📱Steve Jobs
Original nameSteve Jobs
Co-Founder of Apple, Key Driver of the Productization of the Personal Computer and Smartphone
Those Who Turned Invention Into Industry · Industry-Builders
MacintoshiPhoneThe Philosophy of Product and User-Experience Design
Who they are
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) was a co-founder of Apple, not himself an engineer by training, yet famed for a near-exacting intuition of product aesthetics and standard of user experience, who directed a series of landmark products that profoundly changed the shape of personal computing and mobile communication, including the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. In his early years, visiting Xerox PARC, he was deeply struck by the graphical user interface and mouse operation engineers showed him, and thereafter directed Apple to productize and popularize these interaction ideas that previously existed only in the lab, driving the personal computer from a complex machine mainly for enterprise and professional users into an everyday tool ordinary consumers could operate intuitively. The first iPhone, released in 2007, integrated phone, music player, and internet communication device in one, redefining the shape of the smartphone product category, and the mobile-internet wave it thereafter set off profoundly reshaped the shape of almost all digital industries over the next decade and more. Jobs himself was famed for a near-obsessive demand for product detail and a forceful, direct management style, was once for a time ousted from the company he had founded in 1985, thereafter founded NeXT and Pixar Animation Studios, and after Apple acquired NeXT in 1997 returned to Apple and led the company’s revival and peak over the nearly fifteen years after.
Primary sourcesWalter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (the official biography authorized by Jobs himself)
Key stories
A Visit to Xerox PARC
In 1979 Jobs was invited to visit Xerox PARC, where he first saw engineers demonstrate the graphical user interface, window menus, and mouse operation, and these cutting-edge demonstrations then existing only in the lab deeply struck him; he thereafter directed the Apple Macintosh team to greatly simplify and improve these interaction ideas and bring them to market, turning the graphical interface and mouse operation from lab treasures into standard equipment ordinary people could use intuitively.
Ousted by the Company He Founded
In 1985 Jobs, over a fierce disagreement on the company’s strategic direction with Apple’s then-CEO John Sculley, was stripped of real management power with the board’s support and at last chose to leave the Apple he had founded, thereafter founding NeXT and Pixar; when Apple acquired the struggling NeXT in 1997, Jobs used this to return to Apple and gradually retake control, directing the successive release of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and other products — this experience of "ousted, then a king’s return" became one of the most widely told classic narratives in the history of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Version differences
Jobs’s management style and personal behavior are recorded quite negatively in several biographies and colleague memoirs (harsh castigation of subordinates, once refusing to acknowledge his own daughter), and these records and his outstanding contribution in product design are two aspects often discussed together in evaluating this complex figure.
Echoes today
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
The "Reality Distortion Field"This phrase, first coined by early Apple employees to describe Jobs’s highly infectious persuasive power and near-obsessive product vision, thereafter became a widely used buzzword in Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture.