Unfortunately, Steve Jobs isn’t around today to enjoy the fruits of his success. But when he was alive, he helped make Apple into one of the world’s top computer companies.
Steve Jobs started working with electronics when he was young. He learned from his adoptive father about how to build electronic devices. He was fascinated by electronics and eventually formed Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976. The duo worked together to develop a series of personal computers that are easy for people to utilize.
The Apple I and Apple II became huge hits in the late 1970s. However, even as the influential Macintosh computer was released in 1984, Apple started to struggle as IBM was dominating the PC market. This came in spite of how the Macintosh was heralded as a computer that could make it easy for people to be productive in their own homes.
Jobs left Apple for a period of time in the mid-1980s. He had mixed success during the rest of the decade. He purchased a computer animation company from filmmaker George Lucas that would eventually become the immensely influential Pixar Animation Studios. Even with this success, his NeXT hardware and software business struggled to get off the ground as people stuck with other business entities for their computing needs.
In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as its CEO. He hired a new management team and focused on the development of new and more unique products. These included special items like the iPhone and iPad, devices that influenced the tech world.
Jobs died in 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. His net worth was close to $10 billion at the time of his death with his estate being close to twice that value.
What Made Steve Jobs So Successful?
There were many good reasons as to why Steve Jobs was immensely successful even after all those struggles that he dealt with over the years.
Manage the Hardest Times
Steve Jobs was never perfect. His business ventures often struggles and it led to him being apart from Apple for a while. Still, he refused to give up. He continued to have a vision for new ideas and concepts and focused more on how he could grow his business.
In fact, Jobs’ initial failure at Apple after the Macintosh struggled to compete with IBM only led him to look into other ventures. He gained experience while managing the Pixar studio before it would be acquired by the Walt Disney Company and become the internationally-renowned film studio that it is today.
Steve Jobs Took Current Concepts and Made Them Amazing
Jobs also took advantage of many existing concepts in society and found ways to make them different. A great example of this came from looking at the Xerox PARC system. This system was a visual-based operating system. He used the same concept Xerox utilized and adapted it with some alterations to make it easier to use. This in turn made the Macintosh more influential than people expected it to be.
He also considered the iPod after looking onto portable music players. While it’s true that playing compact discs and cassette tapes anywhere could be fun to do, he felt that there needed to be a way to create an infinite device that could play anything one loads onto it. This led to the development of the iPod, which led to the creation of the portable media device market that continues to grow with not only new Apple products but plenty of competing options.
Steve Jobs & The Importance Of Different Visions
One thing you can learn from Steve Jobs is to focus on a different vision when it comes to developing items. A great example of this comes from how he focused on the user getting full control over everything on a computer. This included giving the customer full control over how an operating system is arranged and how the computer is to be programmed. He did this with the Macintosh computer and it proved to be critical to the development of other Apple products over time.
While many of Steve Jobs’ successes are ones that he never lived to see all the way through, he still helped make Apple one of the most important companies in the world while giving him billions of dollars. Thanks to his work, Apple has become one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies.