Poornima Gupta and Peter Henderson
Passionate, prickly, and deemed irreplaceable by many Apple fans and investors, Steve Jobs made a life defying conventions and expectations.
And despite years of poor health, his death on Wednesday at the age of 56 prompted a global gasp as many people remembered how much he had done to transform the worlds of computing, music and cellphones, changing the way people communicate and access information and entertainment.
“The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come,” said Microsoft co-founder and long-time rival Bill Gates. “For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honour.”
The founder of Apple died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, California, surrounded by his family. The circumstances of his passing were unclear, but Jobs has had a long battle with cancer and other health issues.
Jobs’ family thanked many for their prayers during the last year of his illness.
A college dropout, Jobs travelled India in search of spiritual guidance prior to founding Apple – a name he suggested to his friend and co-founder Steve Wozniak after a visit to a commune in Oregon he referred to as an “apple orchard”.
With his passion for minimalist design and marketing genius, Jobs changed the course of personal computing during two stints at Apple and then brought a revolution to the mobile market.
The iconic iPod, the iPhone – dubbed the “Jesus phone” for its quasi-religious following – and the iPad are the creation of a man who was known for his near-obsessive control of the product development process.
“Most mere mortals cannot understand a person like Steve Jobs,” best-selling author and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple employee, said recently. He considers Jobs “the greatest chief executive in the history of man”, adding that he just had “a different operating system”.
Charismatic, visionary, ruthless, perfectionist, dictator – these are some of the words that people have used to describe Jobs, who may have been the biggest dreamer the technology world has known, but also was a hard-edged businessman and negotiator through and through.
“Steve was the best of the best. Like Mozart and Picasso, he may never be equalled,” said Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape Communications.
Microsoft’s Gates called Jobs the most inspiring person in the tech industry and President Barack Obama held him up as the embodiment of the American dream.
It’s hard to imagine a bigger success story than Jobs, but rejection, failure and bad fate were part and parcel of who he was. Jobs was given away at birth, driven out of Apple in the mid-1980s and struck with cancer when he finally regained the top of the mountain.
He resigned as chief executive of Apple on August 24 – saying he could no longer fulfil the duties – and briefly served as chairman before his death.
Jobs grew up with an adopted family in Silicon Valley, which was turning from orchards to homes for workers at Lockheed and other defence and technology companies.
Electronics friend Bill Fernandez introduced him to boy engineer Wozniak, and the two Steves began a friendship that eventually bred Apple Computer. “Woz is a brilliant engineer, but he is not really an entrepreneur, and that’s where Jobs came in,” recently remembered Fernandez, who was the first employee at Apple.
Jobs created Apple twice – once when he founded it and the second time after a return credited with saving the company, which now vies with Exxon Mobil as the most valuable publicly traded corporation in the US.
Every day to him was “a new adventure in the company”, Jay Elliot, a former senior vice-president at Apple who worked closely with Jobs in the 1980s, said earlier this year, adding that he was “almost like a child” when it came to his inquisitiveness.
He was highly intolerant of company politics and bureaucracy, Elliot noted.
But the inspiring Jobs came with a lot of hard edges, oftentimes alienating colleagues and early investors with his my-way-or-the-highway dictums and plans that were generally ahead of their time.
Elliot was a witness to the acrimony between Jobs and former Apple chief executive John Sculley who often clashed on ideas, products and the direction of the company.
The dispute came to a head at Apple’s first major sales meeting in Hawaii in 1985 where the two “just blew up against each other”, Elliot said.
Jobs left soon after, saying he had been fired. “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith,” Jobs told a Stanford graduating class in 2005.
He returned to Apple about a decade after he left, working as a consultant. Soon he was running it, in what has been called Jobs’ second act.
Jobs reinvented the technology world four or five times, first with the Apple II in the 1970s; then in the 1980s with the Macintosh; the ubiquitous iPod debuted in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and in 2010 the iPad.
How did he do it? Design fans, Apple employees and Jobs acquaintances credit a natural design-sense drive to simplify. Jobs’ return to Apple was a study in reduction.
