Steve Job’s: Lessons from Life, a compilation

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there... Yet death is the destination we all share... Death is very likely the single biggest invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new

Jobs Takes iWay To Heaven An iCon Who Revolutionised Mobile Communications, Music, Movies And Modern Culture, Made Technology Beautiful, Ended The Reign of Personal Computers, And Changed Our Lives At 56, Co-Founder Of Apple Loses Fight Against Cancer

    When historians look back at the life of Steve Jobs, they will chronicle a man of contradiction and genius. Jobs led a company that became one of the world's most valuable enterprises, and easily the most beloved by its customers, with a series of innovative and always elegant products that brought value and pleasure to people's lives. Reams are being written and hours are being broadcasted about what Jobs brought into our lives, but someone put it in just one word:’ joy’. Adults glowed with childlike happiness at owning an Apple device, a line-up that included Mac computers, iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Millions lined up overnight before Apple stores to receive new products as if it were manna from heaven. Jobs introduced the look that changed the feel of today’s devices, brought aesthetics to electronics. Some compared him to Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type, while yet another called him the “Michelangelo of our times”. Still others invoked Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Ford  and Thomas Edison. 

Steve was a former hippy and a practicing Buddhist. Jobs's career was in every sense astonishing. For one, he was a college dropout. He started a computer company in his parents' garage at the age of 21. He had neither formal technical training nor any real business experience. He helped create Apple, the first serious personal computer company. He was banished by the managers he recruited. But his years away were hardly a wilderness. He led Pixar's ascent to one of the world's most creative film studios as it revolutionized animation, and he founded a `failure', NeXT, that became the foundation for the modern Mac operating system. Those years gave him the knowledge and skills he needed to lead Apple into its best years.

But what set him most apart from his peers was an exquisite sense of product design and the ability to intuit what people would want, and use. Combined with his leadership and salesmanship skills, he was the most formidable CEO of recent times.

Steve job was once known as the man who saved apple computers. But he will be remembered as one of the rare few who changed the world. Jobs guided apple from the brink of financial ruin to a lofty place among the world’s most valuable companies. But thinking of jobs merely as the man behind apple’s resurrection would be on par with thinking of the Beatles as just a band that made cool music. As did the fab four, jobs altered the rhythm of modern life.

Job’s expertise was less in computers than it was in the humans who used them. He didn’t invent many things outright but he recognised their power before anyone else did. He was a master in arranging ideas, art and technology in a way that repeatedly invented the future, combining the beauty of poetry and power of processor. He revolutionized six industries, personal computers, animated movies, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. You may even add a seventh Retailing, which he did reimagine.

His passions, demons, desires, artistry, devilry and obsession for control were integrally and intensely connected to his approach of business. His quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end to end control of every product it made.

Job’s learned from his mistakes which were many.

He was the product of American way of Business, where you drive faster, crash, hitch a ride and start again. This attitude worked for Edison, Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie, and it worked for Job’s. 

 The reason for our sadness, this outpouring of feeling on Job’s death is because of the WAY Steve lived his life even more than What he accomplished. More than any other person we are aware of, Steve lived life on his own terms completely oblivious of what others thought of him, and not wasting a second on things he didn't think important. The hole we feel in our hearts then is because Steve truly lived his life in a way we wish to emulate. We, too, wish to have the courage to pursue our dreams without fears, to live our lives on our own terms without caring about the approval of others, and to eventually leave the world a better place.

Technology can make life easier. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.                                                                                                -Steve Jobs

How he made me want to change the world and have some fun while at it

I first read about Steve jobs, ironically, in the autobiography of the man who fired him from apple, john Sculley,  the man who moved from pepsi to apple. ‘Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?’ jobs asked Sculley. That has to be the best job offer anyone has ever made in the corporate world. And it is this uncanny ability to ‘change the world’, not once but several times, that makes jobs the tallest figure among all silicon valley entrepreneurs. It was jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak who imagined a world where every home would have a computer. The ball mouse perhaps would have been just another invention stuck at Xerox’s Palo alto research centre until jobs rescued it from obscurity. The graphic user interface that we take for granted today first made an appearance on the apple Macintosh. I am far more impressed with jobs’ never-say-die attitude — defeat, even a big one, isn’t the end of the road. Genius lies within a man, not the products he creates. This is one of the two life lessons I learned from Steve jobs. The other is simple: have fun. as the Steve jobs says, “maybe fun is just fragments of existence with better packaging Steve Job's aspired to change the world. Looking hard it feels that he essentially changed America. It was up to Bill gates lead Microsoft and IBM to actually change the world of personal computing by making it affordable to the masses. But late Job's should get the credit for the idea and the audacity to blaze a new trend.
Designer first, CEO second

