steve jobs - how to put a ding in the universe

8/4/2019 Steve Jobs - How to Put a Ding in the Universe

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Apple Inc


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Summary

Chapter ONE HOW TO START AN APPLE ............. Error! Bookmark not defined.Chapter TWO LET IT BE WAR ..................................Error! Bookmark not defined.Chapter THREE A GUIDE FOR BECOMING A MILLIONAIRE .OR NOT ...Error!Bookmark not defined.Chapter FOUR THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO INVENT IT.......................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.


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Chapter ONE HOW TO START AN APPLE You say this gadget of yours is for ordinary people. What on earth would ordinarypeople want with computers?......a business man once asked Steve Jobs. Yet, it is funny how this obnoxiously passionate youngguy in blue jeans, together with another Steve (Wozniak) would end up competing with billiondollar giant companies. Growing up in San Francisco Bay area, Jobs had the chance to witnessand participate in the inception of a new computer era, along with his friend Steve Wozniak.Who would have believed less than 30 years, a band of shaggy nerds Jobs, Wozniak, Gates willhave risen to become icons and among the richest people on Earth.

Wozniak was an electronics hacker and before founding Apple, Jobs and Wozniak had beenfriends for several years, having met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez,introduced 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. At first, Wozniak, Woz, designed adevice called the 'Blue Box'. It allowed of course illegal phone calls free of charge by faking thesignals used by the phone companies. His friend Steve Jobs instantly realized that there must be

a huge market for something that useful and that Woz was the man for his bigger dreams.

In March 1975, Steve and Woz attended the firstmeeting of the "Amateur Computer Users Group" -better known as the "Homebrew Computer Club" thattook place in a garage, of course. The number ofinterested computer freaks quickly increased to severalhundred and they moved their meetings to theauditorium of the Stanford. This is how it all began: a journey of adventure, ideas, the future and, most of all,dreams. Woz just see kilobytes or circuit boards while

Jobs would see karma or the meaning of the universe.

Can you believe this was the first Apple computer?

So it was. And this is how Steve and Woz presented The Apple I, Apple's first product. Sold as

an assembled circuit board, it lacked basic features such as a keyboard, monitor, and case.

Woz &his ma ic blue box


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Now, have a look at these:

The first Macintosh, released in 1984.

It was the successor of Lisa (a project that proved to be a failure) designed to achieve adequategraphics performance, which had previously required hardware costing over $10,000 US, at a

price accessible to the middle classaround $2,000 US. This narrow goal resulted in an elegant,

efficient design which traded off expandability but met or exceeded the baseline performance of

its competitors.

In June 29, 2007, the release of iPhone in the U.S prompted

enormous lines outside of Apple stores as well as adoring

praise from reviewers (it was also named TIMEs Magazine

Invention of the Year. You can also see quite a nice and

modern architecture piece: Apple Computer retail store on

Fifth Avenue in New York City. The glass cube is the only

portion of the Apple Store that stands above plaza level.

Once inside, customers take a central cylindrical transparent

glass elevator or surrounding spiral staircase to the sales

floor below.

Jobs holding a MacBook

Air at Macworld

Conference & Expo 2008


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Back in those times in the 70s, Jobs was not really interested in creating just electronics and wasnowhere near as good an engineer as Wozniak. "Steve didn't do one circuit, design, or piece ofcode, but it never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said 'Let's hold them upin the air and sell a few', Woz would have later recalled. The two of them might embody thedynamic, linear and determinist modelWozniak and the nonlinear, entropic and creative model

Jobs. Jobs had his eye on marketability of electronic products when persuading Wozniak towork with him toward building and selling a personal computer. He had in mind that the futurecannot exist without computers. He used to say in his flamboyant style: We're here to make adent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We're creating a completely newconsciousness, like an artist or a poet. That's how you have to think of this. We're rewriting thehistory of human thought with what we're doing. His strategic thinking style drove him to seethe importance of the industry in the years to come. Jobs can truly be called a bona fide visionaryand a dreamer in the Beatles meaning of the word. Apple changed people's view on operations acomputer could perform. From computers performing bean counter operations and federal taxesto executing individual's personal business operations it all came down to what a personalcomputer is nowadays to all of us: the most remarkable tool that mankind has ever come up with,

an equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.Jobs led a hardware revolution by reducing the size of computers to small boxes. In those timeswhen computers where existing only in a mainframe form, the pioneers of personal computersused their tacit knowledge characterized by their own beliefs, symbols, values and feelings tocreate a new life style. Apple changed people's idea of a computer from a gigantic andinscrutable mass of vacuum tubes only used by business mammoths and the government to asmall box used by normal people in their very homes. No company has done more todemocratize the computer and make it user-friendly than Apple Computer Inc. The company wasfounded on the concept of externalization: transforming tacit knowledge into explicitknowledge. The big reward of this process, besides money, is the fact that ordinary peoplewould be able to use the benefits of computers in the way they see fit, which makes it both an

evolutionary and a noble case.