Ed Niehaus, who was wooed and hired by Jobs to do public relations for resurgent Apple, remembers an elevator ride that everyone in Silicon Valley has heard of, but seemed more myth than reality.
It was soon after Jobs’ triumphant return and he was axing product plans – and people.
Niehaus recalled: “I once rode down an elevator, not that many floors. We got in the elevator and the next floor a young woman got in, and I could see her go, ‘oops, wrong elevator’. And Steve said, ‘Hi, who are you?’ and introduced himself to her – ‘I’m Steve Jobs’ – turned on the charm and said, ‘What do you do?’ and all this sort of thing. And the door of the elevator opens at the bottom, and he says, ‘We are not going to need you.’ And we walk away.”
Apple was bloated, Niehaus added, and Jobs was bringing back simplicity and focus.
“He always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist,” former chief executive Sculley – who was recruited by Jobs, watched him build the Mac, and then helped throw out the Apple founder in a boardroom battle – told the CultofMac news website in 2010.
A few steps in the Apple design process have leaked out over the years, despite the obsessive secrecy that is part of the company culture. An Apple engineer outlined a long development process at a conference blogged by Businessweek in 2008. A new product or feature begins with 10 ideas – good ideas, no also-rans, which are presented as “pixel-perfect” mock-ups. Apple culls the 10 to three, which are tried out for months more, before a final star is chosen.
Meanwhile, the design team meets for two types of weekly meetings – one to brainstorm with no limits, and one to focus on getting the product out the door, BusinessWeek described.
When Steve Jobs weighed in, it was with a simple set of verdicts: “insanely great”, “really, really, really great”, and “shit”, Niehaus recalled.
“Basically Steve tells you exactly what he wants and you just go build it,” said one former iPhone engineer, who declined to give his name. He remembers working on one project for two months. “Steve said ‘What is this shit? Why are you wasting my time?’,” he recalled.
Being chewed up and spat out by Jobs is an experience most Apple employees who have come in contact with him can relate to. And Jobs was known to like people who stood up to him.
Jobs liked to push. “He was clearly looking for someone who could stand up to him,” said another former member of the top team. He remembers Jobs and Tim Cook, who has taken over as chief executive, as the “metronome” of the company, with different personal styles and exactly the same “insane” attention to detail.
Jobs, in fact, revelled in details, many a time irking everyone around him with his obsessiveness. Apple’s first chief executive Michael Scott has said that Jobs spent weeks contemplating how rounded the edges of the Apple II case should be.
He understood envy “as well as anybody on the planet” and carried it around with him, triple parking his car because he could, said Niehaus, adding that part of what he sold was envy.
Even Jobs’ appearance simplified over the years. The black mock turtleneck and jeans that became the defining Jobs outfit showed up at more comfortable settings in the late 1990s. But he pulled the iPod out of a jeans pocket to introduce the music player in 2001. From then on, he barely seemed to take off the outfit.
Jobs himself described his world as very simple. “For the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something,” he told Stanford University students in a commencement address.
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart,” he said.
That kind of earnest, almost naive hope, combined with ruthless dismissal of whatever missed his lofty standards, were a potent mix for those around him.
His approval was “an addictive drug”, said Niehaus. “I think that most people would knock themselves out to have that experience again… It’s that defining. It is a really tremendous experience.“
Jobs had been on leave three times since 2004, and he clearly thought about an Apple without him. Jobs had a liver transplant and a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Jobs and the Apple board had a succession plan – put Cook in charge – and he has left a well-respected team. Jobs told Time magazine he put extraordinary effort into finding people who he said were 10, 20, 50 times better than average.
Many Apple watchers and investors say that the company has a deep bench, led by Cook. But for others, that just doesn’t ring true.
The former engineer whose months of works was dismissed by Jobs with a single curse does not see much strength in the ranks, saying that it was always a case of “Steve is the visionary”, and if something happened it was always a case of “Let’s ask Steve”.
Apple marked the death of Jobs by placing a simple black-and-white picture of the founder on the front page of its website, with his name and the dates 1955-2011. – Reuters