1972, said, "the very strong odor of the 1960's was still there."
After dropping out of Reed College, a bastion of liberal thought in Portland, Oregon, in 1972, Jobs brought a countercultural lifestyle itself. 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 had not tried to psychedelia - even people who knew him well, including his wife - could not understand.
Decades later, flew around the world as a corporate jet, but maintains emotional ties to the period in which it grew. Often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When it comes to lasting contributions in the Silicon Valley of humanity, mentioned in the offense by the invention of the microchip and "The Whole Earth Catalog," a 1960 publication of the counterculture.
Apple's name reflects its unconventionality. In an era in which engineers and enthusiasts tend to describe their machines with model numbers, chose the name of a fruit, allegedly because of their eating habits at a time.
It comes in the scene as the computer began to go beyond the walls of research labs and companies in the 1970s, Jobs realized that computing was becoming personal - you could do more than just numbers crisis and solve scientific and business - and could even be a force for social and economic change. And at a time when computers were amateur affairs wooden square with a metal structure, which designed the Apple II as a package and plastic elegant low-rise for the study or kitchen. He was not to offer only products, but a digital lifestyle.
He put much stock in the concept of "taste" a word he uses frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in the products that looked like works of art and happy users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of "trying to expose you to the best things humans have done and trying to take things as they are doing."
Regis McKenna, a veteran Silicon Valley marketing executive that Jobs returned in late 1970 to help shape the brand Apple, said Jobs's genius lies in its ability to simplify complex products, high engineering " , which remove the top layers of business, design and innovation, until only the really simple, elegant remained ".
Jobs' own research and intuition, not focus groups, is your guide. When asked what market research went into the iPhone, Jobs said: "None is not the job of consumers to know what they want.".
Early interest
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and given up for adoption by their biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a graduate student from Syria who became a professor of political science. It was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.
Mr. mayorPuestos work, who worked in finance and real estate before returning to his original profession, a machinist, his family moved to the peninsula of San Francisco to Mountain View and Los Altos in the 1960's.
Jobs developed an early interest in electronics. It was sponsored by a neighbor, an electronics buff who built Heathkit DIY electronics projects. It was blatant from an early age. As a student of eighth grade, after discovering that a crucial part missing from a frequency counter was meeting, telephoned William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Hewlett spoke with the boy 20 minutes, produced a bag to collect pieces for him and offered him a job as a summer intern.
Jobs Wozniak met while attending Homestead High School Cupertino residents. The two took an introductory class of electronics there.
The spark that ignited their collaboration was provided by the mother of Mr. Wozniak. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article in October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article, "The secrets of the little blue box" by Ron Rosenbaum, a detailed amateur underground culture of young men known as phreaks who were illegally exploring national telephone system.
Wozniak share the article with Jobs, and the two set out to locate an elusive figure identified in the article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken the name of his discovery that a whistle that came in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes are tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long distance, simply by blowing the whistle next to a headset phone.
Captain Crunch was John Draper, a technician from the former Air Force electronics, and the search took him several weeks. Upon learning that the two young fans were looking for, Draper appeared one day in Mr. Wozniak Berkeley Hall dormitory. Jobs, who was still in high school, had traveled to Berkeley for the meeting. When Mr. Draper arrived, entered the room, saying simply: "I am not!"
Based on information obtained from Draper, Mr. Wozniak and Jobs later worked in construction and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely used for the production of free - and illegal - phone calls. It raised a total of $ 6,000 for the effort.
After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Jobs left after one semester, but stayed in Portland for 18 months auditing classes. In a speech given at Stanford in 2005, said he decided to leave college because they consume all the savings of their parents.
Leaving school, however, also set his curiosity to follow their interests. "I had a bedroom," he said in his speech at Stanford, "so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, carrying bottles of Coca-Cola 5 ¢ deposits to buy food, and I would walk the seven miles into 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 started working there as a technician at Atari, the maker of video games. Still searching for his calling, he left after several months and traveled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, who later became an early Apple employee. Jobs that fall back to Atari. In 1975, he and Mr. Wozniak, who was then working as an engineer at HP, he began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of fans gathered at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, staff has CaliforniaInformática pioneered research laboratories with Stanford, and was spreading to the rest of the world.
"What I remember is the intensity of their appearance," said Lee Felsenstein, a computer designer who was a member Homebrew. "He was everywhere and seemed to be trying to listen to everything that people had to say."
Wozniak designed the original Apple computer, just to show his friends at the Homebrew. It was Jobs who had the inspiration that could be a commercial product.
In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using his own money, Apple started with an initial investment of $ 1,300, but later won the backing of a former Intel executive, AC Markkula, who lent them $ 250,000 . Technique would be the average Wozniak and Jobs through marketing the Apple I computer. Beginning in the family garage in Los Altos job, the company moved to a small office in Cupertino shortly after.
In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced the Apple II Computer Fair of the West Coast in San Francisco. It created a sensation. Faced with a bunch of small and large competitors in the market for new computers, Apple with its Apple II, had devised a way to lie in the business and consumer market by creating a team that can be customized for specific applications .
Sales soared, from $ 2 million in 1977 to U.S. $ 600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. In 1983 Apple was on the Fortune 500. No company had joined the growing list so quickly.
The Apple III, introduced in May 1980, was intended to dominate the market for desktop computers. IBM will present its original personal computer until 1981. However, the Apple III was a series of technical problems, and Mr. Jobs shifted his focus to a new project and ultimately short-lived, a team source office named Lisa.
An apocalyptic moment
By then, Mr. Jobs had done his chronicle of 1979 that both the visit to a Xerox research center in Palo Alto, where he saw the Alto, an experimental system personal computer announcing the modern desktop computing. El Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of the first teams to use a video screen graphics, which presents the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the metaphor of an office desk .
"It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments," Jobs said of his visit in an oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution in 1995. "I remember the 10 minutes of seeing things GUI, the fact of knowing that all computers work this way someday. It was so obvious once I saw him. Did not require great intellect. It was so clear ".
In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple engineers to pursue an independent project, a low cost system code-named Macintosh. The machine was introduced in January 1984 and proclaimed during the Super Bowl by a 60-second commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, who joined IBM, then the dominant computer maker, with Orwell's Big Brother.
A year earlier, Mr. Jobs had attracted Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former executive of Pepsi-Cola boss, Mr. Sculley was impressed by the launch of Jobs: "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 present a series of Jobs new computer models, including an advanced version of the Apple II and later Lisa and Macintosh computers desktop. Through these Jobs popularized the graphical user interface, which, based on a mouse pointing, would become the standard way to control computers.
But when Lisa noncommercial and early Macintosh sales were disappointing, the two men moved away and there was a power struggle, and Mr. Jobs lost control of the Lisa project. The board ultimately stripped of his executive role, taking control away from the Lisa project, and Apple's 1,200 employees were laid off. He left Apple in 1985.
"I do not wear the type of pants to run this company," he told a small group of Apple employees before their departure, as a member of the original development team of Macintosh. I was barefoot as he spoke, and the use of jeans.
That September they announced a new project, NeXT Inc. The aim was to build a workstation for the higher education market. The following year, the Texas Industrial H. Ross Perot spent $ 20 million in the effort. However, it achieved the objectives of Jobs.
Mr. Jobs also established a philanthropic foundation staff after leaving Apple, but soon had a change of heart, deciding instead to spend much of his fortune - $ 10 million - in the acquisition of Pixar, a company struggling supercomputing charts owned by filmmaker George Lucas.
The purchase was an important commitment, there was little market at the time of the computer-animated movies. But that changed in 1995 when the company, Walt Disney Pictures, released "Toy Story". That movie box office ultimately reached $ 362 million, and when Pixar went public in an unprecedented offer, Jobs came out a billionaire. In 2006, Walt Disney agreed to buy Pixar for $ 7.4 billion. The sale made Disney's largest individual shareholder, Jobs, with about 7 percent of the shares of the company.
His personal life also became more public. There were a number of well-publicized relationships, including one with folk singer Joan Baez, before she married Laurene Powell. In 1996, a sister, novelist Mona Simpson, threw a spotlight on his relationship with Jobs on the novel "A regular guy." The two did not meet until they are adults. The novel focuses on a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had a strong resemblance to Mr. Jobs. It was not an entirely flattering portrait. Jobs said a quarter of its accuracy.
"We're a family," said Mrs. Simpson in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. "She's one of my best friends in the world. I call and talk to her every two days."
His wife and Mrs. Simpson to survive, as do their three children with Mrs. Powell, their daughters Eva and Employment Employment Sienna Erin and a son, Reed, another daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, a relationship with Brennan Chrisann and one sister, Patti Jobs.
Back to Apple
Since 1986, Jobs refocused following the business education market and dropped the hardware part of the company, the decision to sell only one operating system. Although NeXT never became a major industry player team, which had a big impact: a young programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the research center Swiss CERN physics in 1990.
In 1996, after unsuccessful efforts to develop the next generation of operating systems, Apple, Gilbert Amelio, with now at the helm, took close to $ 430 million. The next year, Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser. He became CEO in 2000.
Shortly after returning, Jobs publicly ended a long fight Apple with its file of Microsoft, which agreed to continue developing its Office software for Macintosh and has invested $ 150 million in Apple.
Once in control again of Apple, Mr. Jobs set out to reform the industry of consumer electronics. He pushed the company into the digital music business, the introduction of iTunes and then the iPod MP3 player. The music department grew rapidly, reaching nearly 50 percent of the revenues of the company in June 2008.
In 2005, Jobs announced that would end the business relationship with IBM and Motorola Apple and Macintosh computers build on Intel microprocessors.
By then, his struggle with cancer was made public. Apple announced in 2004 that Jobs had a rare but curable pancreatic cancer and had undergone successful surgery. Four years later, questions about their health status is returned when presented at a company event looking haggard. Then he said he had suffered a "common disease". In private, said his cancer surgery had developed digestive problems, but insisted they were not life threatening.
Apple began selling the iPhone in June 2007. Goal Mr Jobs was selling 10 million phones in 2008, equivalent to 1 percent of global mobile market. The company sold 11.6 million.
Although common and smartphones, the iPhone without a pencil and a pioneer in touch screen interface that quickly set the standard for the mobile computing market. Launched with much anticipation and fanfare, the iPhone's popularity surged in late 2010 the company had sold nearly 90 million units.
Although Jobs took only a nominal salary of $ 1 when he returned to Apple, his compensation became the source of a Silicon Valley scandal in 2006 on the retroactivity of million shares of stock options. But after a company investigation and one by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was found to have not benefited financially from the non-retroactivity and charges were.
The episode did little to stand in Jobs slick world of business and technology. As the severity of his illness became known, especially after he announced his resignation, was increasingly acclaimed for his genius and actual achievement: its ability to combine design and market innovation through the integration of consumer-oriented business software, microelectronics, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.
If you had a motto, which may come from "The Whole Earth Catalog," which he said had influenced him deeply as a young man. The book, he said in his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with the warning "Stay Hungry. Preposterous."
"I've always wished that for myself," he said.
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