INCREDIBLE THINKING OF STEVE JOBS
Written by SIDDHARTH KUMAR
The People Crazy Enough to Think They Can Change The World Are The Ones Who Do – STEVE JOBS
Steve Jobs, the man which creates history, by creating personal computers. Many of us know him as the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc. but I try to show a different point of view or maybe after reading this you will gain a whole new perspective towards entrepreneurship and starting your company.
He is a person that is admired by almost everyone in silicon valley and outside, but many of us just see a twenty or thirty-minute video on youtube about him and his companies and thought we know who is he, but after seeing a lot of interviews and reading his biography written by Walter Isaacson (a world-famous writer and president o the Aspen Institute) I had come to a conclusion that he is just a normal person but with a keen interest to gain knowledge and having a high risk-taking behavior.
BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE
The biggest setback of Steve’s life and his abnormal behavior towards society can be because of the fact that he was an adopted child. He was originally born on February 24th, 1955, and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs after that. His father was a Coast Guard mechanic. Steve in one interview said “Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special, they were my parents 1000%”
Steve was very close to his father in fact from a very young age he spent a lot of time with Paul Jobs in his garage, learning about carpentry and design. “I thought my dad’s sense of design was pretty good”, he said.
Incident: One day Steve was doing some work with the engine in the garage and showed it to his father. The work was done, but his father said you have to do it clean and organised, Steve argues “but nobody is going to know it” and his father replied “but you know it”
AGE 12
“Most people don’t get don’t experiences because they never ask” – Steve Jobs
Steve’s one day called up Bill Hewlett when he was 12 years old. A 12-year-old kid found his number on the phonebook and told him that he wants to build a frequency counter and if he could help him with some spare parts. That kid not only get the spare parts but he also gets
a job that summer in Hewlett Packard working on the assembly line, putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters.
Steve always suggested he always asked for help, he said that he never found anyone that he called for help and people said no or hung up the phone.
TEENAGE LIFE
Jobs attended Homestead High School with Bill Fernandez who later introduced Jobs to Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was the co-founder of Apple. Wozniak later became Steve’s very close friend and they together had also built digital blue boxes as their first product, which was kind of illegal as it manipulated the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Later Steve also said that if there were no Wozniak’s blue boxes, “there wouldn’t have been an Apple”. Steve also considered college education meaningless and he also decided to drop out as he did not want to spend his parent’s money. He later attended a course on calligraphy taught by Robert Palladino, which he considered was very useful in building the other companies after being fired from Apple named Pixar and Next.
THE IDEA – BIRTH OF APPLE
Originally Steve Wozniak designed and built it to show off to a computer club of Stanford and Berkeley professors. Wozniak also gave designs for free to everyone at the club, he just passed it out on paper. A $300 computer that can solve problems and visualize them on screen. Steve Jobs when he saw, it got his attention and together they built it. Apple one was a formula one board full of chips hand-wired, it was small and was capable of doing the full job of a computer.
THE GARAGE
The time when Job and Wozniak thought to sell it, they didn’t have the money to buy the parts, so they liberated some parts from Hewlett Packard and Atari, worked on the design for about 6 months and built it on computer. It took about 40 hours to build these things and about another 20, 30, 40 to debug it. They then printed the circuit board without the parts and sent it to their friends and debug time down to around 5 to 10 hours. Steve sold his van and Wozniak sold his calculator and they got 1300 bucks to pay. One day Steve visited a bike shop and showed him the board and the owner offered him to take 50 of these fully assembled computers. They borrowed the parts and built 100 computers and sold 50 to the shop owner for cast and in 29 days paid off the distributor.
GET FIRED FROM HIS OWN COMPANY
“Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Steve Jobs said to John Sculley when they first met after Thanksgiving in 1982. At that point, John was the CEO of Pepsi. At that time John doesn’t know much about computers, Steve doesn’t know about running companies. Steve hired John to help the company in sales of Apple computers as the company growth was exponential at that time. The vision of both Steve and John are different, John thought about cash flow as previously the failure of Lisa with Apple 3 was there but on the other hand, Steve thought about designing Macintosh for the future. There are many possible reasons why Macintosh failed in 1985. One is Steve doesn’t care about Moore’s law that says in every 12 to 18 months the number of transistors doubles and therefore the performance processing power of a computer doubles and Macintosh office was not powerful enough to deal with Apple. Another is John and other board members increase the price in order to increase the profit and also there was a lack of marketing. Steve wants to decrease the price of Mac and also shifts the advertising cost from Apple 2 to Mac and John disagrees with it. They both go to the board members and after a week the board gets in favor of John Sculley and wants Steve to take down the Macintosh division but not get fired.
A founder and a professional executive have both different approaches towards the company. It’s not about who is right and who is wrong it’s just a matter of time and circumstance that made Steve leave the company and made John Sculley the CEO.
TRIP TO INDIA
He was 35 years old when Job’s visited India. Jobs with his friend Kottke visited India between 1974 and 1976. Steve was mystified by eastern philosophies and also he was on a quest for higher learning. He wants to solve the unanswered questions of science. Steve returned with a shaved head and was fond of Hindu philosophies after returning from India. Steve also spends a lot of time reading ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ in India. Steve said in his book “Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work”
THE COMEBACK OF JOBS – ALONG WITH PIXAR AND NEXT
Formation of NeXT
Steve after leaving Apple formed a new startup, building higher-level computer
hardware for the education industry. Many former employees of Apple join Steve in this.
In an interview Jobs said “There needs to be someone who is the keeper and reiterated
of the vision”,” A lot of times, when you have to walk a thousand miles and you take the
first step, it looks like a long way, and it really helps if there’s someone there saying,’
Well, we’re one step closer. The goal definitely exists; it’s not just a mirage out there.”
At age of 31, he is starting from zero. The company exited from hardware business after
shipping about 50,000 units, but later Tim Berners-Lee, founding fathers of the internet, used
the NeXT computer and operating system to create the World Wide Web and in 1997, NeXT
was purchased by Apple along with its operating system. Steve Jobs returned to Apple as the
CEO of Apple and made the history that we all know now.
SMART PEOPLE
In many interviews, when Steve was asked about hiring people, he always said that it’s nonsense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. It’s always better to hire people that are smarter than you and ask them what to do. He also said that it took him about a year and a half to hire good people, technical and non-technical.
VISION
Software Vs Hardware
Steve Jobs mentions that it’s hard to have a competitive advantage over
hardware as it hardly lasts 6 months or so, but in the case of software, it takes a long time for your competitors to catch up with. Microsoft took 8 or 9 years to catch up with Mac at that time. You don’t have a large capital in the early days so try to make a good product that will cut down the cost of sales and marketing and you have an edge over other companies.
Hiring Consultants
Steve Jobs said, “Without owning something over an extended period of time where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.”
“Coming and making recommendations are not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value, and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better” – Steve Jobs (MIT Sloan Speaker 1992)
Becoming a Hardware and a Software company – not completely software Even though software provides a competitive advantage over hardware but the profits are not much higher. The average selling price of a software company is around $500 in the market but on the other hand, a hardware company embedded its hardware along with its software and price is now around $5000 and that creates a huge amount of profit even though the life of the hardware is about 6 months or so. It will help in taking advantage of others.
A good product returns a long term
There are many products out there but a good product is not the one whose marking is best or the manufacturing pace is good but it’s about the time and effort to put
it. Apple products are hard to replicate not because they are the best but because they are very hard to make and people working there put their time and effort to build that product.
MAJOR FAILURES OF APPLE
Here I mention the failures of Apple as a company not personal to Steve Jobs.
The Apple Newton (1993)
John Sculley started this project after Steve resigned from Apple. The main reasons for its failure are overpricing, many glitches, and not good user experience. It was a personal digital assistant fit in your hand and came with many applications that company claims are useful.
Copland (1994)
The idea was to develop a cross-platform that can take down Microsoft’s Windows PCs by running their apps into this OS. In the summer of 1996, management decided to cancel the Copland project. Till that Apple didn’t release anything stable to developers and Mac uses and people are shifting toward Microsoft for that.
Making Mac OS Clones (1995)
In 1995, Apple decided to give license System 7 to other companies so that they could manufacture clones of Macintosh and grow the Mac market. Maybe they came up with this idea by seeing Microsoft doing this. When Steve returned to the company he ended this experiment and take all the designs into the company itself.
iPod Hi-Fi (2006)
The main reason for this failure is the very high price and customers are not willing to pay such a price for a speaker that lacked an AM/FM radio.
THE INNOVATION IN FACTORY
Apple consolidates there hardware, design engineering, manufacturing, worldwide distribution, and hardware service all into one chunk called the hardware division. By taking this decision Apple not only manufactures better but also decreases the cost of manufacturing as the same division is working on the design and the process of manufacturing takes place side by side. This also takes the power of blaming others when something goes wrong and taking responsibility.
THE ARROGANCE OR HIS NATURE
There are countless examples where Steve shows his arrogant, impulsive, and aggressive side. Many former employees of Apple confirmed that he was very strict with his deadlines and also fired people without warning. I can’t say this arrogance is due to his passion and love towards design and product or it’s just a way of managing people. In many interviews,
Steve publicly shows the flaws and mistakes of other companies and how Apple is better than them. He didn’t fear taking anyone’s name out there.
BILL VS STEVE
In the revolution of computers both of them had played a major role. Bill was a good programmer and also done some work for IBM (related to making programs) and on the other hand, Steve was making GUI (Graphical User Interface) that made it easy for the customers to use computers. Steve show this idea to Jobs for the suggestion, as he was thinking about implementing this in Mac but before he would launch it, Bill Gatesimplement this concept and launch it in Windows by the name of interface user. Steve as very angry at Gates for doing this but later the Apple 2 was also declared a flop product and Steve leaves the company.
When Steve returns to Apple along with NeXT, he called Bill Gates for investing in Apple. Later Microsoft buys $150 million worth of shares and commits not to sell for at least the next 3 years. Apple and Microsoft did many collaborations after that, most of them are related to patents but resolve them all.
In his later days, he always shows Bill Gates as his friend and claims that they resolved all the issues. He also mentions that the company needs to get as much help as they can and if Apple doesn’t do the job its not somebody else fault, it’s their fault.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
In his last public speech at Stanford, he told a very important way of thinking, i.e., connecting the dots. He said that we can’t connect the dots by looking forward toward the future, we can only connect it by looking backward i.e., the past.
References
https://www.apple.com/in/stevejobs/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
https://www.cnet.com/news/best-ipad-for-2020-ipad-air-2019-vs-ipad-pro-2020-vs-ipad-20 19/
https://www.biography.com/business-figure/steve-jobs
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/fundamental-analysis/12/steve-jobs-apple-story.as p
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkTf0LmDqKI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7sktJOoyvs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juGBryeyrOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY&t=39s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI