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Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak launch Apple II, 1976 |
CONTINUED FROM PART I: HERE
AND ONE MORE THING!: ABOUT STEVE,
By DAWN ELARDO
And here's how Steve Jobs describes that time in Apple's history: "It was giant! We did about $200,000 when our business was in the garage, in 1976. In 1977, about $7,000,000 in business. I mean, it was phenomenal! And in 1978, we did $17,000,000. In 1979, we did $47,000,000. That’s when we all really sensed that this was just going through the rafters. In 1980, we did $117,000,000. In 1981, we did $335,000,000. In 1982, we did $583,000,000. In 1983, we did $985,000,000, I think. This year, it will be a billion and a half," stated Jobs back in 1985."
AND ONE MORE THING!: ABOUT STEVE,
By DAWN ELARDO
And here's how Steve Jobs describes that time in Apple's history: "It was giant! We did about $200,000 when our business was in the garage, in 1976. In 1977, about $7,000,000 in business. I mean, it was phenomenal! And in 1978, we did $17,000,000. In 1979, we did $47,000,000. That’s when we all really sensed that this was just going through the rafters. In 1980, we did $117,000,000. In 1981, we did $335,000,000. In 1982, we did $583,000,000. In 1983, we did $985,000,000, I think. This year, it will be a billion and a half," stated Jobs back in 1985."
Notwithstanding Jobs's fascination with the height of his success all due to their home-bred company in Cupertino (where he grew up), the high tech master-mind's ultimate confession is that money was not why he did what he did — the drive, the competitive nature, the perseverance, and the undying passion — was a combination of reflecting what he truly wanted to do and what he believed he was meant to do, which in his own words were: "put a dent in the universe and move the human race forward."
Jobs sincerely believed in what Apple stood for: 1984 Think Different Campaign and Here's to the Crazy Ones. He believed in them so much that for Apple's first major TV commercial — 1984 — which aired only once during 1984's Superbowl, Jobs had convinced Wozniak to put up half the money for the budget, because the board of Apple directors did not want to pay for it. (Have a watch at Steve Jobs discuss the thinking behind Apple's marketing [at left below] and a video of the ad Here's to The Crazy Ones, narrated by the marketing wizard himself, and never before broadcasted).
Steve Jobs on Marketing: People Crazy Enough Apple Steve Jobs The Crazy Ones: NEVER BEFORE AIRED 1997
How can we forget the very telling Jobs story when an interviewer, David Sheff met Steve at a celebrity colonized birthday party in New York back in 1985, here's how he tells that story:
As the evening progressed, I wandered around to discover that Jobs had gone off with the nine-year-old birthday boy to give him the gift he’d brought from California: a Macintosh computer. As I watched, he showed the boy how to sketch with the machine’s graphics program. Two other party guests wandered into the room and looked over Jobs’s shoulder. ‘Hmmm,’ said the first, Andy Warhol. ‘What is this? Look at this, Keith. This is incredible!’ The second guest, Keith Haring, the graffiti artist whose work now commands huge prices, went over. Warhol and Haring asked to take a turn at the Mac, and as I walked away, Warhol had just sat down to manipulate the mouse. ‘My God!’ he was saying, ‘I drew a circle!’
But more revealing was the scene after the party. Well after the other guests had gone, Jobs stayed to tutor the boy on the fine points of using the Mac. Later, I asked him why he had seemed happier with the boy than with the two famous artists. His answer seemed unrehearsed to me: ‘Older people sit down and ask, “What is it?" but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?‘"
When asked if Jobs had been impressed with the financial growth of Apple the first time around running the company (he came back in 1986 co-running Pixar) he said, "Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know. The neatest thing was, by 1979, I was able to walk into classrooms that had 15 Apple computers and see the kids using them. And those are the kinds of things that are really the milestones."
Steve Jobs, Computers Are Like a Bicycle For Our Minds Steve Jobs & Bill Gates together at the D5 (2007)
And we haven't even discussed discussed his accomplishments at Pixar Animation Studios — where Jobs was the CEO for about two decades — and upon coming back to Apple in 1996 he was the CEO of both corporations. Steve bought Pixar for $500 million in 1986, and sold to Disney for $7.4 billion in 2006; and it was then that he stepped down as Pixar's CEO.
Today Apple has grown to be the biggest technology company in the world. Apple's net worth is 372 billion dollars and was named the most valuable company in the world — right above Exxon for a short period — before Steve's passing.
According to Harvard Business Review — in which they ranked Steve Jobs as the best CEO in the world in January, 2010 —within Jobs's second tenure from 1997 - 2010, he increased Apple's capitalization by 341.5 billion dollars. Which could also translate to: If you invested 100,000 dollars in Apple back in 1997, it'd be worth 6.86 million dollars today. And yet, it is well known that Jobs payed himself a mere dollar annually for his salary as CEO of Apple. While the man has at well over 200 items patented under his name, and one of which happens to be the glass stairs in the Apple stores.
Steve Jobs has introduced the personal computers into our homes, the floppy disk, (which he later dissipated when it was no longer useful), he gave us the mouse to point and click and then replaced it with the touch screen when it was time;
Recently, he's began to showcase the dying presentation of print and books with the iPad — and transforming them into irresistible digital new-media consumption. And this up-coming Friday: the iPhone 4s will show us how Steve has re-imagined and delivered a digital assistant that doesn't just respond, but thinks. The NY Times's David Pogue said today that it definitely gives the impression of magic — something Jobs always strived for with all his inventions. Note: This first Apple version of Siri is still labeled as a beta sample, for which we can only imagine what Steve Jobs's finalized vision for Siri and Apple mobile devices might be . Well perhaps Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept might clue us in. Let's see below shall we?
Apple's Knowledge Navigator Reel (1987) Apple iPhone 4s Demo
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Steve Jobs and his wife after his last Key Note Address June, 2011. |
Steve jobs is survived by: his wife Laureen Powell Jobs of 20 years (Founder of Terravera [a natural foods company] and a Stanford MBA graduate), his first daughter from a previous relationship when he was only 23 years old, Lisa Brennan Jobs is a Harvard Liberal Arts graduate who is now a writer, living in New York (33 years old, it has been said that Apple's computer Lisa was named after her). Jobs has three kids with Laureen Powell: son Reed Paul (20). daughter, Erin Siena (16) and youngest daughter, Eve (13).
His biological mother is Joanne Carole Schieble (Speech Language Pathologist), and Jobs has invited her to events periodically after leaning her identity. His biological father is John Jondali (Political Science Professor at Nevada University); he;s still alive and has divulged his attempts to communicate and meet with Jobs before his passing at least once. This never happened. When asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents."
He also has a biological sister Mona Simpson, who he's revealed to have been very close with. An accomplished novelist, it has been speculated that her novel A Regular Guy is based on the tech pioneer's life. Privately, he revealed to a PR exec (handling Pixar publicity while he was CEO there) that he was worried about this possible conclusion by the public.
His biological mother is Joanne Carole Schieble (Speech Language Pathologist), and Jobs has invited her to events periodically after leaning her identity. His biological father is John Jondali (Political Science Professor at Nevada University); he;s still alive and has divulged his attempts to communicate and meet with Jobs before his passing at least once. This never happened. When asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents."