In Memory Of Steve Jobs

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here I'm going to write about late Steve Jobs

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[مهرگان]

Steven Paul Jobs, the co-founder, two-time CEO, and chairman of Apple Inc., died October 5, 2011, after a long battle with cancer. He was 56. He was is survived by his wife and four children.
The achievements in Jobs' career included helping to popularize the personal computer, leading the development of groundbreaking technology products including the Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone, and driving Pixar Animation Studios to prominence. Jobs’ charisma, drive for success and control, and vision contributed to revolutionary changes in the way technology integrates into and affects the daily life of most people in the world.

Steve Jobs’ Early Life

Born in San Francisco in 1955, Jobs was was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Santa Clara, Calif.
Jobs attended high school in Cupertino, Calif., the city where Apple is based. In 1972, he briefly attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., but dropped out after a semester. Jobs returned to California in 1974 and landed a job with Atari, where his friend and eventual business partner Steve Wozniak also worked.

Apple – Rise and Eventual Ouster

Jobs co-founded Apple, then known as Apple Computer, with Steve Wozniak to provide a circuit board for hobbyists who built their own computers. Despite that homebrew beginning, Apple helped usher in the age of the personal computer with the introduction of the Apple II line in 1976.
Those machines soon gave way to a revolutionary change in desktop computing – the Macintosh. The Mac OS was the first commercially available and widely embraced system to use the graphical user interface that is common today and a mouse for interacting with the icons on the screen. The Mac was a giant success and rocketed Jobs and Apple into position as one of the world’s most important computer companies.
The company made a huge splash with its 1984 Super Bowl commercial that introduced that Macintosh, which played on George Orwell’s novel 1984 and positioned IBM as Big Brother, while Apple represented heroic rebels struggling for freedom.
By that time, Jobs had lured John Sculley, an experienced executive, away from PepsiCo to be Apple’s CEO. But, in 1985, amid a sales slump, Jobs lost a corporate power struggle to Sculley and the company’s board of directors, and left Apple.

NeXT – A New Challenge

Upon leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT Computer, a computer company that took the graphical lessons learned from the success of the Mac and married them to the computing power of Unix. The stylish and technologically advanced, but expensive, NeXT computers never caught on in the way that the Apple II or Mac lines did, though NeXT maintained a steady business from 1985-1997. And, come 1997, NeXT would take on a new, and much more central role -- at Apple.

Pixar – A Hobby Becomes a Powerhouse

While at NeXT, Jobs purchased a computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. in 1986 for $10 million. That division became Pixar Animation Studios, with Jobs as its CEO and majority shareholder.
Though originally intended as a computer hardware company aiming high-end machines at Hollywood, when that business failed to take off, the company transformed into a maker of animated movies with a contract with Disney.
Under Jobs’ leadership, Pixar became a dominant movie-making force in Hollywood, churning out a string of smash hits, including Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Wall-E, among others.
In 2006, Jobs engineered the sale of Pixar to the Walt Disney Co., a deal which landed him a spot on Disney’s board and made him the company’s largest individual shareholder. After the conclusion of that deal, Fortune Magazine named Jobs its Most Powerful Businessman of 2007.

The Return to Apple - Triumph

Jobs earned that title not only due to his role at Disney but also because, by that time, he had returned to Apple as its Chairman and CEO.
In late 1996, Jobs had overseen the sale of NeXT to Apple and returned to a leadership position in the company he co-founded. The technology underlying NeXT’s hardware and software was acquired in a $429 million deal in 1996 and became the foundation of Apple’s next-generation Mac OS X operating system.
When Apple CEO Gil Amelio was ousted by the company’s board of directors in 1997, Jobs returned to the company as its interim CEO.
At that time, Apple was foundering under low marketshare, a confused licensing strategy, diffuse product line, and lack of focus, all of which led to much speculation in the press and online that the company would either merge with another or go under. In order to keep the company afloat, Jobs immediately began a series of sometimes-unpopular cuts, including paring from Apple’s product lines middlingly successful but passionately followed products like the Newton PDA.
The first major hit product of Jobs’ second tenure at Apple was the iMac, an all-in-one computer introduced in 1998, which continues in production today. The iMac was followed by a string of hit laptop and desktop computers, though some failures - such as the Power Mac G4 cube - were mixed in.
Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple returned from the brink of bankruptcy to again become a stable, successful company. But, thanks to the introduction of a small gadget, the company would soon skyrocket.

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December 2009 – It’s hard to encapsulate just how profoundly the iPod/iTunes combination, and Apple’s deft management of it, has transformed our lives in the last 10 years. Perhaps the only way to truly grasp it is to have been a computer/Internet/music lover in 2000.
But even recalling that time isn’t easy. It’s hard to clearly remember a time without the iPod and iTunes. It feels like they’ve always been with us.
The Internet and the transition to digital have accelerated the kinds of sweeping historical, technological, and cultural transformations that used to take many decades. The transformation isn’t complete yet – witness the flailing of the newspaper industry over its dying model; we still haven’t solved getting web video to our TVs – but it’s happening faster than ever before.
The evolution of the iPod and iTunes is a microcosm of many of the sweeping changes – in entertainment, business, and culture – of the last decade.
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Though it’s easy to forget, the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player. In fact, Apple was widely seen as letting the MP3 player market mature before it stepped in.
Though dozens of players had preceded it, from the iPod’s debut it was clearly the best of the bunch. Its simple interface and ease of loading music were unparalleled. That simplicity remained at the heart of the iPod even as it gained powerful features, such as the App Store.
It wasn’t obvious that the iPod would become nearly a quarter-billion seller. At its debut, the iPod held 1,000 songs and only worked on the Mac. Some dismissed the device, deeming it another Apple niche product. (That’s another major change wrought by the iPod/iTunes axis: Apple is now a major cultural and financial player. Its market capitalization is within $10 billion of Google and, at this writing, its stock is trading nearly 700% higher than Microsoft’s.)
In 2001, MP3 players were the definition of an early-adopter techie product. Now, with them seemingly in every pocket or bag, the stark contrast between then and now becomes apparent.
Bringing your entire music collection with you was practically unthinkable before the iPod. At the time the iPod was introduced, I wanted to take my music library – about 200 CDs, then – with me. My best option was a CD player that played MP3 CDs. The player cost $250 and would have required me to carry 20+ CDs. More portable than 200, but that hardly fits into a pocket! The iPod changed all that. Today, my phone can carry 25,000 songs as easily as 25.
Before the iPod, music wasn’t ubiquitous. After it, all entertainment is portable. As a mobile media player, the iPod laid the groundwork for PMPs and DVD players, the Kindle, and many other mobile devices.
To quantify the impact of the iPod, try this: count the number of people you know who don’t have iPods.
Think about that. Sure, there products almost everyone has – a TV, a car, a bike, a phone, whatever – but those are categories, products and models from many different companies. That’s not the case in MP3 players. If more than 20% of the MP3 player owners in your life have something other than an iPod, I’d be shocked (unless you work at Microsoft).
That’s how you measure a culture-wide shift.
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When the decade began, iTunes existed, but not as we know it today. It started life as SoundJam MP. Apple bought it in 2000 and rechristened it iTunes in 2001.
The original iTunes didn’t transfer music to the iPod (which didn’t exist yet) and didn’t sell music downloads. It simply ripped CDs and played MP3s.
In 2000, there was no major online store for downloadable music. But there was a dream: a jukebox of infinite depth, hosted on the Internet, that anyone could access at any time to hear any song ever recorded.
That dream was widely shared, and many companies tried to realize it. Some – Napster and MP3.com, most notably – came close, but most failed under the weight of music-industry lawsuits. In the vacuum left for want of a legal option, piracy thrived (though it might not have been apparent then, this may well have doomed the music industry as we’ve known it).
Then came the iTunes Store. It debuted in 2003, with major and indie label content, fair prices - $0.99 for a song, $9.99 for most albums – and a not-unreasonable digital rights management scheme.
Just how hungry consumers were for this can be summed up in one statistic: in just eight years, iTunes went from an upstart digital music store to the world’s largest music retailer.
The world’s largest. Not the largest online, the largest anywhere. It flourished while consumers bought more music than maybe ever before and major music stores – Tower Records, comes to mind – went out of business. There’s hardly a better metaphor for the shift from physical to digital in this decade than that. To put an even finer point on it, Apple is now a key player in the music industry, given the power of iTunes as a promotion and distribution channel.
ITunes also changed how we interact with media. Now we expect to get the media we want whenever we want it. TV shows is now on our schedule, any music can be had for a few mouse clicks and $0.99. ITunes, didn’t create them, but it helped popularize podcasts; now they’re an integral part of the media landscape.
These days, people are just as likely to download music as buy a CD (many have given up physical music entirely; if I can’t get something at iTunes or eMusic, I don’t get it at all), and this transition is drastically changing business. It’s lead to successful regional music chains like Newbury Comics being convinced that their existence is threatened despite having 28 stores throughout New England).
ITunes – along with Napster at the start of the decade and MySpace in the middle – trained a generation of music lovers that the Internet is the first, and often only, place to go for music. As so many other industries affected by the switch to digital have learned, there’s no going back.

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"I just shared an elevator with Steve Jobs!" It was 1994, and I was the editor of a Texas computer magazine, and my friend and publisher Susan was calling me from an industry trade show, her trademark cool completely gone after a chance meeting with one of the most famous men on the planet. "Steve Jobs. Can you believe it? I was right next to him! Me, elevator, Steve Jobs! Eight floors!"
I couldn't blame her -- even at the time, tech visionary Jobs was a rock star in the computer world. It was an insanely exciting time for technology -- the Internet was exploding; suddenly everyone had a gadget, an e-mail address, and a computer. And Jobs was at the forefront. So no wonder Susan had felt like she'd been sharing the elevator with a visitor from Olympus -- Jobs stood on mountaintops and spawned whole industries. I wouldn't have been as cool as Susan, though. I'm sure I would have done some terminally embarrassing thing, like asking him to autograph a floppy disk, or gushing in run-on sentences about his general awesomeness, or (worst of all) hitting all the buttons so he'd have to talk to me longer. (Yeah. It's probably for the best we never met. I'm a disaster around people I admire.)
But that memory is just a small part of why I was so saddened by the news today that Jobs had passed away at only 56, finally succumbing to his long battle with pancreatic cancer.
While his accomplishments in technology were almost too numerous to count, he also had a profound effect on the arts. From the start, Apple computers were created with an intuitive, organic feel that continues to make them favorites with artists and designers. He made his mark on the film industry when he founded a little computer animation company you may have heard of called Pixar, and he also directly contributed to the tech revolution that now enables millions to create and share their own music, films, performances, and more. Before Steve's era, if you wanted to make movies, you had to have luck, money, contacts, or access to expensive equipment on your side. Now anyone is a potential Spielberg, and in many many ways, we have Jobs to thank.
The best technology is the kind that frees imagination and opens up a world of possibilities. Jobs and his creations, inventions and innovations accomplished those things in so many ways. He will be missed. But his imagination and work will remain, and will continue to inspire us.
I just wish I'd gotten a chance to share an elevator with him, like my friend Susan had once upon a time -- so that I could have told him
that.

source: about.com