The King of Cupertino

Jobs holding court at Macworld 2007 -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Watching Apple's Steve Jobs deliver the keynote address at Macworld 2008, I was amazed at what this tall, slender, graying man only two years my senior has accomplished in life. He's the CEO of Apple Inc and the majority share holder of Walt Disney Company.

Born in 1955, Steve was adopted by solidly middle class parents in Mountain View, California. Jobs' biological father is Syrian John Jamdali who later became a professor of political science. As a young adult, Jobs dropped out of Reed College after taking just one semester; his favorite course was calligraphy. As part of sowing his "wild oats", Jobs backpacked through India and even experimented with LSD. Steve was also an electronics whiz and interned at Hewlett Packard as a circuit board designer. Here, he met Steve Wozniak who actually built the Apple computer prototype in 1976. Jobs and Wozniak next created the Apple II which was wildly successful and made them both millionaires by age 25.

Jobs was driven out of his own company in 1985 by CEO John Sculley -- a man he hired. A power struggle developed as a result of a PC industry downturn and slow-selling Macs. Jobs went on to found NeXT computers. NeXT specialized in advanced object-oriented computers which proved to be a niche market. They did innovate things like built-in Ethernet ports and graphic mail with embedded links called "NeXTMail". In fact, the World Wide Web was partly innovated by people using NeXT computers.

Jobs managed to sell NeXT to Apple in 1996 (long after Sculley's departure) and rejoined Apple on the board of directors. He replaced Gil Amelio in 1998 after a boardroom coup, and became Apple's official CEO. The rest "is history" as they say. Jobs rolled out hit after hit starting with the bondi blue iMac, continuing with iPod and most recently with iPhone and Macbook Air. As a "sideline" activity, Jobs nurtured Pixar Studios to a successful crescendo and then sold it to Disney in return for becoming Disney's majority stock holder.

What more is there to add? He's a happily married father of four (the first child was a "love child" from the 70's). He's a California liberal, Beatles fanatic and good friend of Bill Clinton. He dated Joan Baez when she was 41 and he was @ 21. He is said to be mercurial, temperamental and egomaniacal. He had a recent scare with pancreatic cancer but it was a rare type that is non-malignant. What amazes me about this man is that he did more by the time he was 22 than most of us have done in a lifetime. He wasn't just an electronics whiz (recall, Wozniak actually designed their successful Apple I). He was and is an amazing evangelizer and technology prophet.

The only thing I would caution is becoming full of one's own success. There are aspects to "Macheads" that call to mind the cult like behavior of Scientologists. The mantras like "Think Different" and the black tee shirts are just marketing ideas as they stand -- not sacred garb or scripture. Sometimes mindless rites and rituals are the follow-on to such amazing showmanship. I, as a devoted follower of all that is Apple, must be careful not to fall into the trap! :-) May the free market keep things in check; let Windows and Linux also continue to prosper. And then may Apple continue to give us spectacular toys and computer innovations in a thoughtful and imaginative way.

We must give due credit to this Beatles-loving mercurial genius -- the King of Cupertino.

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