Have
you ever imagined a world without Personal Computers? How about if you were
made to work on a computer without a single window or with no mouse to click?
Computer would’ve been much of a boring office machine used only by a few
geeks. Well, thanks to Steve Jobs, who changed the way we see things today.
Steven
Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted at birth by Paul
Reinhold Jobs (1922-1993) and Clara Jobs (1924-1986). Apparently, Steve’s birth
mother wanted him to go to college. The choice of parents was been made on the
same grounds. Not been to college, Paul and Clara tried to hide this initially
but had to promise her later. Paul Jobs, a machinist for a company that made lasers, taught his son basic electronics and how to
work with his hands. Clara was an accountant, who taught him to read before he
went to school.
Jobs
attended Monta Loma Elementary, Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High
School in Cupertino,
California. He frequented after-school
lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo
Alto, California, and
was later hired there, working with Steve Wozniak (who later became the
technical brain behind the first PC) as a summer employee. Following high school
graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed
College in Portland,
Oregon. Although he
dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, while
sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money,
and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.
He did some initial work as a
technician and then he came to India for 7 months. In India, he spent
a lot of time on endless bus rides from Delhi to Uttar
Pradesh and back, then up to Himachal
Pradesh and back. He once said that
his trip to India may have given him mosquito bites and diarrhoea, but it was a
real life changer. After returning “Apple Inc.”, currently a multibillion dollar company was founded in a small garage. Steve Wozniak invented Apple – I & II there. After some
presentations, Apple started gaining popularity.
If it was not up to the Jobs, we would’ve still been calling
“Type-Command” kind of a machine, a Computer. The first Graphical User
Interface (GUI) was developed by an innovative scientist in Xerox PARC’s
“mouse-driven GUI” (which we now call windows). Where Xerox ridiculed the
innovation, Jobs saw its true commercial potential.
Apple was touching skies. Back then a very small struggling
company called Microsoft approached Jobs offering it to develop software for
Macintosh – which later became the first PC to have Window like interface. Out
of faith, Job gave away the Mac technology and Microsoft made the best out of
it - Macintosh was released in 1985 and Microsoft released Windows in 1986.
This was just the beginning. Steve always loathed the “Disciplined,
well-dressed and tie” culture in office. This was partially due to the culture
followed in archrival - IBM. This ideology is responsible for the casual wear
culture in most of the IT companies now. He even believed in competing brands. He
even divided Apple into two brands internally – Mac & Lisa (named after his
first daughter). Both the groups would fight like cats and dogs. Microsoft was
capturing the market. The unconventional methods and the company’s failure to
Microsoft resulted in firing of Steve Jobs from his own company.
Steve didn’t give up. He started NeXt Computer. In a year, he found Pixar Animation which now produces undoubtedly the best animated
movies of our time. It all started with Toy
Story which credited Steve as the producer. After gaining some popularity,
NeXt was been taken over by Apple and Steve Jobs became de facto chief of Apple
again. Sadly, Microsoft now had majority shares in Apple. Under Steve, life
changing innovative products like IPod, IPad & Mac Notebook were developed
and successfully sold all around the globe.
His unconventional methods may have been inscrutable in the
beginning but have crawled its way back. It’s been correctly said that it takes
time to absorb trends and incubate them to form a culture. During his career,
Steve Jobs gave us so many trends and we truly owe him for this. A well
deserved, hard earned position in the field of technology and innovation was
left empty on 5th Oct, 2011 when he died of pancreas cancer. Who
will fill his boots now?
Starting from the struggle of a teenager, to the supreme
success, to getting betrayed by MS and then the downfall, Steve Jobs always
struggled for the ultimate success. He never stopped fighting and most
importantly, he never compromised on quality. In 2005, while giving a
convocation speech where he said, “Stay
hungry, stay foolish”. This is what we can learn from his life. Striving
for the ultimate success will always mark our distinction and the best ideas of
our life comes when we are innocent.
