Know More about Steve Jobs.....

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Fast Facts

Name: Steven Paul Jobs
Born: February 24th, 1955
Hometown: San Francisco, CA
College: Reed College for 1 semester
Current Job: CEO of Apple Computer and CEO/ Chairman of Pixar
First Job: Atari technician

Career: Atari, 1974, game designer;

1975, co-founder; Apple Computer,

1975–1977, chairman of the board; Apple computers

1977–1981, de facto chief executive officer;

1981–1984, chairman of the board; NeXT,

1985–1996, president and CEO; Pixar Animation Studios,

1986–, CEO and chairman of the board; Apple Computer,

1995–1997, consultant; Apple Computer

1997–2000, interim CEO; Apple Computer

2000–, CEO Apple Computers

Awards: Technical Excellence Award and Lifetime Achievement,

PC Magazine, 1997;

Hall of Fame, Fortune, 2000.

Address: Apple, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California 95014;

Website: http://www.apple.com.

Connecting the dots.

Steve’s biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put him up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

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Steve - A Business Man

Steven Paul (Steve) Jobs was responsible for building Apple Computer twice, as well as for rescuing Pixar Animation Studios and turning it into one of the world's most successful motion picture studios. He also built NeXT, a good idea that did not catch on. He was a hands-on manager, who studied even the minutest details of his products, with the heart and eye of an artist. His insistence on high-quality, good-looking products struck a chord with many people who appreciated the beauty of Apple products, resulting in such fabulous successes as the Macintosh computer and the iPod portable music system. These successes often reshaped how consumers viewed technology and also reshaped the technology itself. Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates are the two people most often credited with the development of the mass-market personal computer, perhaps decades before it might otherwise have evolved.

He's the guy behind the iPhone and the iPod and the Mac. They're all over the stores and all over the news and every time you turn around you hear about something that he's doing, has done, or should be coming out with in the next few months. That's especially true where the iPhone is concerned. People just can't get enough of it when they first get it, and then the problems start. His stuff costs more than other options that do basically the same things, and that's especially true of his Mac computers versus standard PCs. Some people are starting to ask why. It's a fair question, after all. Some people would say that the technology is far superior to the competition. Others would say you're just paying for the name. So, which is it really?

Those people who think that Steve Jobs is the greatest thing ever often think that because he does so much as a CEO. He has 22,000 employees and a $24 billion per-year empire. He doesn't jump out of planes or gallivant off on safari, but he's still seen as a celebrity of sorts. He was the one who had the vision of what Apple computer could be and was interested in the marketability of it. He's clearly dedicated to making products that a specific group of people want to buy instead of just trying to saturate the market or capture a larger share of it. He's doing a great job in a lot of people's eyes.

What is Steve Jobs' Marketing Strategy?

With years of business marketing under his belt, Jobs keeps talk to a minimum and show to a maximum, allowing a product to sell itself. He also holds to a consistent marketing strategy:

Hours of practice with slides and notes

Animated and enthusiastic presence

Simple presentation

By playing down incomprehensible techie language and focusing on the sheer excitement of Apple products, Jobs makes business marketing to the average consumer simple. In a recent presentation for his video iPod, Jobs exclaimed, "It's the best music player we've made. It has a gorgeous screen, the color is fantastic and the video quality is amazing." And as it happens, everyone whole-heartedly concurs.

So is Steve Jobs a scam artist or a shrewd businessman? The answer is the same to this question as “Are Macs really worth the money”- it depends on who you ask. However if we judge by the overwhelming popularity of Apple products, it seems that Mr. Jobs is, in fact, a very smart businessman.