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Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011
TECHNOLOGYOCTOBER 6, 2011
Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011
Apple Co-Founder Transformed Technology, Media, Retailing And Built One of the World's Most Valuable Companies
By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
+ Mr. Jobs delivered the keynote address at the 2011 Apple World Wide Developers Conferen…
+ Mr. Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. Shown, Mr. Jobs and CEO John Sculley in 1984.
+ Mr. Jobs spoke at his company NeXt, Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., in 1993.
+ Mr. Jobs unveiled a new titanium G4 Powerbook at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco in…
+ Mr. Jobs stood in the Soho Apple store in 2002.
+ Mr. Jobs held the new iPhone 4 at the 2010 in San Francisco on June 7, 2010.
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Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal-computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday at the age of 56.
His family, in a statement released by Apple, said Mr. Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family."
The company didn't specify the cause of death. Mr. Jobs had battled pancreatic cancer and several years ago received a liver transplant. In August, Mr. Jobs stepped down as chief executive, handing the reins to longtime deputy Tim Cook.
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," Mr. Cook said in a letter to employees. "We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much."
Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at the age of 56. A look back at the life of an American business icon. (Photo: Getty Images)
During his more than three-decade career, Mr. Jobs transformed Silicon Valley as he helped turn the once-sleepy expanse of fruit orchards into the technology industry's innovation center. In addition to laying the groundwork for the industry alongside others like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed products over the power of technology itself and transformed the way people interact with technology.
More on Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs Video
Jobs Speech: 'Find What You Love'
Steve Jobs's Best Quotes
Jobs's August Resignation
Mum on Succession, Board Got Heat
Walt Mossberg on Jobs's Legacy: Changing How We Live
Jobs Struggled With Health Problems for Years
Opinion: The Importance of Jobs
Opinion: Steve Jobs and the Death of the Personal Computer
Digits
Steve Jobs's Resignation Letter to Apple
What Was Steve Jobs's Most Influential Product?
The Entrepreneurs Who Look to Steve Jobs
Letter From Tim Cook: 'Apple Is Not Going to Change'
From the Archives
Absent Jobs, Cook Emerges as Key to Apple's Core 06/23/2009
Some Apple Directors Ponder CEO Succession 7/20/2011
"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come," Mr. Gates said in a statement Wednesday.
The most productive chapter in Mr. Jobs's career occurred near the end of his life, when a nearly unbroken string of successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad changed the PC, electronics and digital-media industries. The way he marketed and sold those products through savvy advertising campaigns and Apple's retail stores helped turn the company into a pop-culture phenomenon.
At the beginning of that phase, Mr. Jobs described his philosophy as trying to make products that were at "the intersection of art and technology." In doing so, he turned Apple into the world's most valuable company with a market value of $350 billion.
After losing considerable weight in mid-2008, Mr. Jobs took a nearly six-month medical leave of absence in 2009, during which he received a liver transplant. He took another medical leave of absence in mid-January, without explanation, before stepping down as CEO.
Mr. Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene, and four children.
Among Steve Jobs's legacy was a gift for presentation and speech-making that changed the way tech companies unveiled new products, Lauren Goode reports on a special edition of the News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.
Mr. Jobs turned Apple into the largest retailer of music and helped popularize computer-animated films as the financier and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which he later sold to Walt Disney Co. He was a key figure in changing the way people used the Internet and how they listened to music, watched TV shows and movies, and read books, disrupting industries in the process.
"Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started," Disney CEO Robert Iger said in a statement Wednesday.
Mr. Jobs pulled off a remarkable business comeback, returning to Apple after an 11-year absence during which he was largely written off as a has-been. He went on to revive the struggling company by introducing products such as the iMac all-in-one computer, iPod music player and iTunes digital-music store.
Beyond PCs
Apple now produces $65.2 billion a year in revenue compared with $7.1 billion in its business year ended September 1997. Apple dropped the "computer" in its name in January 2007 to underscore its expansion beyond PCs.
Steve Jobs: Personal Media Pioneer
Photos: Steve Jobs Through the Years
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Timeline: Steve Jobs and Apple
The Apple Evolution
Associated Press
More photos and interactive graphics
Although Mr. Jobs officially handed over the reins of the company to Mr. Cook, his death nevertheless raises a question for Apple of how it will sustain its success without his vision and guidance. Other companies, including Walt Disney, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., experienced some transitional woes before eventually managing to thrive after their charismatic founders passed on.
But few companies of that stature have shown such an acute dependence on their founder, or have lost the founder at the peak of his career. Several years after Mr. Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company began a steady decline that saw it drift to the margins of the computer industry. That slide was reversed only after Mr. Jobs returned in 1997.
Mr. Jobs also leaves behind many tales about his mercurial management style, such as his habit of calling employees or their ideas "dumb" when he didn't like something. He was even more combative against foes like Microsoft, Google Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. When Adobe Systems Inc. waged a campaign against Apple for not supporting Adobe's Flash video format on its iPhones and iPads in April 2010, Mr. Jobs wrote a 1,600-word essay about why the software was outdated and inadequate for mobile devices.
He maintained uncompromising standards for the company's hardware and software, demanding "insanely great" aesthetics and ease of use from the moment a shopper walked into one of Apple's stores. His attention to detail shaped some of the distinctive features of Apple's products.