  His focus on the little things like the “space between different letter combinations” was a constant from the development of the Macintosh to the iPhone, which was released more than 20 years later.
    This is what separated Jobs, as a chief executive, from everyone else. When Jobs resigned as Apple’s chief executive in August, Vic Gundotra, senior vice president for engineering at Google, posted an account of an exchange with Jobs before the introduction of the iPhone.
    Gundotra said Jobs had called him on a Sunday morning with an “urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away.” Jobs said: “I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that OK with you?”

Matter of Taste
Jobs had first seen a graphical user interface prototype a few years earlier on a visit to Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, and immediately knew it was the future of computing. He had no compunction about copying the idea.

“Ultimately it comes down to taste,” Jobs said in Triumph of the Nerds. “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy. Great artists steal.’”

The Mac project showed another side of Jobs: the inscrutable autocrat. He could be charming and rude almost in the same sentence, leaving underlings scared or dazzled or both.

People who worked for Jobs called his powers of persuasion the “reality distortion field.”

Gates Ascends
Jobs’s absence from Apple coincided with the ascendance of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp, developer of a graphics-driven operating system of its own called Windows. Apple filed, and eventually lost, a lawsuit against Microsoft, arguing that Windows was a Mac knockoff.

When Jobs got wind of Microsoft’s plans for what would become Windows, he screamed at Gates about ripping Apple off, according to a 1983 essay by Andy Hertzfeld, the Mac’s chief software designer.

Gates coolly replied, “It’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it,” wrote Hertzfeld, who witnessed the interchange

The constant invention of cool

mahesh murthy

Perhaps I’m one of the few people who had Steve jobs as his customer. For a while I handled the apple digital business and did their sites, banners and media buys while I was at a silicon valley ad firm in the mid-90s. But it started the other way around. The tug on the heart — and the wallet — started in the early ‘90s when I bought an apple Newton. And used it amidst much public ridicule from my pals at Ogilvy to save their names and phone numbers. That’s perhaps the sole reason I’ve ended up with more than 10,000 contacts on my phone today. Which, I must add, is not an iphone but an android. Because the resistance to all overpriced things apple also began early. My pals bought macs. And I, aided by reams of pirated software that macboys could never get, along with decidedly better specifications at a lower price, always bought pcs. it’s what I do today too, advising starry eyed iphonistas to buy the Samsung galaxy s2 as its hugely more value for money than any iphone ever made. But Steve lived the mantra we ad guys would just talk about. “The consumer is always willing to pay a premium for even a slightly worse product as long as he trusts the brand,” we would pontificate to FMCG clients, while personally negotiating for an extra 256mb of ram from the local assembler. But Steve’s customers bought the sizzle, not the steak, and they bought it in droves. Damn you Steve, it’s hard fighting your famed rdf: reality distortion field. So what have i learnt from Steve jobs? First, build a product that is worth talking about, and media will give you free column centimeters. Apple has among the lower ad-to-sales ratios in the world, compared to a Nokia or dell because magazines pay to cover what apple does, and want to be paid to cover most of what everyone else does. I can’t imagine dna asking me to write about the chairman of Samsung, for instance. Second, forget technology. Focus on the user experience. Apple products have historically had poorer tech specs than their rivals. What’s the speed of an iphone processor? Apple won’t say. What looks cooler to use? Apple is the name that comes to mind. Third, screw the bazaar, build a cathedral, damn the consequences and get rich. whether it is pcs, where the more open wintel approach has smothered macs for a generation or mobiles, where android is routing ios in a repeat of history, apple has made money while the rivals had to just be content with market share. Fourth, never let politeness come in the way of directness. I heard the story where a account director told Steve he worked on the business, to which Steve asked if he wrote the ads or did the pictures, and he said neither — and then had to face jobs saying “oh, so you’re the overhead.” and legions more such takes. “Who the hell sees these banners?” was one I had to contend with. The only recourse was to stand your ground and hold your line. Which was perhaps the only way to earn his respect. Five, and last, of course, the legacy. Most of us would be happy building one great company. Jobs built three: apple, NeXT and Pixar. Most of us would be happy changing one business. Jobs changed computers, music and phones. Steve jobs stands tall in having broken every rule in the book. Forget kotler, ries, trout or aaker. jobs wrote the real book on marketing. To me he is the world’s greatest marketer and entrepreneur. the writer is a marketer, entrepreneur and investor

