Steve Jobs Turning Point - Case Study Example

Steve jobs turning point Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 by parents who gave him up for adoption. Steve jobsuncovered information on his real parents when he was twenty-seven years old. His adopted father showed him how to take part and reconstruct electronics when he was very young. From this, he developed a passion for electronics. Steve jobs was very intelligent and innovative even in his teenage and youth but he went through several frustrations on formal schooling.inn school he was a prank star and teachers wanted him skipped o high school though his parents rejected the proposal (Goodell 37). When Steve Jobs enrolled in high school, he met Steve Wozniak who became his friend. They both loved electronics and shared so much on how different chips work, which was not common with individuals of their age then. They also shared so much common interests that made them good friends. Steve jobs later enrolled in Reed College where he dropped after six months. He later spent 18 months dropping in the creative class in the school. In 1974, Steve Jobs got a position as a designer of video games with Atari. When he was 21, he and Wozniak started Apple computer. This is believed to be Steve jobs turning point in life. The two started by selling their personal items since Steve jobs sold his Volkswagen bus while Wozniak sold his calculator that he loved so much. Steve Jobs made a revolution in the computer industry by taking this route. All started at a homebrew computer club where they were building the first computer and they named it apple after an apple farm in Oregon where Jobs visited after returning from India where he had gone to seek spiritual help. Division of labor at apple was very clear since Wozniak was the technical brains while jobs was the doing all other manual jobs. Steve Jobs always pushed Wozniak to complete his projects. Steve jobs always had an imagination of seeing that a business existed on personal computers. In a way, it was because he was desperate since he was broke and he needed money. In other ways, it was because he believed in himself and he knew that he could build anything even his own company. Steve jobs believed that by building affordable personal computers and placing one on every desk would be a way of giving people power. He knew that through these personal computers people would have an access to information first hand and would not have to go through others in accessing the information. This is what kept inspiring him to continue working on the apple computer. Everyone wondered how Steve jobs believed in his own rhetoric. He had a fusion of idealism and technology at that time and it helped Apple take off. By the time Steve jobs was 24 years old, he was worth ten million dollars and at twenty-five, and he was already worth more than 100 million dollars (Goodell 38). As apple grew, Steve jobs also changed and his temper grew. He treated those around him badly. He was in a relationship with Brennan and when she became pregnant, Steve jobs pushed her out of his life. He also refused to assist her financially and he would not let her give up the baby for adoption. He denied paternity until a DNA test confirmed. Even at Apple Steve, jobs had a life of rebelliousness to an extent of being self-destructive. By 1980, the company had grown very large such that Steve jobs could not be able to control everything about it and it was becoming very popular. By then popular Apple II had run its course. When Steve jobs saw a prototype of a mouse and icons of a desktop during his visit to Xerox PARC that was a research center, he was convinced that one day all the computers would operate on a similar model. He could not get the top management in Apple to agree so he took a team that was working on a different project and hijacked them. Steve jobs then took the ideas from Xerox that he thought were the best, and added his own ideas. The result was a team at Apple hidden in a building with a task of creating Macintosh for the first time. The Macintosh team had instructions to make the coolest machine they could. However, the team faced so many challenges with everyday having new crisis from a disk drive not working to software not working. However, Steve Jobs drove the team that consisted of eight programmers to working hard day and night for several months. Sometimes the team would work on something the entire night and when he looked at it in the morning; he would say he was not contented. All Steve Jobs wanted was the programmers to be able to defend what they were doing, if on e was able to defend his work then he was okay. The programmers believed that Steve jobs had both the best and the worst qualities a human being could have. Steve jobs wanted everything done to perfection and demanded for originality of every detail. When he was not able to get the color, he wanted for the Mac he ordered that a special Beige tint should be created. He believed in making good things to make good profits. Steve jobs believed that he was right and not the consumer, which is a strong point for capitalism. He knew that the consumer was going to respect a strong point of view even when it was not what they wanted (Judkins 46). The Macintosh was launched in 1984 as a new computer and it came as a tool of liberation while giving Steve jobs a glimpse to the entire world. The machine turned out to be a huge success and it sold more than one million units making a huge transformation in the computer industry. However, Steve Jobs was not able to control the company he had created. He discovered that it was not possible to run a company that is a fortune like it is a garage and he decided to recruit John Sculley to help. However, he was not able to share power with the executive who was more experienced thus they constantly slashed. The worst happened when the Apple board tossed Jobs overboard at the age of thirty. What he had been focusing on for almost his entire adult life ended and it was very devastating for him. Steve Jobs was deeply wounded by this turn of events since the Apple Company that he had founded was like his second family. He felt that all he had worked so hard for was gone and he became a famous rich but lost young man. He took some time to travel around the world and talk on personal computers. After around one year, Steve jobs had a plan to come back to his feet. He decided that he would build a perfect company in every detail. His logo was to be designed by Professor Paul Rand and the desktop supercomputers with very high speed would be from the state of the art factory. He aimed to make the company a success to revenge on the Apple team that threw him out. He named the company NeXT where he was successful in producing a very distinctive object however; it proved to be very expensive for the market. Consumers who bought NeXT computers said they were the best machines that have ever been built however; nobody was willing to pay so much for the machines. Steve Jobs was able to persuade Ross Perot to make an investment of 20 million dollars; however, after a few years it was clear that the computers would end up in a museum as artifacts. Steve jobs had confused art with commerce this time round. Everything about NeXT Company was perfection (Goodell 40). Steve Jobs life turned around again when he got married to Laurene Powell and when he accepted an offer at Pixar. The company made Steve Jobs the CEO and he turned the graphics division into an animation studio. In 1995, Pixar went public and once again, Steve jobs was sitting on stock that was worth 1.1 billion dollars making him look like a genius. Meanwhile Apple was struggling to survive with a clueless CEO who was slowly turning the once great company to irrelevance. Steve jobs thus decided to make a comeback for apple so he convinced the board to buy NeXT’s software to use it as the basis for Apple’s future operating system. He made several moves to bring back Apple that was almost dead by then. Steve jobs is credited with having brought Apple back to life in the 1990s just as he had initiated its success at the beginning. Steve Jobs put Apple back on its tracks and brought up new stylish designs that caught people’s attention. He ended up coming up with the two most innovative products of Apple, the iPhone and iPad that were launched after he had been discovered to have cancer. Works Cited Goodell, Jeff. "The Steve Jobs Nobody Know. (Cover Story)." Rolling Stone 1142 (2011): 36-45. Judkins, Julie. "The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs." Library Journal 139.2 (2014): 46 Read More