Mr. Jobs enforced strict secrecy among employees, a strategy that he believed heightened anticipation for new products. News of his death came a day after Apple unveiled its newest device, the iPhone 4S, without him on stage.
Mr. Jobs, the adopted son of a family in California, was born on Feb. 24, 1955. A college dropout, he established his reputation early on as a tech innovator when, at 21 years old, he and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs family garage in 1976. Mr. Jobs chose the name, in part, because he was a Beatles fan and admired the group's Apple records label, according to the book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Carlton.
The pair came out with the Apple II in 1977, a computer that was relatively affordable and designed for the mass market rather than for hobbyists. It went on to become one of the first commercially successful PCs, making the company $117 million in annual sales by the time of Apple's initial public offering in 1980. The IPO instantly made Mr. Jobs a multimillionaire.
Not all of Mr. Jobs's early ideas paid off. The Apple III and Lisa computers that debuted in 1980 and 1983 were flops. But the distinctive all-in-one Macintosh—foreshadowed in a TV ad inspired by George Orwell's novel "1984" that famously only aired once—would set the standard for the design of modern computer operating systems.
Even then, Mr. Jobs was a stickler for design details. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at Apple who joined the company in 1978, once said that Mr. Jobs was adamant than the keyboard not include "up," "down," "right," and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens.
Cultivated Image
Mr. Jobs's pursuit of aesthetics sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers attractive. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he persuaded Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.
Even in his appearance, Mr. Jobs seemed to cultivate an image more like that of an artist than a corporate executive. In public, he rarely deviated from an outfit consisting of Levi's jeans, a black mock turtleneck and New Balance running shoes.
As Apple expanded, Mr. Jobs decided to bring in a more experienced manager to lead the company. He recruited John Sculley from PepsiCo Inc. to be Apple CEO in 1983, overcoming Mr. Sculley's initial reluctance by asking the executive if he just wanted to sell "sugar water to kids" or help change the world.
After Apple fell into a subsequent slump, a leadership struggle led to a board decision to back Mr. Sculley and fire Mr. Jobs two years later at the age of 30. "What can I say—I hired the wrong guy," Mr. Jobs brooded in a PBS documentary. "He destroyed everything I had spent 10 years working for."
Getty Images
Steve Jobs is shown above at an Apple conference in June, one of his final public appearances as CEO.
Mr. Jobs then created NeXT Inc., a start-up that in 1988 introduced a black desktop computer with advanced software. The machine suffered from a high price and some key design decisions. But its operating system would eventually become a foundation for OS X, the software backbone of today's Macs, after Apple purchased NeXT for $400 million in December 1996.
In 1986, using part of his fortune from Apple, Mr. Jobs paid filmmaker George Lucas $10 million to acquire the computer-graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. The company Mr. Jobs formed from that purchase, Pixar Animation Studios, went on to create a string of computer-animated film hits, such as "Toy Story." Mr. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 in a $7.4 billion deal.
In Mr. Jobs's absence, Apple began foundering, and computers using Intel chips and Microsoft software became increasingly dominant. By 1997, Apple had racked up nearly $2 billion in losses in two years, its shares were at record lows and it was on its third CEO—Gil Amelio—in four years.
Eight months after the deal to buy NeXT in December 1996, Mr. Amelio was ousted and Mr. Jobs appointed interim CEO, a title that became permanent in January 2000. One former Apple employee recalls Mr. Jobs joking soon after he returned that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want."
Series of Stumbles
Mr. Jobs, who was given a salary of $1 a year along with options to Apple stock, made a series of changes. He killed the struggling Newton handheld computer and trimmed a confusing array of Mac models to a handful of systems focused on the consumer market.
In May 1998, he introduced the iMac, an unusual one-piece computer that sported a colorful translucent case. Apple launched an ad campaign featuring the phrase "Think Different," featuring photographs of creative individuals including Albert Einstein and Muppets creator Jim Henson.
While shareholders cheered the changes, Mr. Jobs flexed his power on Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus. Within months of taking over, he replaced four of the five top executives with former NeXT underlings. He issued emails forbidding employees to bring pets to the office or to smoke, even in parking lots. He threatened to fire anyone caught leaking company documents.
Apple had stumbles during Mr. Jobs's second stint, including a cube-shaped Macintosh that failed to catch on and was scrapped in 2001. The failure was one reason Apple posted a quarterly loss and warned it would miss estimates several times in 2000 and 2001.
But big hits followed. In 2001, Apple introduced the iPod, which transformed digital music players. Apple has more than 70% market share in the market.
A key advantage was the iTunes Music Store, opened in 2003. Mr. Jobs helped persuade major record labels to sell recordings for 99 cents each. The store, which has sold more than 16 billion songs, became an incentive for people to buy iPods because, for much of its history, songs from the iTunes store could be downloaded only to Apple's music player.
Bench of Executives
At the same time, Mr. Jobs was building his bench of executives. He recruited Mr. Cook, a former Compaq Computer Corp. executive, in the late 1990s to straighten Apple's operations and promoted him over time to chief operating officer.
In 2004, Mr. Jobs had to lean on this bench when he disclosed that he had had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. Apple revealed the procedure in early August 2004, but a person familiar with the situation said Mr. Jobs first learned of the tumor during a routine abdominal scan nine months earlier. The board and Mr. Jobs said nothing to Apple shareholders as the Apple executive, during that time, dealt with the tumor through changes to his diet, the person said.
In June 2007, Mr. Jobs made another splash when Apple introduced the iPhone. Mr. Jobs was typically hands-on in the creation of the iPhone. People familiar with the matter say the former CEO was the one who made a decision to change the screen of the iPhone from plastic to glass after he unveiled the product at the Macworld trade show in 2007. The iPhone team scrambled to procure glass that would meet his standards, so the devices could be manufactured in time for the launch.
Despite skepticism about Apple's ability to enter an already competitive market dominated by the likes of Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices, Apple became a force in the mobile phone market, selling 92 million iPhones as of December 2010.
Last year, Mr. Jobs also unveiled the iPad tablet computer to great fanfare. Apple has sold more than 29 million iPads as buyers snapped them up. People who work closely with Mr. Jobs said the project was so important to him that he was deeply involved in its planning even while recovering from his 2009 liver transplant.
Those who knew Mr. Jobs say one reason why he was able to keep innovating was because he didn't dwell on past accomplishments and demanded that employees do the same. Hitoshi Hokamura, a former Apple employee, recalls how an old Apple I that was displayed by the company cafeteria quietly disappeared after Mr. Jobs returned in the late 1990s.
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Mr. Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005, almost a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.
—Pui-Wing Tam, Don Clark and Jim Carlton contributed to this article.
Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com and Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304447804576410753210811910.html#ixzz1ZyBh27iG
Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011
Apple Co-Founder Transformed Technology, Media, Retailing And Built One of the World's Most Valuable Companies
By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
+ Mr. Jobs delivered the keynote address at the 2011 Apple World Wide Developers Conferen…
+ Mr. Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. Shown, Mr. Jobs and CEO John Sculley in 1984.
+ Mr. Jobs spoke at his company NeXt, Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., in 1993.
+ Mr. Jobs unveiled a new titanium G4 Powerbook at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco in…
+ Mr. Jobs stood in the Soho Apple store in 2002.
+ Mr. Jobs held the new iPhone 4 at the 2010 in San Francisco on June 7, 2010.
1/6
prev
next
Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal-computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday at the age of 56.
His family, in a statement released by Apple, said Mr. Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family."
The company didn't specify the cause of death. Mr. Jobs had battled pancreatic cancer and several years ago received a liver transplant. In August, Mr. Jobs stepped down as chief executive, handing the reins to longtime deputy Tim Cook.
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," Mr. Cook said in a letter to employees. "We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much."
Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at the age of 56. A look back at the life of an American business icon. (Photo: Getty Images)
During his more than three-decade career, Mr. Jobs transformed Silicon Valley as he helped turn the once-sleepy expanse of fruit orchards into the technology industry's innovation center. In addition to laying the groundwork for the industry alongside others like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed products over the power of technology itself and transformed the way people interact with technology.
More on Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs Video
Jobs Speech: 'Find What You Love'
Steve Jobs's Best Quotes
Jobs's August Resignation
Mum on Succession, Board Got Heat
Walt Mossberg on Jobs's Legacy: Changing How We Live
Jobs Struggled With Health Problems for Years
Opinion: The Importance of Jobs
Opinion: Steve Jobs and the Death of the Personal Computer
Digits
Steve Jobs's Resignation Letter to Apple
What Was Steve Jobs's Most Influential Product?
The Entrepreneurs Who Look to Steve Jobs
Letter From Tim Cook: 'Apple Is Not Going to Change'
From the Archives
Absent Jobs, Cook Emerges as Key to Apple's Core 06/23/2009
Some Apple Directors Ponder CEO Succession 7/20/2011
"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come," Mr. Gates said in a statement Wednesday.
The most productive chapter in Mr. Jobs's career occurred near the end of his life, when a nearly unbroken string of successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad changed the PC, electronics and digital-media industries. The way he marketed and sold those products through savvy advertising campaigns and Apple's retail stores helped turn the company into a pop-culture phenomenon.
At the beginning of that phase, Mr. Jobs described his philosophy as trying to make products that were at "the intersection of art and technology." In doing so, he turned Apple into the world's most valuable company with a market value of $350 billion.
After losing considerable weight in mid-2008, Mr. Jobs took a nearly six-month medical leave of absence in 2009, during which he received a liver transplant. He took another medical leave of absence in mid-January, without explanation, before stepping down as CEO.
Mr. Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene, and four children.
Among Steve Jobs's legacy was a gift for presentation and speech-making that changed the way tech companies unveiled new products, Lauren Goode reports on a special edition of the News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.
Mr. Jobs turned Apple into the largest retailer of music and helped popularize computer-animated films as the financier and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which he later sold to Walt Disney Co. He was a key figure in changing the way people used the Internet and how they listened to music, watched TV shows and movies, and read books, disrupting industries in the process.
"Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started," Disney CEO Robert Iger said in a statement Wednesday.
Mr. Jobs pulled off a remarkable business comeback, returning to Apple after an 11-year absence during which he was largely written off as a has-been. He went on to revive the struggling company by introducing products such as the iMac all-in-one computer, iPod music player and iTunes digital-music store.
Beyond PCs
Apple now produces $65.2 billion a year in revenue compared with $7.1 billion in its business year ended September 1997. Apple dropped the "computer" in its name in January 2007 to underscore its expansion beyond PCs.
Steve Jobs: Personal Media Pioneer
Photos: Steve Jobs Through the Years
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Timeline: Steve Jobs and Apple
The Apple Evolution
Associated Press
More photos and interactive graphics
Although Mr. Jobs officially handed over the reins of the company to Mr. Cook, his death nevertheless raises a question for Apple of how it will sustain its success without his vision and guidance. Other companies, including Walt Disney, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., experienced some transitional woes before eventually managing to thrive after their charismatic founders passed on.
But few companies of that stature have shown such an acute dependence on their founder, or have lost the founder at the peak of his career. Several years after Mr. Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company began a steady decline that saw it drift to the margins of the computer industry. That slide was reversed only after Mr. Jobs returned in 1997.
Mr. Jobs also leaves behind many tales about his mercurial management style, such as his habit of calling employees or their ideas "dumb" when he didn't like something. He was even more combative against foes like Microsoft, Google Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. When Adobe Systems Inc. waged a campaign against Apple for not supporting Adobe's Flash video format on its iPhones and iPads in April 2010, Mr. Jobs wrote a 1,600-word essay about why the software was outdated and inadequate for mobile devices.
He maintained uncompromising standards for the company's hardware and software, demanding "insanely great" aesthetics and ease of use from the moment a shopper walked into one of Apple's stores. His attention to detail shaped some of the distinctive features of Apple's products.
Mr. Jobs enforced strict secrecy among employees, a strategy that he believed heightened anticipation for new products. News of his death came a day after Apple unveiled its newest device, the iPhone 4S, without him on stage.
Mr. Jobs, the adopted son of a family in California, was born on Feb. 24, 1955. A college dropout, he established his reputation early on as a tech innovator when, at 21 years old, he and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs family garage in 1976. Mr. Jobs chose the name, in part, because he was a Beatles fan and admired the group's Apple records label, according to the book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Carlton.
The pair came out with the Apple II in 1977, a computer that was relatively affordable and designed for the mass market rather than for hobbyists. It went on to become one of the first commercially successful PCs, making the company $117 million in annual sales by the time of Apple's initial public offering in 1980. The IPO instantly made Mr. Jobs a multimillionaire.
Not all of Mr. Jobs's early ideas paid off. The Apple III and Lisa computers that debuted in 1980 and 1983 were flops. But the distinctive all-in-one Macintosh—foreshadowed in a TV ad inspired by George Orwell's novel "1984" that famously only aired once—would set the standard for the design of modern computer operating systems.
Even then, Mr. Jobs was a stickler for design details. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at Apple who joined the company in 1978, once said that Mr. Jobs was adamant than the keyboard not include "up," "down," "right," and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens.
Cultivated Image
Mr. Jobs's pursuit of aesthetics sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers attractive. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he persuaded Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.
Even in his appearance, Mr. Jobs seemed to cultivate an image more like that of an artist than a corporate executive. In public, he rarely deviated from an outfit consisting of Levi's jeans, a black mock turtleneck and New Balance running shoes.
As Apple expanded, Mr. Jobs decided to bring in a more experienced manager to lead the company. He recruited John Sculley from PepsiCo Inc. to be Apple CEO in 1983, overcoming Mr. Sculley's initial reluctance by asking the executive if he just wanted to sell "sugar water to kids" or help change the world.
After Apple fell into a subsequent slump, a leadership struggle led to a board decision to back Mr. Sculley and fire Mr. Jobs two years later at the age of 30. "What can I say—I hired the wrong guy," Mr. Jobs brooded in a PBS documentary. "He destroyed everything I had spent 10 years working for."
Getty Images
Steve Jobs is shown above at an Apple conference in June, one of his final public appearances as CEO.
Mr. Jobs then created NeXT Inc., a start-up that in 1988 introduced a black desktop computer with advanced software. The machine suffered from a high price and some key design decisions. But its operating system would eventually become a foundation for OS X, the software backbone of today's Macs, after Apple purchased NeXT for $400 million in December 1996.
In 1986, using part of his fortune from Apple, Mr. Jobs paid filmmaker George Lucas $10 million to acquire the computer-graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. The company Mr. Jobs formed from that purchase, Pixar Animation Studios, went on to create a string of computer-animated film hits, such as "Toy Story." Mr. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 in a $7.4 billion deal.
In Mr. Jobs's absence, Apple began foundering, and computers using Intel chips and Microsoft software became increasingly dominant. By 1997, Apple had racked up nearly $2 billion in losses in two years, its shares were at record lows and it was on its third CEO—Gil Amelio—in four years.
Eight months after the deal to buy NeXT in December 1996, Mr. Amelio was ousted and Mr. Jobs appointed interim CEO, a title that became permanent in January 2000. One former Apple employee recalls Mr. Jobs joking soon after he returned that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want."
Series of Stumbles
Mr. Jobs, who was given a salary of $1 a year along with options to Apple stock, made a series of changes. He killed the struggling Newton handheld computer and trimmed a confusing array of Mac models to a handful of systems focused on the consumer market.
In May 1998, he introduced the iMac, an unusual one-piece computer that sported a colorful translucent case. Apple launched an ad campaign featuring the phrase "Think Different," featuring photographs of creative individuals including Albert Einstein and Muppets creator Jim Henson.
While shareholders cheered the changes, Mr. Jobs flexed his power on Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus. Within months of taking over, he replaced four of the five top executives with former NeXT underlings. He issued emails forbidding employees to bring pets to the office or to smoke, even in parking lots. He threatened to fire anyone caught leaking company documents.
Apple had stumbles during Mr. Jobs's second stint, including a cube-shaped Macintosh that failed to catch on and was scrapped in 2001. The failure was one reason Apple posted a quarterly loss and warned it would miss estimates several times in 2000 and 2001.
But big hits followed. In 2001, Apple introduced the iPod, which transformed digital music players. Apple has more than 70% market share in the market.
A key advantage was the iTunes Music Store, opened in 2003. Mr. Jobs helped persuade major record labels to sell recordings for 99 cents each. The store, which has sold more than 16 billion songs, became an incentive for people to buy iPods because, for much of its history, songs from the iTunes store could be downloaded only to Apple's music player.
Bench of Executives
At the same time, Mr. Jobs was building his bench of executives. He recruited Mr. Cook, a former Compaq Computer Corp. executive, in the late 1990s to straighten Apple's operations and promoted him over time to chief operating officer.
In 2004, Mr. Jobs had to lean on this bench when he disclosed that he had had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. Apple revealed the procedure in early August 2004, but a person familiar with the situation said Mr. Jobs first learned of the tumor during a routine abdominal scan nine months earlier. The board and Mr. Jobs said nothing to Apple shareholders as the Apple executive, during that time, dealt with the tumor through changes to his diet, the person said.
In June 2007, Mr. Jobs made another splash when Apple introduced the iPhone. Mr. Jobs was typically hands-on in the creation of the iPhone. People familiar with the matter say the former CEO was the one who made a decision to change the screen of the iPhone from plastic to glass after he unveiled the product at the Macworld trade show in 2007. The iPhone team scrambled to procure glass that would meet his standards, so the devices could be manufactured in time for the launch.
Despite skepticism about Apple's ability to enter an already competitive market dominated by the likes of Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices, Apple became a force in the mobile phone market, selling 92 million iPhones as of December 2010.
Last year, Mr. Jobs also unveiled the iPad tablet computer to great fanfare. Apple has sold more than 29 million iPads as buyers snapped them up. People who work closely with Mr. Jobs said the project was so important to him that he was deeply involved in its planning even while recovering from his 2009 liver transplant.
Those who knew Mr. Jobs say one reason why he was able to keep innovating was because he didn't dwell on past accomplishments and demanded that employees do the same. Hitoshi Hokamura, a former Apple employee, recalls how an old Apple I that was displayed by the company cafeteria quietly disappeared after Mr. Jobs returned in the late 1990s.
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Mr. Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005, almost a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.
—Pui-Wing Tam, Don Clark and Jim Carlton contributed to this article.
Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com and Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304447804576410753210811910.html#ixzz1ZyBh27iG
Thursday, August 18, 2011
HP's strategic shift away from TouchPad; PCs, too?
If there's a notch on the technology timeline demarcating the PC and post-PC eras, we might have just crossed it.
Hewlett-Packard on Thursday effectively announced it was done with the personal computer, extending a crazy week in tech news that saw Google double down on mobile devices with its enormous bid for a Motorola division.
HP, a storied brand that was instrumental in expanding the PC industry, announced that its board had authorized exploring "strategic alternatives" for its computer division. That's corporate speak for a sale or spin-off.
The Palo Alto tech giant and the industry as a whole have seen a drop-off in laptop and desktop sales and margins, as consumers shift to tablets and smart phones.
And yet ... HP also announced plans to discontinue the phones and tablets based on the operating system it acquired through its now clearly ill-fated $1.2 billion purchase of Palm last year. That means it's pulling the plug on its highly promoted TouchPad tablet, less than two months after it hit the market.
The news underscores two critical points about the state of the technology industry:
First, we're rapidly moving into a world where consumer demand for mobile devices is outstripping that for PCs, dampening business prospects for the sector.
Think about it this way: HP, the largest PC manufacturer, a company whose Silicon Valley history predates the personal computer itself, is effectively saying there isn't enough upside to bother staying in the game.
"The increasing momentum of the media tablet market, led by the iPad, is creating a difficult environment for the PC industry," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst at research firm IHS iSuppli, in a recent report.
Second, even companies trying to embrace the post-PC world are struggling to get their arms around it as Apple crowds them out. A year and a half after the Cupertino company introduced its breakthrough iPad, not a single serious rival has emerged. The industry blog All Things D reported this week that Best Buy has sold only 25,000 HP TouchPads, less than 10 percent of the supply sitting in warehouses. That compares with more than 9 million iPads sold in the last quarter.
It seems even heavyweight contenders like HP can drop big dollars without making so much as a dent.
Consumer impact
For consumers, these trends are a mixed bag. They'll likely see falling prices for PCs, but it means yet another business has failed to gain strength in mobile computing. Less competition invariably means fewer options in the market and more pricing power for leaders like Apple.
On a conference call Thursday, HP Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjack said the company decided to exit the tablet business due to weak sales and suggested it had no plans to try again.