Personality  Passionate, prickly, and deemed irreplaceable by many Apple fans and investors, Steve Jobs made a life defying conventions and expectations. Job’s learned from his mistakes which were many. With his passion for minimalist design and marketing genius, Jobs changed the course of personal computing during two stints at Apple and then brought a revolution to the mobile market. Charismatic, visionary, ruthless, perfectionist, dictator -these are some of the words that people have used to describe Jobs, who may have been the biggest dreamer the technology world has ever known, but he also was a hardedged businessman and negotiator through and through. Jobs came with a lot of hard edges, often alienating colleagues and early investors with his my-way-or-the highway dictums and plans that were generally ahead of their time. Here’s a guy who never finished college, never went to business school, never worked for anyone else a day in his adult life. So how did he become the visionary who changed every business he touched? Actually, he’s given us clues all along. Remember the “Think Different” ad campaign he introduced upon his return to Apple in 1997? “Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.” ‘Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do’. It was in 1997 that Steve Jobs, stood before a giant image of Mahatma Gandhi and to these words launched the company's epic recovery. Gandhi briefly featured in Apple's memorable “Think Different“advertising campaign, greatly admired for its creativity as it drew public attention to the company's new products. In other words, the story of Steve Jobs boils down to this: Don’t go with the flow. Steve Jobs refused to go with the flow. If he saw something that could be made better, smarter or more beautiful, nothing else mattered. Not internal politics, not economic convention, not social graces. Apple has attained its current astonishing levels of influence and success because it’s nimble. It’s incredibly focused. It’s had stunningly few flops In era of limits, Jobs was last great tyrant From Gadgets He Built To Clothes He Wore, Everything That Has A Touch Of Tech Guru Becomes Part Of His Cult David Streifeld In school he was known for his razor sharp observations, and for his bulling. Both this traits would eventually come to define the man. He betrayed friends, lied, ignored sufferings of others around him and played favourites in office. Either you were enlightened or an asshole.     For the next half-century, Jobs never let up. He chewed out subordinates and partners who failed to deliver, trashed competitors who did not measure up and told know-it-all pundits to take a hike. He had a vision of greatness that he wielded to reshape the computer, telephone and entertainment industries, and he would brook no compromise.         Where he was unrestrained was in his work. Stories of him forcefully telling Apple employees that a product was not good enough are legion. (“You’ve baked a really lovely cake,” he told one engineer, adding that the hapless fellow had used dog feces for frosting). Make it smaller and better, he commanded. No element of design was too minor to escape his notice. (On a Mac interface: “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”)     Jobs castigated competitors, particularly Microsoft. Bill Gates’s company, which dwarfed Apple in power and wealth during the 1980s and 1990s, was not even described as second rate; it was deemed third-rate. Worse, it was not even trying. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,” Jobs said in a typical broadside. “They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”        Jobs’s self-confidence could sometimes be indistinguishable from arrogance and self-aggrandizement. At an Apple Halloween party during the wild early years, he reportedly came dressed as Jesus. (In a rare tribute for a lay person, Jobs’s career was celebrated Thursday on the front page of the Vatican newspaper.) But it was an arrogance tempered by faith in the power of technology to improve lives.     The satirical newspaper The Onion underscored this point nicely in its news story on Jobs’s death. The headline, modified here to replace an expletive, said: “Last American Who Knew What the Heck He Was Doing Dies.”

‘Wonderful’ Mystery
“The mystery is actually wonderful,” said Regis McKenna, a computer-industry marketing consultant who first worked with Apple in the 1980s. “You want to know more about this company the more mysterious it is.”

Another way Jobs manufactured his aura
was with product unveilings. He obsessively prepared for the choreographed occasions, often at Apple’s Cupertino campus or San Francisco’s Moscone Center, rehearsing his delivery many times over. He would scrap presentations wholesale, even at the last minute, if they weren’t up to snuff.

He captivated audiences, and the gadgets he introduced resonated with consumers the world over, adding billions of dollars in revenue. Sales surged 82% to a record $28.6 billion in the June 2011 period, the last full quarter before Jobs resigned, and the stock closed at $376.18 on August 24, before the move was announced. That gave Apple a market value of $348.8 billion.

All that success came with an ego to match. Jobs was a notorious control-freak with authority issues, associates and former employees say. He came close to breaking securities laws by backdating employee stock options. Even his worsening health — or his non-disclosure of his illness to shareholders - drew scrutiny from authorities.

‘Park Different’
In Apple’s parking lot, people often noticed Jobs’ silver Mercedes-Benz SL 55 AMG parked in the handicapped spaces. His cars were easy to spot because he refused to put license plates on them. “It’s a little game I play,” he told Fortune in 2001.
Employees stuck notes under the car’s windshield wipers, encouraging Jobs to “Park Different,” a play on the “Think Different” Apple advertising slogan.

Jobs was known to praise people one minute and belittle them the next. According to The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman, this management style was known at Apple as the “hero-shithead roller coaster.” No one was immune from Jobs’s tirades, and he had strained relationships with colleagues, friends, and family throughout his life.

Jobs Ousted
“Back then he was uncontrollable,” Rock said in a 2007 interview with Institutional Investor. “He got ideas in his head, and the hell with what anybody else wanted to do. Being a founder of the company, he went off and did them regardless of whether it ended up being good for the company.”


The Mac didn’t sell well during the 1984 holiday shopping season, and Sculley demanded in April 1985 that Jobs be relieved of day-to-day duties and serve as a non-executive chairman, playing the role of outside spokesman. Jobs hated the idea and tried to get the backing of Apple’s directors. The board sided with Sculley and Jobs was out.


Jobs was 30 years old and devastated, but not for long. “I didn’t see it then,” Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford speech, “but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”


In 1985 he founded NeXT, which developed a powerful computer based on the Unix operating system. The sleek, black machines earned a reputation for elegant design and high performance; Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web on a NeXT workstation.


 Jobs later called the NeXT-Pixar years "one of the most creative periods of my life" and said his dismissal from Apple had been "awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2096251,00.html#ixzz1aU1X7cpf

SPUNK
Jobs was brash from an early age. When he was just 12 he discovered that he did not have a crucial part of a frequency counter that he was assembling and promptly telephoned William Hewlett after locating the Hewlett-Packard co-founder’s number in a phone directory. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.

CUSSEDNESS
When Apple’s first board of directors wanted all employees to have name badges, Jobs’ friend and Apple cofounder Steve Woznaik got the employee No. 1 badge, while Jobs was assigned No 2. Jobs protested until he received No. 0 because it came before No. 1

The jobs success mantra: start getting very bored

Dropping a clue to what made him tick, jobs once told a friend, boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and “out of curiosity comes everything.”
“All the (technology) stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too,” mused the restless visionary.

It’s hard to be in a place where everyone knows your name

It was the 1980s, relatively early in his career, and Steve Jobs was travelling in Japan. In a hotel lobby, a gaggle of girls came up and asked for his autograph. Jay Elliot was an executive with apple at that time, traveling with jobs. “I was thinking, wow, how many CEOs have girls coming up and asking them for autographs?” Elliot says now.
And yet jobs, who seemingly enjoyed the access his celebrity brought, also appeared deeply conflicted about his fame, zealously guarding the smallest details of his private life. “Steve had a love-hate relationship with his own fame,” says Alan Deutschland, author of the second coming of Steve jobs, an unauthorized biography. “He wanted it both ways. He clearly enjoyed the celebrity and the access it gave him, but he wanted total control over his image.”
So where does jobs fit in the pantheon of celebrity ceos? One has to reach back into history for comparisons: Henry ford, Thomas Edison, or even Walt Disney. But it's Edison’s name that pops up the most often. As Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University, says, “he could really sell. He was very good at his external image.”
But there's another side to it all. Can being a celebrity be detrimental to one's performance as a ceo? “It’s a huge problem when the boss becomes the brand,” says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale school of management. “The upside is it gives the brand human terms. the downside is that none of us are immortal. These branded bosses often start to believe in their own immortality.” Sutton believes there is evidence that the more famous CEOs were distracted by all that public scrutiny, to the detriment of their companies. But, he says, “Jobs clearly doesn't fit into that category.”
Compounding jobs’ astonishing fame was the early age at which he achieved it. he spent virtually his entire career in the public eye, co-founding apple at age 21. At 26, he was on the cover of time. However jobs may have felt about his fame, there's no question that one key element of it was his struggle with — and triumphs over — adversity. It was a truly American story in many ways: first, achieving success despite humble beginnings. Then failure — getting pushed out of his own company. and finally, a return to grace, first at Pixar, then by returning to apple for a string of huge successes, until his health began to deteriorate.
Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the NYU stern school, says, “Everyone in America over 30 has had their life touched by illness in some way. This humanized him. You just felt for the guy. It was hard not to pull for him.”

LSD Roots of Apple Planter

    An 18-year old from San Francisco, disillusioned and dropped out of college, visited India, in search of enlightenment in 1973. He went back after three months. Three years later, he built iconic Apple Inc that gave the world some of the most loved and stunning gadgets. 35 years later, on the day India launched the world's cheapest tablet PC, a category created and dominated by Apple, its co-founder Steve Jobs passed away, without having visited the country again.
In 1973, Steve Paul Jobs traversed the Himalayas in search of the 'ultimate truth' with his friend Daniel Kottke, slept on hash and marijuana and went to the ashram of Baba Neem Karoli, near Ranikhet. The Baba had just died. But Jobs returned to California in Indian clothes, and a Buddhist.
"It was one of the first times that I started to realise that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together," Jobs was quoted as saying about his India experience in his biography "The Little Kingdom-The Private Story of Apple Computer."
The one thing that remained with Jobs from India, was the psychedelic experience. He said that the LSD experience was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He also said that people around him, who did not share his counter-culture roots, could not fully relate to his thinking.

Steve was always Ahead of Me... Eric Schmidt Executive Chairman, Google Inc      Everyone knows the transaction where the board sided with John Sculley and Steve left Apple. Steve sold all of his Apple stock, kept one share, and founded NeXT. Typical Steve manoeuvre. When I was still at Sun Microsystems, I visited him at Ne-XT—we did a bunch of deals with him. He was exactly the same way he was at Apple: strongly opinionated, knew what he was doing. He was so passionate about objectoriented programming. He had this extraordinary depth. I have a PhD in this area, and he was so charismatic he could convince me of things I didn’t actually believe. I should tell you this story. We’re in a meeting at NeXT, before Steve went back to Apple. I’ve got my chief scientist. After the meeting, we leave and try to unravel the argument to figure out where Steve was wrong—because he was obviously wrong. And we couldn’t do it. We’re standing in the parking lot. He sees us from his office, and he comes back out to argue with us some more. It was over a technical issue involving Objective C, a computer language. Why he would care about this was beyond me. I’ve never seen that kind of passion. At NeXT he built this platform—a powerful workstation platform for the kind of computing that I was doing, enterprise computing. When he came back to Apple, he was able to take the technology he invented at NeXT and sort of slide it underneath the Mac platform. So today, if I dig deep inside my Mac, I can find all of that NeXT technology. Now, this may not be of interest to users, but without the ability to do that the Mac would have died. I was surprised that he was able to do that. But he did it. When he went to Apple, he was basically down to 1% market share. Apple was near bankruptcy, the company had been for sale, there were a series of management changes. I talked to him about it. He said, “The thing that I have that no one else has is very loyal customers.” He had these fanatical people who would line up all night for a product that wasn’t any good. He figured correctly that by upgrading and investing in and broadening the portfolio, he could do it. At some level he foresaw the next 10 years. What I remember thinking at the time is that you shouldn’t take a job unless you know how to win. I had no clue how to do what he did. When somebody tells you they’re going to do something and you say, “I don’t understand how you’re going to do that,” and they succeed? That is the ultimate humbling experience. My interactions with Steve were always like that. He was always ahead of me. When he started working on tablets, I said nobody really likes tablets. The tablets that existed were just not very good. Steve said: “No, we can build one.” One of the things about Steve is, he was always in the realm of possibility. There was a set of assumptions that Steve would make that were never crazy. They were just ahead of me. I joined Apple’s board after the Apple Stores started. It used to be that you would go to a store and you had Macs and PCs. And then, because of volume and because of the Microsoft monopoly, people were not buying any Macs. There was less and less distribution, and many dual Mac-PC distributors were going away. The argument at the time was you shouldn’t screw your distributors because they are your lifeline. Steve made the calculated decision to open a series of stores and turn it into a sort of a consumer lifestyle. He also understood that people had trouble with computers, and they wanted to go to a place where somebody could help them. The stores were universally derided as the stupidest idea ever known to man, and they would literally bankrupt the company. It was an incredibly gutsy move. And Apple Stores I believe are the highest-grossing stores in America. It took enormous courage for Steve to go through the operations, the treatments—without violating his privacy, it’s just horrific what he had to go through. I think he made all the board meetings I was at. He was obviously ill sometimes, and sometimes he was fine. But Apple was his passion, along with his family. There was never any question when I was there as to his ability to do his job, and I just felt terribly sorry for him over what he was going through physically. Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they carry your heart with them. The exact phrase was, “It’s your heart running around outside your body.” That’s a Steve Jobs quote. He had a level of perception about feelings and emotions that was far beyond anything I’ve met in my entire life. But death means is you can’t call—you can’t call him. It’s a loss. I’ll miss talking to him.

The Man who Dared to Think Differently  Mukesh Ambani A PERFECTIONIST WITH EXCEPTIONAL ATTENTION to detail. A radical visionary. Demanding and passionate. Creative genius. A leader. It is hard to sum up a man and his life’s work in a few simple words, but with the untimely passing of Steve Jobs, our thoughts are drawn to do just that. Through tweets, texts, wall postings, and blogs, a collective global moment of mourning is taking place. But as we pause to reflect a life well-lived, it is with gratitude and a bit of awe that we should look back upon Steve Jobs’ remarkable life story. From humble beginnings to global visionary, Steve’s ideas and innovations forever changed how people across the globe think about and use technology. Steve to many was one of the greatest inventors and innovators. But I would also consider him as one of the greatest ‘Reinventors’. Through his ingenuity he reinvented many businesses — fundamentally and radically. He not only changed the game but also in the process changed the rules. The outlier in Steve always questioned how things can be done profoundly differently. His bias towards changing the world was infectious. His boldness to take on the impossible has inspired many and will continue to do as the world learns to live without him. He could face the headwinds of risk and uncertainty with impeccable calm and poise, and prove the naysayers wrong through flawless execution. We salute this spirit with humility and affection. Steve had a broader understanding of the world that emanated from his curiosity. He let nothing go to waste.  Ensuring Unparalleled User Experience Like the calligraphy lessons that he informally took after dropping out of his college were later used in designing the typefaces for the Mac. That ushered in a new revolution in the personal computing era when the computer went from the plain text mode interface to the graphic mode interface. From the very beginning, Steve created technology that was simple, enhanced productivity, and offered unparalleled user experiences. In a fundamental way, the byproducts of this innovation drove technology to the masses — including India, a country Steve traveled extensively and experi- enced. Steve personified passion, irreverence, trust and above all courage. He thrived on adversity which he always took as a challenge that brought out the best in him. ‘Nothing to lose’ was his mantra and a man with such courage was only destined to do the impossible! What struck me most of him was his undying confidence. While answering a question on recession, I remember Steve saying, “Recession, what recession? We are making great products and people are still queuing to buy them. I don’t see recession for Apple!” Such was the innate confidence which complemented the brilliance of this great industry captain. Steve was a magnet. He had this uncanny knack of attracting the best talent. His demeanour instilled immense passion and loyalty in his people. He taught them to be curious and to trust their intuition. Steve’s own intuition was unparalleled. Vision is one thing but to back it up with intuition is another — a skill that Steve had immaculately mastered over the years. Steve has already had such a huge impact on humanity. Steve co-conceived the whole personal computing era. Twenty years later he conceived the post-personal computing era. The world is going to rapidly change in the near future. Technology will play a central role in it. The way we live will be influenced by the way we will embrace and interact with technology. I just wish Steve was around for at least the next 30 years. He surely would have been one of the drivers of this change and would have dazzled us with his mercurial mind. One of Apple’s early campaign slogans was simply “Think Different”. That simple phrase embodies what Steve did each and every day. He thought differently, envisioned tomorrow, and delivered truly exceptional customer experiences. Steve Job’s life serves as a shining example to each of us, and the impact of his passion will be felt for decades to come. Steve Jobs leaves behind a timeless legacy. His life will go down in the history of mankind as a story of perpetual inspiration. He will be remembered fondly by many as a man who dared to dream and dreamed to dare! A Job well done Steve! Steve will always be the one true ‘Apple of everyone’s eye’ for several generations to come. Mukesh Ambani

