Mevio Tech

Steven Paul Jobs passed from this life today on 5 October 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56 years old. He will be remembered as one of the great industrialists of our age (or any other age). He changed forever the ways that we work and think about productivity, the ways that we play and think about entertainment, the ways that we communicate – even the ways that we think about what it means to own a thing. He built two iconic and distinctly American companies that would utterly transform the businesses of music, film, technology and marketing.

For a man who would become one of the most influential in the world, Steve Jobs’ life story had an unlikely start. He was born in San Francisco on February 14th, 1955 to two young graduate students named Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali (a Syrian who was in the United States on a student visa). He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of nearby Mountain View, attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High without particularly distinguishing himself, dropped out of Reed College after only one semester, hacked around with his computer club friends, experimented with LSD and traveled to India as a young man in search of spiritual growth.

On April 1st, 1976 Jobs, one of his hacker friends Steve Wozniak, and their co-worker at Atari, Ronald Wayne, founded the Apple Computer company. At first they sold personal kit computers that were hand-built by Wozniak. The next year they introduced a groud-breaking personal computer called the Apple II, and in five short years, the company’s annual sales exceeded $1 billion.

Jobs left Apple for a time, to take the helm of what was a small graphics hardware development company called The Graphics Group. Now known as Pixar, the company has been responsible for revolutionizing animated feature films, producing titles such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo and Up.

Jobs came back to Apple in the mid 1990s, where he got to work returning the company to profitability and a leadership role in consumer tech. He terminated several projects, and refocused the company on a line of extremely powerful, well designed, aesthetically stunning personal computers called the iMac. In an age where software licensing was the typical revenue center for many technology firms, Jobs’ strategy was to produce products that would have total design integrity. His strategy worked, not only to bring the company great success, but to create devices that would refashion the way we live. The original iPod portable media player, introduced in 2001, has been called “the perfect thing.” Smart phones, multi-gesture touch screens, mobile browsing, cloud storage and many of the other great consumer tech developments of the first decade of the 21st Century – those that were not introduced by Apple were done best by Apple.

Jobs will be remembered by those who worked with him as demanding, sometimes aggressive and even temperamental. He once made Fortune Magazine’s list of toughest bosses in America, but his insistence on quality and leadership in innovation altered the landscape of Silicon Valley, American business and, indeed, the world.

Jobs will also be remembered, of course, as one of the great showmen and marketers of all time. His keynote speeches at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conferences are the stuff of legend, and his company’s advertisements were almost always singularly artful, inspiring and effective.

Steve Jobs once said “a lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Throughout his life, he showed us many, many new things that it turns out we wanted – and he built a company that promises to do the same for years to come.

MEVIO has programmed a special tribute channel with videos reflecting on the life and legacy of Steve Jobs. We continue to add new content to the channel, so please check back for the latest updates or subscribe to the RSS feed.