Oratorical Analysis of Steve Jobs's Speech - Essay Example

?Jane Jones Jim Smith English IV 19 May Oratorical Analysis The late Steve Jobs (1955 was a genius in the computer world and some would say he was directly responsible for the personal computer as the world knows it today. From humble beginnings as the illegitimate son of immigrant college students (later adopted by a working class couple), Jobs was many things in his lifetime, college dropout, entrepreneur, multi millionaire and cancer survivor for over seven years, until the disease killed him at the relatively young age of fifty six. He was personally responsible for the invention of the Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, iPhone and the device that was once again destined to turn the computing world upside down once again, the iPad. Although Jobs didn’t invent the interface mouse, he was the one who brought it to the forefront of computing, along with many other innovations that we take for granted. On June 12, 2005 Jobs was asked to deliver the commencement address for Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. His humorous and yet serious speech is available on You Tube and also the text of it is available at the University’s web site (2005). In that talk, Mr. Jobs talked about four distinct points: 1) His early life through college, 2) His tenure and abrupt departure from Apple and career thereafter 3) Jobs’ cancer diagnosis and facing death before fifty and 4) The concluding statements. This paper will then attempt to give an Oratorical Analysis on that speech and including the text, along with the You Tube video, other information will be gleaned as needed from Biography’s work on Mr. Jobs (Biography 2012). I. Early Life Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California. His father was a Syrian professor at the University of Wisconsin and his mother, Joanne Schieble, was a graduate student. Yet there were two very big problems, at least for the post McCarthy and I Like Ike United States of America of 1955. First, his parents were unwed and that was the time period females were sent away in shame if they became pregnant, for they were in “trouble”. The second and equally just as terrible major issue was that his biological father was Syrian, Abdulfattah Jandali. Biracial relationships were a definite taboo although his parents eventually also produced a daughter, whom Steve Jobs finally met in the eighties. So his mother decided long before Steve’s birth to give him up for adoption. The one stipulation she had was her child be raised by college graduates and the adoption was arranged for a lawyer and his life. Yet there was a huge problem with that; they wanted a girl and Steve was definitely a boy. So they rejected the infant sight unseen. A hasty replacement was obtained with a couple named Clara and Paul Jobs from the Silicon Valley. Although hard working (Clara was an accountant and Paul was a machinist) neither had graduated college. As a matter of fact Paul Jobs had never even graduated from high school! Schieble was so upset that she put the adoption on hold for many months before she finally relented, after a compromise was reached and the Jobs’ promised that young Steven would eventually attend college. He eventually met his mother and knew who his father was, although they did not connect. Jobs sarcastically referred to his birth parents as a sperm and egg bank. By all accounts Steven had a happy childhood and it was probably through Paul Jobs that the boy developed his life’s work, for man and son spent many enriching hours in the family garage tinkering with electronics. Yet for all of his accomplishments the boy was not very good in school, even though he tested so highly in elementary school that the educators wanted to propel him forward to high school, a proposition that his parents did not approve. A good part of Jobs’ free thinking philosophy was no doubt shaped by the turbulent decade of the sixties, the very years of young Steven’s formative years. One needs to only watch singer Billy Joel’s music video of his song We Didn’t Start the Fire to see a history of the fifties and sixties in three minutes. He was eight when John F Kennedy was assassinated, ten when the Viet Nam war escalated, and a very impressionable twelve and thirteen in 1967 and 1968, the years of the hippie movement and the violent demonstrations against the war. Most of that history literally happened in the boy’s backyard, in Berkley and Haight Ashbury and undoubtedly hippies, free love and illicit drugs were common sights in his hometown. Steve was also fourteen when another monumental event happened to the world. Neal Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969 and for a teenage boy interested in electronics and computers, young Steve was probably enthralled. When he entered high school he met Steve Wozniak through a mutual friend. Although the other Steve was a good bit older (1950), the two clicked due to their shared love of electronics. Jobs was able to eventually skip a grade and graduated from high school in 1972. Instead of going to a hometown school (like Stanford), he took off for Oregon and Reed College in Portland. However in the speech he stated that the college was horrendously expensive and his blue collar parents were struggling to keep up with tuition and dorm fees. Not only that Jobs had no vision as to what he wanted to do with his life but suspected that college wouldn’t help whatever it was. So after only six months he dropped out and life wasn’t cool, sleeping on the floor of sympathetic friends’ rooms and selling soda bottles for food. In the meanwhile, he began dropping in on classes, what most universities call “auditing” a class. One of those classes was calligraphy and Jobs was enthralled with the subject. It was to prove crucial to him many years later when he designed his first computer, where different fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman with multiple sizes were installed. Not so modestly in the address he stated without his influence, “it's likely that no personal computer would have them”. Another piece of advice he gave to the Stanford graduates was that he always trusted his gut instinct and that had guided him throughout his life. Trusting that feeling, Steve Jobs returned home to California in 1974 wiser but with no degree. II. Business Career Upon arriving in California, Steve got employment with the home entertainment giant Atari (headquartered in Sunnyvale), helping to design the fledgling video game industry. However the nine to five work a day world, even with his beloved computers and electronics did not suit him and soon the nineteen year old man was restless yet again. After less than two years there, with an enlightenment trip to India to be discussed later wedged in, he left Atari and began working with Wozniak in early 1976, once again in his parents’ garage. They financed their venture with the sale of Jobs’ VW van (once again an iconic symbol of the hippie era) and Wozniak’s calculator (that was a very expensive item at the time). But fate was with them that time. It would only take the two partners less than a mere decade to found Apple Computer and to have amassed a personal fortune of many millions of dollars, along with being in charge of many thousands of employees. By January 1985, Apple was pulling in two billion dollars a year in gross sales. That must have been a strange position for the two free thinking partners. In between they developed the Macintosh (a good part of the reason for those millions). Jobs helped develop the dramatic “1984” Super Bowl commercial that was instrumental in the company’s success. To dramatize all of those success stories even more, Steve Jobs was not quite thirty when all of that happened. As an interesting bit of trivia the apple was the two partners’ favorite fruit and the bite taken from the trademark was a play on words (bite vs. byte). Then one of his decisions came back to haunt Steve Jobs. He had personally hired John Sculley away from Pepsi Cola in 1983 to be Apple CEO. However Jobs was described by many employees as controlling and erratic. Even though the Macintosh was initially popular, particularly after the football commercial, Apple sales soon declined against IBM’s fledgling PC, based upon Microsoft’s DOS, preferred by businesses. The CEO blamed Jobs personally for this and publicly stated Jobs’ presence was destroying the company. The relationship between Sculley and Jobs deteriorated to the point that the CEO staged a coup. The computer company’s board evidently agreed with Sculley, for Jobs was voted out of his managerial position in May 1985. A few months later Steve Jobs resigned from the company he had co-created and he was not associated with Apple for another eleven years. Twenty years later one can hear the raw emotion in his voice as Jobs discusses feeling like a failure and knowing how public his humiliation was. However he also says in the speech that leaving Apple was one of his best decisions and that his resignation “freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life”. Wozniak had recently suffered severe injuries in an airplane crash and stayed on with Apple, although he too relinquished daily duties just two years later. Something during the ousting of Jobs must have been involved between the two men who worked in a dinky garage side by side with no funds, for Wozniak stated many years later they were no longer close friends. It is very much evident that Steve Jobs was not the sort of man to tuck his tail between his legs and stay down for very long. For the very same year Jobs left Apple, he founded Next Computer with a personal startup of seven million dollars, using an operating system of his own design. The next year (1986), producer director George Lucas was interested in unloading a small movie studio and Jobs was able to purchase it for $10 million, using venture capital from future presidential candidate H Ross Perot of all people. Jobs named the studio Pixar and put his old Oregon calligraphy passion to good use, using computer animation to design movies. It took another decade; probably a small amount of time in the animation world, but in 1995 Pixar released the wildly successful Toy Story. Its resulting sequels, along with such other blockbusters as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, have netted four billion dollars and to use Jobs’ words Pixar has become the “most successful animation studio in the world”. It must have been exactly that, for entertainment giant Disney bought and merged with Pixar in 2006, with the resulting Disney shares in lieu of payment making Jobs the company’s largest shareholder, personally worth billions. That must have felt like sweet payback and Jobs’ statement about releasing his creative talent was proven true. Somewhere along the line, while Steve Jobs was becoming a highly successful film maker, a funny thing happened in the computer industry. Next was never a successful computer company, struggling most of its young life, and one of the reasons was its $10 thousand price tag, exorbitant even in 1990. The one good thing it had was the world’s first operable web browser. Apple was also struggling, seemingly bested at every turn by Bill Gates’ Microsoft and the personal computer. With the emergence of the internet and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Windows ’95 was by far outselling the Mac’s and as a last ditch effort, Apple decided to buy Next in 1997, amazingly paying $429 million for it. That must have been highly profitable for Jobs personally as well. The man they had publicly fired eleven years earlier, Steve Jobs, came along as one of its assets and was welcomed with open arms. He was installed as CEO the next year, a position he maintained the rest of his life. The Next computers might not have sold well but the technology Jobs had invented for them helped propel Apple into the profitable company it is today. The iMac came along soon after in 1998 with the like Mac Book shortly thereafter. It was 2001 when their most successful venture was unveiled, the iPod and the accompanying iTunes. Followed by the iPhone and eventually the iPad, along with other commercial and private ventures, Apple has finally got into profitability and now has the loyal, mostly youthful following that Jobs and Wozniak had envisioned so many years earlier. III. Personal Life, Illness and Death Life must have been very good for the very private man who was Steve Jobs in the early part of the twenty first century. He was back at the helm of Apple, the company he had founded; he was very wealthy and content. In 1991 he had married Laurene Powell after he had met her at Stanford and in his address at the college he refers to his wife as “an amazing woman”. From all other accounts also, their over twenty year marriage was happy and loving. In addition to his daughter from a relationship in his twenties, the couple had a son and two more daughters. Interestingly enough, he had tried to deny the first daughter’s paternity by claiming he was sterile! Jobs was born in 1955, during what is mainly considered to be the second phase of Baby Boomers, born during and shortly after the Korean War. Boomers in general tend to be free thinkers and for the most part reject anything that is conventional unless other methods are investigated. This is particularly true when it entails organized religion and Steve Jobs embodied that wholeheartedly. While at Atari in the mid seventies, Jobs had visited India for spiritual enlightenment. As Beatle George Harrison had done a decade previously, Jobs experimented in psychedelic drugs, along with meditation. His seven months in the sub continent gave him a deep respect for Zen Buddhism and Jobs practiced it for most of the rest of his life. Yet earthly happiness for Steve Jobs was to be short lived. In October 2003, he was diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumor, which is a form of pancreatic cancer. First trying and failing with esoteric and holistic Eastern healing methods, Jobs finally consented to modern medicine and had surgery in 2004. At the time of the commencement address the next June, doctors had pronounced him cancer free, remarkable in the fact that a few months before they had told him to “go home and get his affairs in order”. However, by late 2008 the cancer had returned and eventually Jobs underwent a liver transplant. The very private Jobs scoffed at all the rumors and publicly stated he was “dealing with a hormone imbalance”. Except for an address at the Apple shareholder’s meeting in late 2009, he stayed out of the spotlight for the rest of his life, save for unveiling the iPad 2 in March 2011 and a few other select public appearances. On August 24, 2011, Jobs resigned from Apple for the final time, also naming his own successor, Tim Cook. Only six weeks later, on October 5, 2011, Apple shuttered its website for at least a day, announcing the death of Steven Jobs, and it was front page news throughout the world. Fortune magazine in their eulogy called him the world’s greatest entrepreneur. That is quite the accomplishment considering that includes such competition as Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers and Henry Ford. There were also statements of greatness from the President of the United States, Barrack Obama, and also from his long time rival but still close friend Bill Gates. The man was issued an astounding 342 patents over the course of his life; the last one issued the day before he died. A quote Jobs used in his commencement address would be relevant to Steve Jobs over most other people, “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." However, at the same time he cautioned the graduates not to waste one second of their short lives by wondering what could have been. IV. Conclusion At the end of his speech to Stanford graduates, Jobs spoke about a long defunct counter culture magazine catalog called Whole Earth Catalog. Steve was right; the catalog existed for a mere four years but was a hit among the flower generation. Like he pointed out, no only were there endless items for sale, but it was the internet of its day, an amazing little magazine wondrously and laboriously produced with typewriters. Perhaps the creators of the Net did read Whole Earth Catalog as in 1969 they envisioned in a dream the things that we take for realities today. It took visionaries such as Steve Jobs and Stewart Brand (founder and editor of Whole Earth Catalog) to sit in front of primitive typewriters and computers and turn their dreams into our facts. Steven Jobs may have been dead for over a year now but his name and his legend will live forever. So will his products, for as much as he was an innovator, Jobs was also a mentor to the younger employees, recognizing great talent. Also, if flattery is indeed the sincerest form of praise, then Jobs is indeed praised. The flood of look alike and act alike products for the iPod and iPhone from foreign markets is incredible. It is interesting to note that in the decade while Steve Jobs was away from Apple, making a huge fortune, the man who was instrumental in his ouster, John Sculley, had quietly disappeared and no further mention is made of him in the research material. How long did he last after 1985? Perhaps then it is fitting that the last two words of his graduation address (also the farewell of Whole Earth Catalog) sum up this paper very well also: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. WORKS CITED Bellis, Mary, Why Is Steve Jobs Important?, Web, November 16, 2012. Biography.com, Steve Jobs biography, Web, November 16, 2012. Jobs, Steve, You've got to find what you love, Web, November 16, 2012. Read More