Three apples have changed the world. One seduced Eve, the second awakened Newton and the third was offered to the world half bitten by Steve jobs

President Obama summoned his trademark eloquence to honour Jobs, who was just 56, calling him
“among the greatest of American innovators-—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it”.

Jobs on Gates
I wish him the best... I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram.
The New York Times
    (Jan 12,1997)
The only problem with Microsoft is they have no taste... they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.
Triumph of the Nerds (1996)

I wish I had Steve’s taste. In people and product. It’s magical. In that case. Wow.
Gates, on being asked what he learnt from watching Jobs

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that's what matters to me," Jobs once said.

An apple a day may keep the doctor away, But the virus of Cancer from consumed the CEO of Apple.

 

Star Whom Whole Galaxy Will Follow 

SHIV NADAR  Founder & Chairman, HCL Group

    For someone to create a market cap larger than IBM, in one lifetime, is truly phenomenal. However, the bigger picture is how an icon like Steve Jobs thought — thinking like no one else could. He is in the same league as the person who created the wheel. His genius will be realised in years to come. Steve’s impact and legacy is that he simplified the most complex of things like no one else could. For example, the concept of zero and the concept of infinity are difficult to define and hard to conceive. He had it all in the mind and could simplify anything. He was like a star behind which the whole galaxy would follow. These (stars and galaxies) are self-contained systems in space and his products have been quite like that — systems selfcontained in their space. You don’t need anything external to run them. His mind could understand it all. His mind was working simultaneously on many fronts — on R&D, manufacturing, marketing, consumers. He had an unparalleled sense of dimension and scale. He understood everybody’s need beautifully. For example, an iPad is a product that can stand on its own — it has a space of its own. He had the unique ability to do like that — create a star and galaxies would follow. And then to reduce it to the lowest common denominator — create a product that would be simple to use, by anyone. In the earlier era of computing, we were told a product has to fulfil a need. Developers would write applications to help consumers use products. R&D would write instructions for manufacturing, systems organisation and then the end-user. They would divide the work into several parts. Jobs showed a different, better, simple and a beautiful way to do it. You can use his products without an instruction manual. It didn’t matter if you were an Einstein or a housewife — the products work for everybody. He brought about a change on how products are made. He was very capable and an ultimate developer. He was 50 years ahead of his time. What he has created (iPhone, iPod, iPad and others) are not products — but self-contained spaces. He also picked his people carefully. For instance, when at NeXT (founded by Steve), he wanted a special logo and a graphics designer from IBM to do it. He himself went to IBM to tell the bosses there to release the man. He cleared every piece of advertising and architecture. He was a perfect sculptor. There ain’t another person like him.

