Tuesday, November 24, 2020

iCon - Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business

 This is an unauthorized biography of the greatest - Steve Jobs. i in the title of the book specified in small is a representation of many apple products. It also has a "I am con" kind of representation. This book is about the second innings of Steve Jobs at Apple once he was thrown out by the board of directors in 1985. 

PC: https://www.gottabemobile.com/iphone-6-iphone-5s-designs-reportedly-jobs-influenced/

Steve Jobs, born in San Francisco was adopted by Paul Jobs - a mechanic in American coast guard and his wife Clara Jobs. Jobs family moved to Mountain View California where Steve met many friends having curiosity in electronics. He enrolled in to Reed college in Oregon but soon dropped out and took interest in calligraphy. He started working at Atari Inc. where he worked on circuit boards for games. He took help from his long time friend Steve Wozniak and submitted boards that shook Atari's product owners. With Wozniak on his side, Jobs persuaded him to demo the partially built Apple 1 computer at HomeBrew computer club. This proved to be a life changing event for Jobs and Wozniak. The Apple Inc. as its known today was first conceptualized in Job's garage. The first investor Mike Markkula who was a retired Intel product marketing manager quoted saying he is investing not in the idea of Apple but in the incredible man behind it ie Steve Jobs. 

Steve Jobs took the role of CEO of Apple and was very successful at it. He was even the youngest to make it to the Forbes list of richest people in USA. He brought in the chief marketing manager Scully from Pepsico to Apple in 1983 as CEO. Jobs released ads for the Macintosh in 1984 stating the machine is something that no one ever has imagined to exist. This was largely seen as marketing hype and Macintosh did not receive the response Jobs was expecting. There were differences between Scully and Jobs. Macintosh failed to outperform IBMs personal computer. Jobs controlled the Macintosh division and the CEO Scully controlled the Apple 2 division and these two divisions worked like 2 different companies though Apple 2 generated the most of the revenue. In 1985 Jan, during the annual meeting, Apple 2 was not mentioned at all and this brought more bitterness among the early employees of Apple 2. Most of them left. Scully planned to reorganize the Apple board of directors in response to which Jobs also developed a plan to eliminate Scully. But Jobs plan was leaked and he later resigned from Apple. 

Jobs in 1985 founded NeXT Inc. which sold workstations for education use. He also founded Pixar- a computer animation studio which later produced movies like Toy Story and Incredibles etc. 

In 1996, when Apple announced it would buy NeXT for 427 million dollars. With this Jobs became the interim chief executive. Much of the NeXT products found their way in to Apple technologies. Under the guidance of Jobs, Apple increased sales significantly with the introduction of iMac and other new products. Jobs introduced iPod, iTunes and iTunes Store. In 2007, Apple entered the Phone business with the introduction of iPhone. 

The book is a narration of how Jobs built back the Apple empire and launched breakthrough products like iPod and iPhone. He has been criticized for his salesman and persuasion skills all through and at the same time he is perceived as a jerk more and less of a genius when it comes to technology. 

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