Apple from birth, in main figures:

1976: Steve Jobs started Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak

1984: Introduced Revolutionary Macintosh the market.

1985: Steve Jobs was forced to resign by the board of directors of Apple computers.

1986: Jobs founded Next Computers and co-founded Pixar Animation Studio.

1997: Next Computers was sold to Apple & Jobs became the CEO.

2001: Launched revolutionary iPod2007: Introduced 3G iPhone, first of its kind in the market.

2010: Introduced the IPad that sold 1 million pieces in 28 days


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Chapter TWO LET IT BE WARThey were all pirates on a newly invented sea; they were pirates of Silicon Valley

Intelligent thinking cannot be developed and used in static and deterministic environmentscharacterized by mediocrity. The Machintosh famous Superbowl ad, directed by Alien directorRidley Scott, sending to George Orwells symbol of the Big Brother in 1984 novel, wouldbecome a pop icon in its own right, reappearing nearly 30 years later as a political parodywielded by tech-savvy Barack Obama supporters. Much of the message behind the ad -Conformity sucks! Non-conformity rules! Apple is for non-conformists! - has stayed, albeitstripped of its none-too-subtle Orwellian overtones.

Creative thinking implies production of new knowledge. The production of new knowledge canbe delivered by continuous improvements or by significant jumps. It can be either quantuminnovation as total novelty or incremental innovation as an extent of an already existinginnovation. (Bratianu, Turcoiu, 2009). Apple's core ideal has always been to make people'sexperience of computing as accessible and pleasurable as possible. As a young man, Steve Jobs,Apple's CEO, decided to be the Beatles ideal dreamer of computing. A pples history, theinteresting thing was that Jobs, just like Bill Gates, was not an IT guru, but he had the capacity tosee the future like no other. He knew that mainframe computers only used by the US army or byimportant universities could give the necessary intelligence to produce computers for allhouseholds, companies, industries etc. He knew that these products will upgrade considerablythe life standards of many.

But where does absolute originality start and fiercest competitiveness stop?

Good artists copy, great artists steal. This is one of the leitmotifs of the acclaimed moviePirates of the Silicon Valley flashing perfect characterization of the two lifetime enemies SteveJobs and Bill Gates.

STEVE JOBS

ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME MAGAZINE

BY HANOCH PIVEN


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Strategic thinking represents an integration process of the most advanced thinking models. Itconcerns with what may happen in the next future time. By doing the same, Bill Gates noticedthe fact that the most important IT company of that period, IBM, was not focusing on a friendlierOperating System, although they provided computers for the market. As Pirates of SiliconValley describes, the 70 and 80 personal computer market was the battle field for two creative

minds that founded two historic companies: hardware manufacturer Apple and softwaresolutions manufacturer Microsoft. When venerable business technology company IBM enteredthe personal computer market in 1981, the story goes that Apple greeted its new competitor witha full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, reading: "Welcome IBM. Seriously."


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This is how an ad and the introduction of Mac was presented in Newsweek magazine back then.In the years that followed, the Jobs and Gates battled back and forth with their respectiveachievements. The movie quoted in the above has a delicious dialogue on this:

Steve Jobs: What is this? This is like doing business with a praying mantis. You get seduced, and

then eaten alive afterwards?

Bill Gates: Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox -

who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get

there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you're yellin'? "That's not fair. I

wanted to try to steal it first." You're too late.

Source:www.moviequotes.comWhat the dialogue voices is actually the truth: following the Apple II, a computer model named'Lisa' was introduced, which was a disaster as it was way too expensive. It was an amazing

machine, equipped with an operating system with windows and pull down menus and everythingelse Microsoft eventually copied from Apple. But Apple itself was also 'inspired' by a machinenamed 'Xerox Alto', designed at Xerox Corporations Palo Alto Research Center.

A famous quote of Jobs mentions the following in regards to the competition with Microsoft: Itwasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it's that the Mac was a sittingduck for 10 years. That's Apple's problem: Their differentiation evaporated. Although Applehas had ups and downs, it was always able to reinvent itself and to create a market necessity forits products. In regards to Bill Gates, Jobs has always an acid remark, for example: I wish himthe best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if hehad dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger. Gates has also an irony

of its own- his style is not so passionate but rather more strategic and pragmatic: Success is amenace; it fools smart people that they can not lose.

This rivalry was probably consuming for both Jobs and Gates, but for all human kind it was thepremise for high speed evolution and progress.

Jobs and Gates in a historic face to face live meeting in 2007
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Apple declared a detente in 1985. Just six years later the two companies forged a power-sharingdeal (along with lesser discussed participant Motorola) which resulted in the creation of thePowerPC chip. Developed jointly, the chip created a powerful, robust processor that could stillrun older Mac applications. At a time when yet another industry competitor, Microsoft, wasgaining more and more market-share, the deal between IBM and Apple presented a more

formidable foe for Bill Gates' Windows and Intel-powered machines. With several updates inprocessing speed, the PowerPC chip ran all Mac computers until 2006, when Apple switched tochips made by Intel.

Its all about courage! The rest is smart advertisingIn 1996, a man named Dell Schanze sold a computer that he had built himself. He began buildingand selling more but he found customers only for about 5 computers a month. So he decided totry some marketing. Brave guy! He walked into a radio station and did some unusualcommercials for his totally unknown company called Totally Awesome Computers; in thesecommercials, he talked about life, marriage, family values and God. He even bordered on the

outrageous (in one of his ads suggesting that he was French kissing his dog) - Hughes, 2005. Healso talked about the competition saying that Bill Gates did not love his customers the way DellSchanze did. He was so confident in his products that he offered $1000 to anyone proving therewas a better PC out there than Totally Awesome. You might say that the guy did not have a cluewhat he was doing; that is not marketing or advertising. Yet it was something. He was notcreating advertising but content. Content that entertainsthat was his formula. And guess what?People pay far more attention to content; they find it closer, more human, candid and familiarthat pure advertising that is usually quite dry or exaggerated and they feel lied or manipulatedout-front. In the same idea, Apples success (now even greater that Microsofts) is due to itsphilosophy, to what it offers to people and how it approaches clients. Apple is known for its veryloyal customers. Jobs even said once: I get asked a lot why Apple's customers are so loyal. It's

not because they belong to the Church of Mac! It's because when you buy our products, andthree months later you get stuck on something, you quickly figure out [how to get past it]. Andyou think, "Wow, someone over there at Apple actually thought of this!" And then three monthslater you try to do something you hadn't tried before, and it works, and you think "Hey, theythought of that, too." And then six months later it happens again. There's almost no product inthe world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac.(www.businessweek.com).

"Hint: It's not a Mac," Apple teased in a special October 2001 invite for the debut of its latestproduct, the brilliantly named iPod. Even if you tried (and you likely didn't), you couldn't escapethe mania that followed. Apple had released a number of gadgets in the past like and

Macintosh TV, for examplebut the iPod was in a category all of its own. The $399 portablemusic player, with its innovative click-wheel interface, impressive storage capacity andlightning-quick download capability, quickly became one of its top-selling products. "You can fityour whole music library in your pocket," Jobs liked to say. Apple's timingand its ingeniousadvertising couldn't have been more perfect either. The commercials showcased the latest,hippest tunes to a demographic that was still reeling from the January 2001 fall of Napster, thefree music-sharing giant that launched the age of digital music. Since its debut, more than 170million iPods have been sold around the world. Even so, Apple's decision to drop the word
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"Computers" from its official corporate name in 2007 has not been met with universal praise. Asone software developer put it, "Steve, do you want to sell colored plastic all your life or do youwant to change the world?"

Two years after the iPod, Apple launched its iTunes store in 2003, offering legal musicdownloads for 99 cents per song. The iTunes store was significantly more user friendly than itscompetitors' services, with a vastly greater library; Apple had the added advantage of being ableto tie the store and the software to its hugely popular iPod. In its first week, iTunes sold 1 millionsongs; within a year, it sold more than 50 million.

Chapter THREE A GUIDE FOR BECOMING A MILLIONAIREOR NOT

Steve Jobs first appeared on the Forbes list of richest Americans in 1982. Many would like toknow what hides behind the money, the manager and the man Steve Jobs. His charisma andcharacter building, along with his speeches are just flabbergasting both from an experiencedmanager and commoners point of view: When I was 23, I had a net worth of over a milliondollars. At 24, it was over $10 million and at 25 it was over $100 million. or Im the onlyperson I know that lost a quarter of a billion dollars in just one year.. its very character buildingJobs said. What type of leader is Steve Jobs one might ask. An innovative, unconventional,involved, passionate, charismatic, excellent communicator, the answer might strike back. In histwenties, Jobs then traveled to India with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple

employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment experimented with psychedelics,calling his LSD experiences one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his]life (www.wikipedia.org). He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearingtraditional Indian clothing. He has stated that people around him who did not share hiscountercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees fromthat time had described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. "Back then he wasuncontrollable," an early Apple board member said of Steve Jobs in explaining why, in 1985, theboard voted to fire him. "He got ideas in his head, and the hell with what anybody else wanted todo." In 1985, a power struggle developed between Jobs and CEO John Sculley, who had been

hired two years prior. Sculley was the former Pepsi President who had joined Apple to play therole of Jobs' babysitter of sorts and couldn't handle working with Jobs anymore, comparing Jobsto a relentless zealot. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley and Jobs was removed fromhis managerial duties. But in 1997, with the company's profits shrinking and Microsoft'sWindows 97 flying off the shelves, Apple's board decided that a zealot was just what it needed.In August of that year, Jobs came back and became the company's chairman. After returningApple sent in the market two brilliant products: iPod and iPhone. Regarding iPhone, Jobs saidthe following: Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes


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everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's beenvery fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these. Apple Inc. stated in May 2010 that is hassold 1 million of its new iPad tablet computers in the month after its launch, meaning it's beenselling more than twice as fast as the iPhone did when it was new.

"He had become a far better leader, less of a go-to-hell aesthete who cared only about makingbeautiful objects," wrote Fortune's editor-at-large Peter Elkind of the co-founder's triumphantreturn. "Now he was a go-to-hell aesthete who cared about making beautiful objects that mademoney." Today, he is recognized as one of the company's most valuable assetsjust hours afternews broke that Jobs' failing health had forced him to take medical leave (he underwent a livertransplant), the company's stock fell 4%.

Despite very modest beginnings (Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Woz his HP calculator toprovide upfront capital of the company set up in Jobs parents garage), Jobs never thought ofApple as anything but a legend and never treated the people who worked for him as anythingless, either. Jobs wasnt making computers; he was changing the world. A brand as loved asApple is corporate nirvana. (Drake, Gulman, Roberts, 2005). Think how Apple comp. ownersor other Apple product view and treasure their possession among other products/brands. Yet thelevel of dedication of Apple customers pales as compared with that of Apple employees. Just likeSteve Jobs, Apple employees believe they are on a mission and they really believe they are

changing the world. They stay at work long hours to get things well done and its not just a storybecause they work and feed on passion.

Woz & Jobs with their personal computer in

1979.


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Apple in present figures

Source:www.wikipedia.org
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Chapter FOUR THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTUREIS TO INVENT IT

Through his vision and strategic thinking, Steve Jobs was able to see into the future likefew can do it. Much has been made of Jobs' aggressive and demanding personality. Fortunewrote that he "is considered one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs. Jef Raskin, a former

colleague, once said that Jobs "would have made an excellent king of France," an allusion toJobs' compelling and larger-than-life persona. Although that he was under continuous critics, hisgreat ability to unify people to the same goal was always outstanding.

A great brand is like a pretty girl. (Drake, Gulman, Roberts, 2005) People want her,spend a lot of money on her and the world is her oyster. If you dont have a beautiful brand as apretty girl, you can kiss your chances of customers chasing you goodbye. A company that isnaturally pretty is a company that nurturing the inside, sustaining a positive culture, creates abeautiful exterior. Employees who are disengaged at work provide one-third less value thanthose who are engaged. (Drake, Gulman, Roberts, 2005). Its like someone finally solved thechicken or the egg question. Employee dedication and loyalty creates customer dedication and

loyalty but at the end of the day, theyre the same animal. Apple excels at creating atremendously power brand within its company.

Steve Jobs has always aspired to position Apple and its products at the forefront of theinformation technology industry by foreseeing and setting trends, at least in innovation and style.He summed up that self-concept at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Conferenceand Expo in January 2007 by quoting ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. There's an old Wayne

Jobs

on the ob


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Gretzky quote that I love: 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' Andwe've always tried to do that at Apple and always will".

BIBLIOGRAPHY:www.apple.comwww.wikipedia.orgwww.businessweek.comwww.forbes.comwww.time.comConstantin Bratianu, Titi TurcoiuManagement strategic si de risc, Ed. Paidea, 2009Constantin Bratianu

Management si antimanagement, Ed. BusinessExcellence, 2009Mark Hughes Buzz Marketing, Ed. Publica, 2008Pirates of Silicon Valley, movie, 1999, based on the bookFire in the Valley: The Making of The PersonalComputer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine,www.moviequotes.comOwen LinzmayerApple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of theWorld's Most Colorful Company, 1999 fromhttp://books.google.comSusan M. Drake, Michelle J. Gulman, Sara MLight Their Fire: Using Internal Marketing to IgniteEmployee Performance and Wow Your Customers,Kaplan Publishing, 2005
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steve jobs - how to put a ding in the universe

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