"With such a young ecosystem and poorly received hardware, we were unable to achieve our target," she said.
It's hard to see HP's retreat as anything less than a validation of the post-PC vision articulated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
"A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they're looking at this as the next PC," Jobs was quoted as saying at the unveiling of the iPad 2 in March. "The hardware and the software are done by different companies. And they're talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs.
"And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC."
Jobs' words ring even more true in light of Google's announcement on Monday that it plans to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in what would be by far its largest acquisition.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/18/MN5H1KP2PP.DTL#ixzz1VSGOKn2n
Hewlett-Packard on Thursday effectively announced it was done with the personal computer, extending a crazy week in tech news that saw Google double down on mobile devices with its enormous bid for a Motorola division.
HP, a storied brand that was instrumental in expanding the PC industry, announced that its board had authorized exploring "strategic alternatives" for its computer division. That's corporate speak for a sale or spin-off.
The Palo Alto tech giant and the industry as a whole have seen a drop-off in laptop and desktop sales and margins, as consumers shift to tablets and smart phones.
And yet ... HP also announced plans to discontinue the phones and tablets based on the operating system it acquired through its now clearly ill-fated $1.2 billion purchase of Palm last year. That means it's pulling the plug on its highly promoted TouchPad tablet, less than two months after it hit the market.
The news underscores two critical points about the state of the technology industry:
First, we're rapidly moving into a world where consumer demand for mobile devices is outstripping that for PCs, dampening business prospects for the sector.
Think about it this way: HP, the largest PC manufacturer, a company whose Silicon Valley history predates the personal computer itself, is effectively saying there isn't enough upside to bother staying in the game.
"The increasing momentum of the media tablet market, led by the iPad, is creating a difficult environment for the PC industry," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst at research firm IHS iSuppli, in a recent report.
Second, even companies trying to embrace the post-PC world are struggling to get their arms around it as Apple crowds them out. A year and a half after the Cupertino company introduced its breakthrough iPad, not a single serious rival has emerged. The industry blog All Things D reported this week that Best Buy has sold only 25,000 HP TouchPads, less than 10 percent of the supply sitting in warehouses. That compares with more than 9 million iPads sold in the last quarter.
It seems even heavyweight contenders like HP can drop big dollars without making so much as a dent.
Consumer impact
For consumers, these trends are a mixed bag. They'll likely see falling prices for PCs, but it means yet another business has failed to gain strength in mobile computing. Less competition invariably means fewer options in the market and more pricing power for leaders like Apple.
On a conference call Thursday, HP Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjack said the company decided to exit the tablet business due to weak sales and suggested it had no plans to try again.
"With such a young ecosystem and poorly received hardware, we were unable to achieve our target," she said.
It's hard to see HP's retreat as anything less than a validation of the post-PC vision articulated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
"A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they're looking at this as the next PC," Jobs was quoted as saying at the unveiling of the iPad 2 in March. "The hardware and the software are done by different companies. And they're talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs.
"And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC."
Jobs' words ring even more true in light of Google's announcement on Monday that it plans to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in what would be by far its largest acquisition.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/18/MN5H1KP2PP.DTL#ixzz1VSGOKn2n
H-P Reports, Plans to Sell PC Biz
Mark Vickery, On Thursday August 18, 2011, 4:47 pm EDT
A funny thing happened on the way to tech giant Hewlett-Packard's (NYSE: HPQ - News) fiscal 3rd quarter 2011 earnings report, which was supposed to have come out after the closing bell Thursday. When reports leaked that H-P was planning to spin-off its PC business and was seeking to purchase British-based software firm Autonomy for $10 billion, this forced the company to report earlier than expected.
Confirmed by Hewlett-Packard was that it is indeed spinning off its entire PC business -- on both the Consumer and Enterprise sides. This marks a ground-shifting reversal for the company, which in 2002 became the biggest player in the PC market with its purchase of Compaq. H-P also said it will be doing away with its webOS business.
Oh, and by the way, H-P posted adjusted earnings of $1.10 per share on revenues of $31.2 billion in the quarter, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimates of $1.09 and $31.1 billion, respectively. H-P also lowered its full-year revenue guidance from $129-130 billion down to $127.2-127.6 billion.
In another bloody day of regular trading, HPQ shares tumbles roughly 6%. After hours, the sell-off continues -- the shares are down another 2.4% as of the writing of this article.
CEO Leo Apotheker appears to be focused on increasing profit margins by both selling off the company's PC unit and its pursuit of Autonomy, which specializes in Enterprise-side information management software. While profit margins in the PC business remain in the mid-single digits, H-P's Enterprise business sees 15% profit margins. The company expects the spin-off will take place within the next 12-18 months.
Very few analyst estimate revisions had been taking place during the course of the quarter, but with the company lowering guidance for fiscal year 2011, we expect analysts covering H-P will be much busier over the next few days. Among their concerns will be how shedding the PC business -- which accounts for roughly one-third of H-P's business overall -- will affect the company's numbers in the near term.
