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STEVE JOBS | 1955-2011
By BRUCE NEWMAN - San Jose Mercury News
Steve Jobs, who sparked a revolution in the technology industry and then presided over it as Silicon Valley’s radiant Sun King, died Wednesday. The incandescent center of a tech universe around which all the other planets revolved, Jobs had a genius for stylish design and a boyish sense of what was “cool.” He was 56 when he died, ahead of his time to the very end.
According to a spokesman for Apple Inc. -- the company Jobs co-founded when he was just 21, and turned into one of the world’s great industrial design houses -- he suffered from a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he had undergone surgery in 2004. Jobs had taken his third leave of absence from the company in January of this year, and made the final capitulation to his failing health on Aug. 24, when he resigned as Apple’s CEO. After 35 years as the soul of Silicon Valley’s new machine, that may have been a fate worse than death.
Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, Calif., where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976. Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery -- its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall -- to a device people considered “personal,” and then indispensable.
Jobs was the undisputed “i” behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lower-case. According to Fortune magazine he was considered “one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs,” but Jobs also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs -- ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits -- whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company’s stock plunged 22 points after Jobs announced his final medical leave Jan. 17.
“A hundred years from now, when people talk about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates is going to be remembered for his philanthropy, not technology,” said tech forecaster Paul Saffo, “the same way people remember Andrew Carnegie for the money he gave to education, not the fortune he made in steel. But what they’re going to say about Steve Jobs is that he led a revolution.”
It was a war waged on three fronts -- computers, music and movies -- and with each successive Apple triumph, Jobs altered the landscape of popular culture. With its user-friendly interface and anthropomorphic mouse, the Macintosh forever changed the relationship between humans and computers. After acquiring Pixar Animation Studios in 1986, Jobs became the most successful movie mogul of the past half-century, turning out 11 monster hits in succession. The 2001 smash “Monsters, Inc.” could just as easily have been the name of the company.
But it was with the iPod -- originally released just six weeks after the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, 2001 -- that Jobs engineered another tectonic shift in the digital world. The transistor radio had untethered music from the home, and Sony’s Walkman had made recorded music portable. With one of the world’s premier consumer electronics businesses, and a music label of its own, Sony was poised to dominate digital distribution for decades.
But it didn’t happen. Jobs took a digital compression format that had been around for a decade, synced it to Apple’s new digital download service, iTunes, and with the iPod changed a system for delivering music to consumers that had been in place since Edison invented the phonograph.
It was Jobs’ genius for simplicity that led to a pricing standard of 99 cents per song that remained unchanged for eight years, despite initial resistance from the music studios. And it was his irresistibility as a pitchman that brought the record labels so completely into line that iTunes now is the dominant player in the digital music business.
A man of sometimes confounding contradictions, Jobs once traveled to India and shaved his head seeking spiritual enlightenment. But he also brought a fierce urgency to his business dealings, often screaming at subordinates and belittling foes. Feared and revered, Jobs commanded the respect of his competitors, loyalty from the engineers he goaded relentlessly, and loathing from almost everyone.
“It’s not easy to like Steve close up -- he does not suffer fools gladly,” said Bob Metcalfe, founder of the networking giant 3Com and an old friend of Jobs. “But I like him very much. His energy, and standards, and powers of persuasion are amazing. He is the epitome of a change agent.”
Whether by accident or design, Jobs created such an intense aura of mystery about what he was on to -- and up to -- that he developed a cult of personality, sometimes called “Macolytes.” His appearances at the annual MacWorld Expo were often an occasion for the rollout of some new product that Jobs -- with a rock star’s sense of theatricality -- had managed, until that very moment, to keep top secret. To his loyal fans, it seemed to matter little that Apple’s new device inevitably cost far more than its competitors’.
And while his personal fortune -- often the measure of success among the tech elite -- was dwarfed by peers such as Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. and Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp., Jobs’ matchless record of innovation over three decades made him the coolest computer nerd in the valley.
“He reinvented the paradigm of what computing is three times with the Apple II, the Macintosh and the iPhone,” said Mike Daisey, who built a theatrical performance, titled “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” around a life notable for its highs and lows. “And to be clear, the rest of the tech industry reinvented the paradigm zero times.”
Jobs insisted the products Apple brought to market not merely be great, they must be “insanely great.” It was his focus on design that allowed Apple to maintain a hold on the imagination of the public that often was disproportionate to the company’s market share.
Apple’s product lines were a projection of his sense of style, transforming the boring, putty-colored boxes of computers sold by competitors like Dell Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. into a compote of fruit and berry-flavored iMacs. Yet Jobs himself rarely deviated from a single, Mao-like uniform of blue jeans, black turtleneck and sneakers, turning that into a kind of meta-fashion statement: Think different. Dress the same.
By BRUCE NEWMAN - San Jose Mercury News
Steve Jobs, who sparked a revolution in the technology industry and then presided over it as Silicon Valley’s radiant Sun King, died Wednesday. The incandescent center of a tech universe around which all the other planets revolved, Jobs had a genius for stylish design and a boyish sense of what was “cool.” He was 56 when he died, ahead of his time to the very end.
According to a spokesman for Apple Inc. -- the company Jobs co-founded when he was just 21, and turned into one of the world’s great industrial design houses -- he suffered from a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he had undergone surgery in 2004. Jobs had taken his third leave of absence from the company in January of this year, and made the final capitulation to his failing health on Aug. 24, when he resigned as Apple’s CEO. After 35 years as the soul of Silicon Valley’s new machine, that may have been a fate worse than death.
Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, Calif., where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976. Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery -- its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall -- to a device people considered “personal,” and then indispensable.
Jobs was the undisputed “i” behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lower-case. According to Fortune magazine he was considered “one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs,” but Jobs also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs -- ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits -- whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company’s stock plunged 22 points after Jobs announced his final medical leave Jan. 17.
“A hundred years from now, when people talk about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates is going to be remembered for his philanthropy, not technology,” said tech forecaster Paul Saffo, “the same way people remember Andrew Carnegie for the money he gave to education, not the fortune he made in steel. But what they’re going to say about Steve Jobs is that he led a revolution.”
It was a war waged on three fronts -- computers, music and movies -- and with each successive Apple triumph, Jobs altered the landscape of popular culture. With its user-friendly interface and anthropomorphic mouse, the Macintosh forever changed the relationship between humans and computers. After acquiring Pixar Animation Studios in 1986, Jobs became the most successful movie mogul of the past half-century, turning out 11 monster hits in succession. The 2001 smash “Monsters, Inc.” could just as easily have been the name of the company.
But it was with the iPod -- originally released just six weeks after the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, 2001 -- that Jobs engineered another tectonic shift in the digital world. The transistor radio had untethered music from the home, and Sony’s Walkman had made recorded music portable. With one of the world’s premier consumer electronics businesses, and a music label of its own, Sony was poised to dominate digital distribution for decades.
But it didn’t happen. Jobs took a digital compression format that had been around for a decade, synced it to Apple’s new digital download service, iTunes, and with the iPod changed a system for delivering music to consumers that had been in place since Edison invented the phonograph.
It was Jobs’ genius for simplicity that led to a pricing standard of 99 cents per song that remained unchanged for eight years, despite initial resistance from the music studios. And it was his irresistibility as a pitchman that brought the record labels so completely into line that iTunes now is the dominant player in the digital music business.
A man of sometimes confounding contradictions, Jobs once traveled to India and shaved his head seeking spiritual enlightenment. But he also brought a fierce urgency to his business dealings, often screaming at subordinates and belittling foes. Feared and revered, Jobs commanded the respect of his competitors, loyalty from the engineers he goaded relentlessly, and loathing from almost everyone.
“It’s not easy to like Steve close up -- he does not suffer fools gladly,” said Bob Metcalfe, founder of the networking giant 3Com and an old friend of Jobs. “But I like him very much. His energy, and standards, and powers of persuasion are amazing. He is the epitome of a change agent.”
Whether by accident or design, Jobs created such an intense aura of mystery about what he was on to -- and up to -- that he developed a cult of personality, sometimes called “Macolytes.” His appearances at the annual MacWorld Expo were often an occasion for the rollout of some new product that Jobs -- with a rock star’s sense of theatricality -- had managed, until that very moment, to keep top secret. To his loyal fans, it seemed to matter little that Apple’s new device inevitably cost far more than its competitors’.
And while his personal fortune -- often the measure of success among the tech elite -- was dwarfed by peers such as Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. and Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp., Jobs’ matchless record of innovation over three decades made him the coolest computer nerd in the valley.
“He reinvented the paradigm of what computing is three times with the Apple II, the Macintosh and the iPhone,” said Mike Daisey, who built a theatrical performance, titled “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” around a life notable for its highs and lows. “And to be clear, the rest of the tech industry reinvented the paradigm zero times.”
Jobs insisted the products Apple brought to market not merely be great, they must be “insanely great.” It was his focus on design that allowed Apple to maintain a hold on the imagination of the public that often was disproportionate to the company’s market share.
Apple’s product lines were a projection of his sense of style, transforming the boring, putty-colored boxes of computers sold by competitors like Dell Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. into a compote of fruit and berry-flavored iMacs. Yet Jobs himself rarely deviated from a single, Mao-like uniform of blue jeans, black turtleneck and sneakers, turning that into a kind of meta-fashion statement: Think different. Dress the same.
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