Steve Jobs is a man who has great courage and dares to take risks. He may not be perfect but he pulled together the most fantastic act by overcoming Microsoft, the movie industry and the music business. Jobs followed his dream and led a revolution in the computing world.
Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. His biological mother was an unwed graduate student named Joanne Simpson and decided to put him 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: Clara didn't graduate from college and Paul only attended high school. When she found out that both his future parents had never graduated from college, she refused to sign the adoption papers. She only relented a few months later and agreed to have her baby adopted by them, under the firm condition that they would send him to college.
Steve Jobs went to college but decided to drop out because it was too expensive. Recalling his time there he said, "I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cents deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."
At 20, Steve Jobs and a friend started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976. Later that year, they debuted the Apple I and a local store offered to buy 50 machines. To finance the production, they had to sell their most expensive possessions. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van while Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator. Steve Jobs named their company Apple, in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.
By 1982, however, his company sales sagged in the face of competition from IBM's new PC. Not wanting to dwell on successive failures, they worked on a new machine called the Macintosh. By 1986, the Mac, which Steve Jobs promised to be "insanely great," was a huge success. After 10 years, starting from 2 kids working in a garage, Apple computer had grown into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.
At 30, Steve Jobs, however, was fired from the company he confounded with Steve Wozniak. He left the company after losing a bitter battle over control with Apple's CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs had recruited from Pepsi Cola. When Steve Jobs heard of the message he said, "You've probably had somebody punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind out of you and you cannot breathe. The harder you try to breathe, the more you cannot breathe. And you know that the only thing you can do is just relax so you can start breathing again."
Steve Jobs sold over $20 million of his Apple stock, spent days bicycling along the beach, feeling sad and lost, toured Paris, and journeyed on to Italy. Recalling this publicly heartbreaking episode, Jobs said, "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."
During the next five years he started two companies --- NeXT and Pixar. NeXT didn't do as well as Jobs had dreamed for, but Pixar was a success story. Jobs became an instant billionaire. Meanwhile, his old company Apple was under immense pressure from its rival Microsoft and in 1996 posted billions of dollars in losses.
In December 1996, Steve Jobs convinced Apple to buy NeXT and make its software the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS. The technology he developed at NeXT became the catalyst of Apple's comeback. Initially appointed as Apple's adviser, Steve Jobs was named Apple's interim CEO in 1997.
He had made Apple healthy again and returned it to a place where it was contributing new and innovative technologies to the computer world. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability and introduced innovations.