HEWLETT PACKARD CO (HPQ): Read the Full Research Report
Zacks Investment Research
A funny thing happened on the way to tech giant Hewlett-Packard's (NYSE: HPQ - News) fiscal 3rd quarter 2011 earnings report, which was supposed to have come out after the closing bell Thursday. When reports leaked that H-P was planning to spin-off its PC business and was seeking to purchase British-based software firm Autonomy for $10 billion, this forced the company to report earlier than expected.
Confirmed by Hewlett-Packard was that it is indeed spinning off its entire PC business -- on both the Consumer and Enterprise sides. This marks a ground-shifting reversal for the company, which in 2002 became the biggest player in the PC market with its purchase of Compaq. H-P also said it will be doing away with its webOS business.
Oh, and by the way, H-P posted adjusted earnings of $1.10 per share on revenues of $31.2 billion in the quarter, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimates of $1.09 and $31.1 billion, respectively. H-P also lowered its full-year revenue guidance from $129-130 billion down to $127.2-127.6 billion.
In another bloody day of regular trading, HPQ shares tumbles roughly 6%. After hours, the sell-off continues -- the shares are down another 2.4% as of the writing of this article.
CEO Leo Apotheker appears to be focused on increasing profit margins by both selling off the company's PC unit and its pursuit of Autonomy, which specializes in Enterprise-side information management software. While profit margins in the PC business remain in the mid-single digits, H-P's Enterprise business sees 15% profit margins. The company expects the spin-off will take place within the next 12-18 months.
Very few analyst estimate revisions had been taking place during the course of the quarter, but with the company lowering guidance for fiscal year 2011, we expect analysts covering H-P will be much busier over the next few days. Among their concerns will be how shedding the PC business -- which accounts for roughly one-third of H-P's business overall -- will affect the company's numbers in the near term.
HEWLETT PACKARD CO (HPQ): Read the Full Research Report
Zacks Investment Research
Palm largely dead as HP shuts phone, tablet unit
Rachel Metz, AP Technology Writer, On Friday August 19, 2011, 12:13 am EDT
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- When Hewlett-Packard Co. snapped up Palm Inc. last year for $1.8 billion, it looked like the smartphone pioneer's last chance.
Palm was a year into a major turnaround effort but gaining little traction despite a hip, new CEO known for making the iPod a household name. It had high hopes for its latest handset, the Pre, which ran on the company's new, intuitive operating software, known as webOS. It needed a savior, and HP, which itself needed a boost in the mobile technology market, seemed like its best bet for survival.
It didn't work. With fierce competition from Apple Inc.'s iPhone and smartphones running Google Inc.'s Android software, HP's handsets running the webOS software developed by Palm have been just a blip on most consumers' radar screens. A tablet called the TouchPad, released in July and also running webOS, has also sold poorly.
The market seemed too tough for HP to forge ahead: The technology conglomerate said Thursday that it is shuttering its mobile device business, which includes the webOS-running smartphones and TouchPad.
The announcement came as HP said it also plans to sell or spin off its PC division. Together, the moves would take HP out of the consumer market, though it will continue to sell servers and other equipment to business customers.
Technology developed by Palm (a brand name HP has phased out) may still exist in some form. In an interview, HP CEO Leo Apotheker said the company was disappointed more with the hardware sales than the performance of the webOS software, which it will try to keep alive in some way. HP is studying its options, which could include licensing the software to handset makers or allowing them to use it for free as open-source software, as Google does with Android.
Still, for Palm, the decision sounds largely like a death knell that comes after nearly 20 years of mobile technology innovation, ownership changes and failed efforts to become a leader in the handheld market.
Palm, founded by Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins in 1992, helped create the handheld computing market with its Palm Pilot "personal digital assistants" in the 1990s. But after Palm reshuffled itself repeatedly -- it was bought by U.S. Robotics, a modem maker that itself was bought by 3Com Corp. in 1997, and then spun off again as its own company in 2000 -- other companies took control of the market. In 2003, Palm acquired Handspring -- a rival startup Dubinsky and Hawkins created-- and spun off PalmSource, which made the PalmOS handheld computing software, as an independently traded company. Japan's Access Co. bought PalmSource in 2005.
Speaking to The Associated Press several months before HP announced it was buying Palm, Dubinsky said all the shuffling took "critical resources and attention from product development." And even though it happened years ago, she called the decision to spin off PalmOS a "huge strategic error."
"As RIM, Apple and Palm all have demonstrated, these devices need to be highly integrated hardware and software developments in order to optimize the user experience," Dubinsky wrote in an e-mail to the AP. "When Palm no longer could advance the OS, and had to create a new one, it lost several years."
By early 2009, Palm readied itself for a big comeback. At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company unveiled the stylish touch-screen Pre and webOS software, which at the time could do something the iPhone couldn't: run multiple applications simultaneously.
One more ingredient it hoped would revitalize the company was the addition of a leader who helped make Apple what it is today.
Just before the Pre's launch, Palm replaced then-CEO Ed Colligan with Jon Rubinstein, who spent a decade at Apple during that company's comeback run. Rubinstein, who started at Apple in 1997, was a pivotal figure behind the brightly colored iMacs and the iPod.
He came to Palm in 2007 as executive chairman under a deal in which Palm sold nearly a third of the company to private equity firm Elevation Partners (when HP acquired Palm, it bought out Elevation's stake).
