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Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dies
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 6 October 2011
Politicians, business leaders, technology pioneers, artists, celebrities and consumers across the world have been paying tribute to Steve Jobs, the man who set out to make computers but somehow revolutionised the movie and music industries along the way. The Apple co-founder died yesterday after losing his fight with pancreatic cancer, he was 56.
One of the undisputed pioneers of Silicon Valley, Jobs’ role in the IT revolution of the last four decades was as the visionary, one of the first to imagine computers in every home, intuitive interfaces that everyone could use, sleek hardware that you didn’t have to hide out of sight, and the computer as a device of entertainment as well as business.
Jobs founded Apple with his friend Steve Wozniak in 1976, having had casual jobs at both Hewlett Packard and Atari, and inspired by what was happening in computing on America’s West Coast at the time – both Jobs and Wozniak had been attending meetings of Silicon Valley’s grass roots Homebrew Computer Club. Together they developed and marketed what was considered the world’s first personal computer, the Apple II.
From the success of that venture, the Apple Computer company quickly began to grow, again moving the entire IT world forward eight years later when it launched the first Macintosh computer in 1984, the first commercially successful machine with the graphical user interface that became the norm in computing. However, not long after the launch of the Macintosh, Jobs found himself ousted from the company he had co-founded.
After a disappointing year commercially, and with some in the growing Apple empire complaining about Jobs’ erratic nature, John Sculley, the former Pepsi exec Jobs had persuaded to become CEO of Apple in 1983, forced the company’s co-founder out. Although acrimonious at the time, Jobs later claimed his 1985 ousting was one of the best things to ever happen to him, initiating “the most creative period of my life”.
While out in the wilderness, as it were, Jobs pursued other business ventures. He founded another computing company, Next Computer Inc, creating PCs for the higher education and business market. Although Next had only modest success in terms of sales, the operating system it developed was influential, and the current Apple OS is very much based on it. The Next enterprise also enjoys the claim to fame that Tim Berners-Lee developed the first ever web server using one of its computers.
Jobs’ other big venture in this era was Pixar. He acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm in 1986, with the intention of building it into a high-end graphics hardware firm. That initial plan didn’t come to much, but along the way the company, by this time renamed Pixar, struck up a partnership with Disney to make computer-animated films.
It was, of course, a hugely successful alliance, resulting in a string of award-winning movies, from ‘Toy Story’ to ‘Monsters Inc’ to ‘Finding Nemo’, all of which were huge hits at the box office, and changed the art of animation. Disney subsequently bought out the company, a deal which made Jobs the biggest single shareholder in the wider Disney corporation.
But, of course, possibly the greatest part of the Jobs story begins in 1997, when both he and the company he had co-founded 20 years earlier enjoyed the biggest comeback in IT history, as Jobs rejoined Apple as CEO after it acquired his Next Computers business. Apple’s fortunes had dipped massively in the 1990s as its main rival Microsoft took over the world with its Windows operating system, Office software and IE web browser, and Jobs faced many challenges on his return to the Apple empire. Some had already written the company off completely, but I think it’s fair to say he met those challenges.
From the eye-catching, semi-transparent and rather colourful original iMac, to the OSX operating system which capitalised on the output of Jobs’ Next company, to the game-changing iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple began to take over the world.
While, in this latter era, Apple was rarely first to market with a new product idea, and while some would argue its competitors often made similar products which were – technically speaking – superior, the company’s devices always looked better, both physically and on screen, its software often seemed simpler and more user-friendly, the way products were packaged and marketed made them feel more accessible to the majority, and – as a general rule – Apple remembered to do what some of its competitors often forget, to release products that actually work. All of which meant Apple started eating up market share, despite never competing on price.
Of course it helped that the one community who had remained faithful to Apple throughout, even in the lowest ebbs of the 1990s, were those in the media and creative industries. Suddenly the brand that many designers and journalists had always associated with was on the up, and with a great story to tell – “ousted founder returns and rescues his former company”. But the fact that Jobs, unusual for the IT industry, was so personable, and such a good public speaker, helped with this process, so that every time the CEO got on stage to make an announcement it became a worldwide media event.
It is during this era that Jobs, somewhat inadvertently, became one of the most important people in the music business. It happened because Apple wanted to launch a digital music player, but none of the music companies were making their songs available in a way that consumers could easily access.
The luddites running the big music firms, many of whom struggled to use their own pagers, had ignored new technology, and then when Napster woke them up, they hired lawyers and IT consultancies who claimed they could stop the distribution of music online with lawsuits and digital rights management technology. When the labels finally started to realise the internet could actually be a new sales platform rather than just a vehicle for piracy, they set up their own digital ventures which focused on the interests of rights owners over music consumers, and were therefore universally awful.
Jobs told Rolling Stone in 2003: “There’s a lot of smart people at the music companies, the problem is they’re not technology people. The good music companies do an amazing thing, they have people who can pick the person that’s gonna be successful out of 5000 candidates. The world needs more smart editorial these days. The problem is, that has nothing to do with technology. And so when the internet came along, and Napster came along, they didn’t know what to make of it. They were pretty doggone slow to react. Matter of fact, they still haven’t really reacted, in many ways. And so they’re fairly vulnerable to people telling them technical solutions will work, when they won’t”.
That Jobs was able to persuade these executives to licence his iTunes store – a user-friendly consumer-centric service that did work – so to feed his iPod devices, is a testament to how personable and persuasive the Apple chief really was. His dabblings in the movie industry probably helped, unlike his competitors he had entertainment industry credentials. Though even Jobs the visionary probably didn’t anticipate just how significant those early talks with the record companies and music publishers would be, that, by creating an online store designed principally to help sell an MP3 player, his company would become one of the most important entertainment retailers in the world.
Through iTunes and the iPod, Jobs both transformed his company into one of the most successful consumer electronics firms on the planet, and totally changed – and some might argue rescued – the entire music industry. Even with the developments in recent years in social media and streaming music – two things Apple has never really cracked – iTunes still controls the vast majority of the digital music market, and is arguably the only digital service that delivers significant revenues to rights owners that come from the pockets of music fans rather than venture capitalists. And, as with its hardware, Apple has achieved all this despite never really competing on price.
Of course there have been tensions between the music industry and Apple along the way – some majors regretted the 99 cents price point they’d agreed to, others wanted variable pricing, some didn’t like being forced to sell albums track by track, the indies questioned why a company that positioned itself as anti-establishment too often ignored their interests, and many feared the sheer market dominance of this IT firm in the digital music space and suspected it may be abusing its size – but that didn’t stop labels, publishers, managers, artists and songwriters getting a little excited whenever Jobs called, or took to the stage.
Jobs revealed that he been diagnosed with a cancerous tumour in his pancreas in 2004, but the tumour was removed and he seemed to recover remarkably quickly. However, health concerns returned a few years later, and while Apple initially kept them a secret, as Jobs started to visibly lose weight the firm announced in 2009 that he would take a six month leave of absence for treatment. By this point Jobs and Apple were so interlinked that Wall Street started to panic amid concerns for the CEO’s health. In April 2009 Jobs had a liver transplant, but the prognosis was good, and he returned to Apple later that year.
Nevertheless, reports about Jobs’ ailing health continued, and at the start of 2011 he again took time off for health reasons. In August he announced he would step back from the CEO role for good, to be replaced by his close colleague Tim Cook, who had run Apple during previous breaks from the company. In a note to staff Jobs wrote: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come”.
Yesterday Jobs’ family confirmed the Apple man had “died peacefully today surrounded by his family”. In a statement his company added: “We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts”.
As it released the statement Apple replaced its home page at Apple.com with a black and white photo of their co-founder and former leader with the strapline “Steve Jobs 1955-2011”. A suitably simple yet somehow brilliant tribute.