Jobism: Stay hungry. Stay foolish Steve Jobs, also referred to as the Thomas Edison of his time, revealed in a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 why he dropped out of college -and why he thought it was one of the best things he ever did. He urges to students to pursue their dreams and see opportunities in setbacks.  Text from his speech I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me 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, it’s 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. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now. This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much. Team Work: My model for business is the Beatles. They are four guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other: the total was greater than sum of parts. The man who gave us the ipad, ipod and the imac himself never designed a computer in his life. Steve Jobs had a deep bench of executives who have been with Apple Inc for more than a dozen years — an unusual line up for a company in the fast-moving technology world. Here are some of the top people at Apple.  While Steve Jobs was the Entrepreneur and a master Salesmen, Tim Cook was the Operations man, Jonathan Ive was the person behind all the iproduct designs.   Peter Oppenheimer Peter Oppenheimer is Apple’s chief financial officer, a position that in many companies is a stepping stone to the CEO position. But at Apple, financials seem to take a back seat to technology and design. Oppenheimer wasn’t mentioned in the speculation over who would take over as CEO after Jobs, before it became clear that Cook was the crown prince. Tim Cook Jobs’ successor as CEO, was chief operating officer and had filled in for Jobs during his three medical leaves. He joined Apple in 1998 as senior vice-president of worldwide operations and has been credited with tuning Apple’s manufacturing process to solve chronic product delays and supply problems. As the guy who kept things humming in the background, Cook hasn’t participated much in product launches.  Philip Schiller Philip Schiller is the head of product marketing and frequently participates in Apple’s trademark product launch events. Yet he’s worked in the shadow of Jobs.  Scott Forstall Scott Forstall heads Apple’s development of software for the iPhone and iPad and helps demonstrate their features at launch events. He worked with Jobs at Next, the company Jobs founded after leaving Apple in the 1980s, and joined Apple when it bought Next in 1997. Forstall is one of the architects of the current Mac operating system, OS X. He has bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford University. Jonathan Ive Jonathan Ive has led Apple’s industrial design team, responsible for the look and feel of the hardware, since 1996. He’s the winner of several design awards. In a 2007 interview with the Design Museum in Britain, he says Apple’s design process is characterised by “fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked, like cables and power adaptors.” Steve Jobs, The Modern Day Thomas Edison Given that Steven P Jobs contribution to technology had impact on lives of many Apple product users, people often compare him with Thomas Alva Edison and Graham Bell. But he did not invent anything. Rather, his reinventions often changed the contours of a product category. Comparison with Edison is unavoidable, when it was Edison’s phonograph that eventually gave way to the iPod and his influences on mass communications and telecommunications were transformed forever in the iPhone. It’s hard to imagine a bigger success story than Steve jobs, but rejection, failure and bad fate were part and parcel of who he was. Jobs was given away at birth, driven out of apple in the mid-80s and struck with cancer when he finally regained his position at the top of the mountain. He resigned as ceo of apple inc on august 24 — saying he could no longer fulfil the duties — and briefly served as chairman before his death. Jobs grew up with an adoptive family in silicon valley. Electronics friend bill Fernandez introduced him to boy engineer Steve Wozniak, and the two Steve’s began a friendship that eventually bred apple computer. “Woz is a brilliant engineer, but he is not really an entrepreneur, and that’s where jobs came in,” recently remembered Fernandez, who was the first employee at apple. Earlier this year, Wozniak said that his goal was only to design hardware and he had no interest in running apple. Computing PRE-APPLE Large, heavy machines that used intimidating software. User interface was unfriendly, technical instructions had to be typed in to execute various command. HOW JOBS REINVENTED Smaller and aesthetically superior hardware powered by radically different operating system that used icons of real life items rather than abstract commands. Mouse was introduced. Media Players PRE-APPLE Sony’s Walkman and its clones that gave way to Discman and other similar products were the only way to carry music around till the MP3 players were invented. But it involved carrying cassettes and CDs around. MP3 players that came next allowed music to be stored as data files, the device was clunky, heavy and had several buttons. HOW JOBS REINVENTED iPod introduced in October 2001, was light weight, had fewer but intuitive buttons. In later version, a screen was added. MP3 players too evolved under intense competition. Digital Music PRE-APPLE Napster and several other portals were offering freely downloadable music as demand for digital music rose. But most of what was offered was unlicensed and therefore illegal. Music companies, suffering losses, began suing Napster and others. HOW JOBS REINVENTED Launched iTunes music store in October 2003 to people could download of music legally. The iTunes experiment was soon replicated by the telecom service providers, supermarket chains and phone makers such as Nokia. Smartphones PRE-APPLE Smartphones that were like miniature computers were restrictive in functions. They were heavy and came with large qwerty keyboards. Phones with email function and qwerty keyboard lacked multimedia features. HOW JOBS REINVENTED iPhone redefined the smartphone market, the phone came with all the features of iPod and allowed users to seamlessly switch between videos, songs, a phone call, email and browsing. Tablets PRE-APPLE Tablets were around since the late 1990s, but they were more of laptops with rotating screen. The screens were interactive but touch interface was rudimentary and worked mostly with stylus. HOW JOBS REINVENTED iPad created a new category of computers, spurring competitors including Samsung to launch similar products such as Galaxy Tab. They come with touch interface and large bouquet of apps. iPads took e-book readers to another level, giving Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook a run for their money.