But Palm's efforts turned out to be too little, too late. While many analysts and critics felt webOS and the Pre were good, consumers weren't biting. Subsequent smartphones released under Palm and, more recently, through HP, have also failed to impress shoppers.
Speaking at a tech conference late last year, Rubinstein said competitors simply innovated too fast for Palm to catch up.
"The world moved faster than we expected and we ran out of runway," he said.
Indeed, since Palm's comeback attempt, the popularity of the iPhone has only grown while phones running Android, which first hit the market in 2008, abound. According to research firm IDC, Apple took the top spot in the second quarter, while Samsung Electronics Co. -- a big maker of Android phones-- took second place in unit sales. Nokia Corp. came in third, while BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. took fourth.
Rubinstein, currently a senior vice president of HP's personal systems group, said Palm studied a number of alternatives to being bought by HP. He said HP was a good choice because, as the largest computer company in the world by revenue, it could help Palm bring its products to more people.
As it turns out, the mobile pioneer will largely cease to exist.
AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson contributed to this report.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- When Hewlett-Packard Co. snapped up Palm Inc. last year for $1.8 billion, it looked like the smartphone pioneer's last chance.
Palm was a year into a major turnaround effort but gaining little traction despite a hip, new CEO known for making the iPod a household name. It had high hopes for its latest handset, the Pre, which ran on the company's new, intuitive operating software, known as webOS. It needed a savior, and HP, which itself needed a boost in the mobile technology market, seemed like its best bet for survival.
It didn't work. With fierce competition from Apple Inc.'s iPhone and smartphones running Google Inc.'s Android software, HP's handsets running the webOS software developed by Palm have been just a blip on most consumers' radar screens. A tablet called the TouchPad, released in July and also running webOS, has also sold poorly.
The market seemed too tough for HP to forge ahead: The technology conglomerate said Thursday that it is shuttering its mobile device business, which includes the webOS-running smartphones and TouchPad.
The announcement came as HP said it also plans to sell or spin off its PC division. Together, the moves would take HP out of the consumer market, though it will continue to sell servers and other equipment to business customers.
Technology developed by Palm (a brand name HP has phased out) may still exist in some form. In an interview, HP CEO Leo Apotheker said the company was disappointed more with the hardware sales than the performance of the webOS software, which it will try to keep alive in some way. HP is studying its options, which could include licensing the software to handset makers or allowing them to use it for free as open-source software, as Google does with Android.
Still, for Palm, the decision sounds largely like a death knell that comes after nearly 20 years of mobile technology innovation, ownership changes and failed efforts to become a leader in the handheld market.
Palm, founded by Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins in 1992, helped create the handheld computing market with its Palm Pilot "personal digital assistants" in the 1990s. But after Palm reshuffled itself repeatedly -- it was bought by U.S. Robotics, a modem maker that itself was bought by 3Com Corp. in 1997, and then spun off again as its own company in 2000 -- other companies took control of the market. In 2003, Palm acquired Handspring -- a rival startup Dubinsky and Hawkins created-- and spun off PalmSource, which made the PalmOS handheld computing software, as an independently traded company. Japan's Access Co. bought PalmSource in 2005.
Speaking to The Associated Press several months before HP announced it was buying Palm, Dubinsky said all the shuffling took "critical resources and attention from product development." And even though it happened years ago, she called the decision to spin off PalmOS a "huge strategic error."
"As RIM, Apple and Palm all have demonstrated, these devices need to be highly integrated hardware and software developments in order to optimize the user experience," Dubinsky wrote in an e-mail to the AP. "When Palm no longer could advance the OS, and had to create a new one, it lost several years."
By early 2009, Palm readied itself for a big comeback. At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company unveiled the stylish touch-screen Pre and webOS software, which at the time could do something the iPhone couldn't: run multiple applications simultaneously.
One more ingredient it hoped would revitalize the company was the addition of a leader who helped make Apple what it is today.
Just before the Pre's launch, Palm replaced then-CEO Ed Colligan with Jon Rubinstein, who spent a decade at Apple during that company's comeback run. Rubinstein, who started at Apple in 1997, was a pivotal figure behind the brightly colored iMacs and the iPod.
He came to Palm in 2007 as executive chairman under a deal in which Palm sold nearly a third of the company to private equity firm Elevation Partners (when HP acquired Palm, it bought out Elevation's stake).
But Palm's efforts turned out to be too little, too late. While many analysts and critics felt webOS and the Pre were good, consumers weren't biting. Subsequent smartphones released under Palm and, more recently, through HP, have also failed to impress shoppers.
Speaking at a tech conference late last year, Rubinstein said competitors simply innovated too fast for Palm to catch up.
"The world moved faster than we expected and we ran out of runway," he said.
Indeed, since Palm's comeback attempt, the popularity of the iPhone has only grown while phones running Android, which first hit the market in 2008, abound. According to research firm IDC, Apple took the top spot in the second quarter, while Samsung Electronics Co. -- a big maker of Android phones-- took second place in unit sales. Nokia Corp. came in third, while BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. took fourth.
Rubinstein, currently a senior vice president of HP's personal systems group, said Palm studied a number of alternatives to being bought by HP. He said HP was a good choice because, as the largest computer company in the world by revenue, it could help Palm bring its products to more people.
As it turns out, the mobile pioneer will largely cease to exist.
AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson contributed to this report.
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