KEY POINTS:
Apple is completely driven by the charismatic CEO Steve Jobs, innovator, marketer and visionary - but who is he?
Jobs uses an apparently simple philosophy. He has stated "I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better."
Original Macintosh engineer and development team member Andy Herzfeld says "When you talk about the character of Apple or the character of the Macintosh, much of that is the character of Steve Jobs."
But what is that character? Focused, charming, driven, charismatic, ruthless - Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media (a publisher of IT books), says "Maybe that's a characteristic of a lot of great innovators - they're not necessarily easy to be friends with."
He also says (in ISOTV's documentary Silicon Valley) that he's renowned in "the Valley" as so clearly a genius, yet so clearly difficult to work with.
Apple Inc was born on April 1, 1976, starting with printed circuit boards. Wozniak and Jobs eventually created their first personal computer, the Apple I, and sold it for $666.66. Woopidoo has a more expansive bio than Apple's.
It notes that Jobs is well known for his work ethic and his 'rumoured' bad temper. The site also points out that Jobs' drive has consistently helped to grow Apple from the company bordering on bankruptcy in the 1990s to the global success story of today - Jobs has personally helped to create the iPod, iPhone, and other devices.
In the movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley, Jobs is portrayed as the geeky spiritual one, dabbling in hippy mysticism and drugs culture, who nevertheless had a ruthless business streak even then.
Politically, Steve Jobs has been linked to the Democrats and indeed, Al Gore was on Apple's board.
Jobs is 52 - he was born 24th February 1955. As stated, Apple's official biography is wondrously brief: "Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976. Apple leads the industry in innovation with its award-winning Macintosh computers, OS X operating system, and consumer and professional applications software..." (you get the picture).
The official bio also points out that Jobs co-founded Pixar Animation Studios (Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo etc) and that "Steve grew up in the apricot orchards which later became known as Silicon Valley, and still lives there with his wife and three children."
Orchards, eh? The story goes that the first Apple computer built by Jobs and Steve Wozniak was housed in the wooden frame of an apple box.
Stephen Paul was born in San Francisco and adopted out to Paul and Clara Jobs. He attended Cupertino schools, spending his childhood in the area that became Silicon Valley. He held a summer job at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto before attending college and got to know Steven Wozniak at lectures and from working at HP.
Steve Jobs didn't graduate, spending only a half-year at college, but in 1974 he began going to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in California, along with Wozniak, and took a job at Atari to save money for a spiritual retreat to India.
The Home Computer Club listened to talks and shared information on IT happenings, but also on design and production techniques for the nascent computer industry. Wozniak says the whole ethic was the sharing of knowledge.
Wozniak says (in the same documentary) that the Homebrew Computer Club always discussed the social revolution that affordable computers could bring, and this seems to have soaked into Steve Jobs' soul.
Apple products have always been deceptively simple and attractive by design while hiding considerable depths - something that some commenters on this blog like to disparage. It shouldn't need announcing I am totally with Apple on this.
Jobs returned from India to work with Atari and continued to work with Wozniak on other projects. It was Jobs who eventually convinced Wozniak to market a computer he had built for himself, leading to Apple, the Apple II, the Macintosh ... Jobs' charisma became legendary during this period.
Guy Kawasaki, the renowned Apple evangelist, says Jobs legitimised the technique of evangelising computers. Kawasaki goes further and says "First there was Jesus, then there was Steve." That sounds incredibly presumptuous (as it is), but underlines that right from the word go, those at Apple were right behind the banner of trying to change the world with technology.
Nowadays Steve Jobs is rarely in the news unless he's making an Apple announcement or running a keynote at an Apple conference, especially at the mid-year WWDC or the January Macworld in San Francisco.
Herald online tech editor Matt Greenop saw Steve Jobs at a Macworld conference in New York. Matt says that Jobs was treated by the hundreds of assembled Mac-heads like "some sort of deity".
"As soon as Jobs walked on stage in his uniform black turtleneck and jeans, the whole atmosphere in the place changed," he said. "You'd be forgiven for thinking it was the second coming, everyone in the place hung of every single word, laughed at bad jokes and oohed and ahhed in all the right places. But he's all about charisma, and you can't help but get sucked into it."
Recent appearances have had people worrying about his health, and AUT's René Burton, who was at WWDC last month, confirms: "He looked a bit different to what I was expecting. He looked rather thin. But he was pretty good. He didn't spend that much time on stage." René added, in the interview published on my mac.nz site "The other presenters were very good as well."
As always, any discussion of Steve Jobs leads fans to worry - what happens if Steve is not there? The periods where others sat on the Apple throne were unhappy ones, shaking the faith of fans like myself. Products were weak, product lines confusing, prices seemed higher than ever - there were dramatic sales declines. Then he came back and all became good again.
Steve Jobs might be driven, ruthless, charismatic ... but his often singular vision, drawing on other technical and marketing geniuses, has created world-changing products no matter what your computing preference is.
Would I like to meet him? Of course. Even if he cut me dead. Then I could say "Hey, Steve Jobs cut me dead." Awesome.
- Mark Webster mac.nz
