He had people like me to do it for him. I was one of the many hundreds of engineers who worked indirectly for Steve Jobs over the last three decades. However, I retired as of November 2021.

Four major ones.

1. He started in business very early. He was not a nerd student who crave school achievements.
2. He had a great friend in Wozniak. They were friends since 13. They have trust. Woz is a supreme engineer.
3. They caught the right event and right time. Jobs knows how to sell.
4. Jobs had hard time when he was young. He did not get spoiled.

Summary: friendship, trust, skills, business mindset early, right timing and all in.

I only worked with Steve Jobs for about 45 minutes, but the event was memorable. Because a guy got fired where I was working, I was directed to take his place handling a contract my company had with Atari. Arriving at Atari, I expected to meet with the engineer on the World Cup Soccer game project. However, the Marketing Manager blocked that meeting because of industrial security, told me I could talk to a technician, and loaned me his office for the meeting.
I had just arrived in the manager's office when the door opened behind me, and in came a barefoot, hippy-dippy type character. This person walked by me as though I didn't exist, climbed onto the manager's desk, and sat cross-legged as American Indians do or did. Having worked in San Francisco, I wasn't too surprised with the tech's behavior and dress, but the bare feet were a new touch.
In spite of everything, the meeting went very smoothly, and I got all the information I needed, but the tech remained emotionally flat the whole time. At the end of our little meeting, the tech hopped off the desk and quickly departed the room.
Yes, the tech was Steve Jobs. I had no idea I had been talking to someone who would change the world and become a multibillionaire.

How did Steve manage to “Think Different?”

Steve was a dropout, a rebel, but most importantly, Steve was FREE!

Steve enjoyed complete self-governance, total independence to be himself, and would never conform to or follow the crowd.

Steve was not a people pleaser. He was driven by his passion and vision, NOT by other people’s opinions.

Why don’t we have more Steve’s in the world?

Our Industrial Age educational system has one mission to accomplish:

STANDARDIZE!

The educational system tells us what to think, NOT how to think.

Indoctrination is oppressive, it kills creativity and innovation.

Indoctrination has been an effective way to mold people to fit the “status quo” and NOT challenge it.

Why doesn't the world see more creative geniuses?

Because we’re expected to follow the crowd.

To answer your question, what made Steve Jobs so special?

Steve was FREE from indoctrination!

Real education teaches you how to solve problems, how to create things, and most importantly, how to THINK DIFFERENT!

#BeBusinessSmart

When he was quite young, 18 or so, he worked for Atari. He was valuable enough to not get fired even when nobody wanted to work with him, (because of how he smelled), as he thought veganism was so pure, (hippy bullshit), that he would not smell bad. But no one wanted to come close to him. So instead of firing him, and hiring another guy, even though they pretty much had a line of people wanting to work at Atari, they created a night shift for him to work during.

He also worked at HP.

Steve Wozniak found out about Jobs when he had a specific electrical need and Steve Jobs had solved it. He made some kind of counter that Woz had not been able to make. Jobs did influence a lot, in earlier years at Apple, and you could not “techno talk your way” out from him.

He knew his stuff! He knew more about electronics than most people his age. He, after all, worked on making the Apple I and II, even though Woz designed it and did most of the work.

So yes, he was very technical.

Jobs was very famously a micromanager, and his input everywhere, which kind of makes it hard to silo his contributions. His undefined role in the early days made some folk express doubts about a fifty-fifty partnership.[1] But what was he?

Clearly, Jobs was a businessman with many hats. He recruited managers, engineers, and marketers, including John Sculley, Rod Holt, Regis McKenna; he acquired money for investment into the company by approaching Mike Markkula; he talked to vendors and found Apple's first clients; he made input on products (Lisa, Macintosh, and all the new gadgets you own); and when Apple had expos, he was the showman.

As the company grew, many of these jobs were taken over by other people, but Jobs always maintained an interest in Product Development and Marketing, so I suppose that's what you can consider him.

But calling Jobs a Product Manager or Businessman doesn't reveal his critical contribution to Apple.

A few stories illustrate -- I'm no raconteur, but I hope these help:

Jobs was a starter. There's a story of how a young Jobs and Woz found out about a phone phreaker [2] who came up with a way to make long-distance calls for free. It was Jobs who came up with the idea to make and sell these "Blue Boxes" for profit. Thus the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

Jobs was a gambler. In the early stages of the company, one of the programmers for the company lost all of his code. The only way to get the code back was from a vendor who stored backups. But Apple was behind on payments, and the vendor didn't care much for Jobs's attitude.

Jobs tells the vendor that he has a check waiting for him at Apple, and if he lets the kid get his code he can drive on over and get paid. So kid finishes getting his code as the guy heads over. When the vendor arrives, Jobs tells him there's no check and that he could go to hell [3] (I believe that's how the book put it). Can you imagine Woz pulling a stunt like that?

Jobs was a salesman. At Apple, if Jobs wasn't the first thing on your mind, you'd probably soon find yourself without one. He was the guy who could make you put in more effort than you ever knew you could. The Atlantic has a great piece on this so I won't butcher it, but I encourage you to check it out: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/in-praise-of-bad-steve/246242/

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Hindsight bias makes it hard to appreciate the importance of the non-technical visionary. The computer industry may have started out in small garages, but all the successful ones quickly grew out of those. When you grow, things don't scale linearly. Who's scaling what's important. The key insight is that at the cutting-edge, computing technology is not bits and silicon. It is a concept, like metal-working or architecture. And of course, this is the easiest thing to undervalue because good ideas have this pervasive tendency to become part of the way we see the world.

Jobs didn't do the kind of stuff that gets you a title. He did the kind of stuff that gets you the world's most valuable tech company.

[1][3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICon:_Steve_Jobs
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking

James Scoppettone, American Impressionist Artist of 60 years, and long ago retired real estate broker.

In 1976 my wife Sherry, our daughter Dina, and I spent a leisurely afternoon at Al Alcorn’s home in Los Altos Hills. Al, a friend of ours, had invited us along with several if his high tech friends to hang out and enjoy the beautiful day. The three of us were dangling our feet along the side of his pool when a late arrival came over to us and, looking at the soles of our feet exclaiming that we were having a carrot juice flush, which we were aware of as we were vegitarians at the time and carrot juice was a daily regime. The individual introduced himself as Steve Jobs, and said he had just formed a company called Apple Computer. Not being a techie, he said that unlike the big industrial computers, his company was going to produce a small personal computer.

Fast forward to the early 1980s. Steve had been living in his home in Monte Sereno and although only ten minutes from he Apple headquarters building in Cupertino, he said that he needed to acquire a propert midway between Cupertino and Francisco due to his many trips to the city, and would I assist and represent him in locating same.

For the next couple of years in spite of his hectic schedule he would call and say “how’s your time, can we check out more property?” The quest to find the right property always came back to a property that he had seen several years prior while on his motorcycle up driveways in the woodside area. On one property was a barn that he felt had the charm and character that captured his imagination. The quest then became somewhat of solving a mystery. After many trips scouring the Woodside area we finally located the property with the telltale barn.

I contacted a broker in Woodside working with Coldwell Banker and she said she knew the couple who owned the propertyand would inquire if they might consider selling. The property, which included a large rambling hacienda built in 1925 by the copper mining industrialist Daniel Jackling, was a beautiful oak studded acreage that Steve, aside from the enormity of the house, immediately knew was the one on which we would make an offer.

An agreement was reached and Steve took title in 1984. His intent was to demolish the house and replace it with a smaller home more suited to his lifestyle. His plans were derailed for a number of years due to legal opposition regarding te possible historical aspects of the property. Finally the Woodside City Council granted Steve permission to demolish the house, which was done in 2011, tragically just months before STeve’s untimely death in October that year.

Thus my most memorable experience working with Steve Jobs was solving the mystery of locating the charming barn in Woodside that would ultimately be part of his home sweet home.

As an aside, having spent many hours with Steve, contrary to what I have seen others comment on his behavoir, I always found him to exude a lighthearted but no-nonsense demeanor, a sincere respect for those who treated him respectfully, and displaying a conviction that trustworthyness and pursuit of one’s dreams should be something which we all strive for.

Certainly fond memories of securing seats behind the Mac team at the 1984 introduction of the Mac computer at Foothill College; and pairing Sherry and I with an old aquaintance, Nolan Bushnell and his lady at his 30th birthday party at the St.Francis Hotel in SF where Ella Fitzgerald sang Steve Happy Birthday. These will all be lasting fond memories to share with family and friends for years to come.

He refused to have meetings with more than 3 people involved, and would blatantly ask any extra people "who are you and why are you here?" Before kicking them out.

He generally expected you to take a walk with him if the conversation was serious.

He did not believe in asking customers what they wanted. He believed that if Ford had asked customers, they would have requested a faster horse.

Even as the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world, he answered customer emails from time to time.

He was paid $1 a year

He was CEO of two separate publicly traded companies at once. As far as I know nobody else has done this.

He routinely bypassed and overruled the inputs of people with more experience and credentials, in marketing, design, strategy, etc. He was very often correct.

He was also very often rude and brutally blunt. This is pretty rare among successful CEOs.

Despite his role as CEO, he made it his business to test and pioneer new products. He was using a rudimentary form of iCloud back in 1998.

He worked all hours and had no issues pulling people out of bed for something important.

He waffled. He had no problem changing his mind on something he previously declared as stupid or awful. He did this shamelessly, to the frustration of others.

He classified people around him as "geniuses" or "bozos" - there was no middle ground.

Steve Jobs was a great entrepreneur who knew better than anyone how to anticipate the wishes of the greatest number.

He was a visionary who saw things through to the end. He wasn't afraid to think differently, which allowed him to be incredibly innovative throughout his life.

The resilience Steve Jobs showed throughout his life is also very inspiring.

Fired from the company he founded by someone he hired, Steve Jobs never gave up the fight. He continued to achieve great success before returning to save Apple.

He launched the smartphone revolution by launching the iPhone in 2007. From that launch was born an industry that has enabled Apple to become the company with a capitalization of more than 2,000 billion dollars today.

Steve Jobs was not an easy person to live with, but that's the hallmark of those genius entrepreneurs who are as demanding with others as they are with themselves.

Steve Jobs will forever be remembered as a true genius who was able to step out of the crowd to follow his vision.

He is more technical than most realize.

1. The Wikipedia article is not very precise about Jobs's tenure at Atari. From the Little Kingdom:

He poked his nose into other engineers' business and made no secret of his disdain. Bushnell recalled that Jobs"regularly told a lot of the other guys they were dumb shits."

Quoting Jobs: "Some of their engineers were not very good and I was better than most of them. The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad. I wasn't really an engineer at all."
...

Despite his lack of formal electronic training...Jobs tailored the performance of the chips to what was wanted on the screen. He understood the chips' subtleties, potted out a new design and made substantial improvements to the game.

Wozniak admired Jobs's work. "He did the creative stuff. He realized how he could build the same thing a lot simple and better. It was engineering."

2. Jobs unilaterally made the key chip decision for the Apple, over-ruling Wozniak and adopting an Intel chip that nobody used. This was one of the most important decisions leading to its success. (I am summarizing, read the entire account on pp. 145-46)

Three things.

1. Found good mentor and friends when young.
2. Started building and selling things when young.
3. Never let school limit their imaginations.

This happens also to Elon Musk.

Both Elon Musk and Jobs are residents of Palo Alto, a nice California neighborhood where the ambient is right, with good mixture of money, education, and business.

Jobs built and sold the Blue Box with Wozniak - without this device, he would never start Apple.

Steve jobs dropped first Ipad into an aquarium to check “vacant” (if any) space in it. As iPod touched bottom, air bubbles were clearly visible. While everyone shocked, Steve smiled & proved that Ipod can reduced further to small size.

This lesson teaches extreme dedication level towards work which steve jobs had. Steve believed & worked on dreams.

Lets come to story: When Steve first shared idea about iPhone, everyone critised as no one will buy such phone where you have to pay for even listening songs . Rest is history. Today iphone is one of most valuable brand of World. Steve jobs accepted criticism in positive way. He worked, he proved.

Steve jobs was removed from company he started. He didn't acted violently. He figured out to become best there. He again returned as CEO of Apple by giving idea for Ipod. Steve proved his beyond imagination patience level.

While at time of death, he gave strong message to Youth “ I always worked. I worked everytime. I earned lots of money. Today i realised that i didn't spend time with family. I worked but never thought of living my own life. Have sometimes for oneself too”

In simple, work with dedication but don't create rush in life. Everything has priority. Everything needs time. Have time for family too & yourself too.

Steve got Success by his Hard work, Patience level, dedication, trust with friends & 'never ' give up attitude.

Image source: Dreamwalk

I met him once when I was a kid attending the first microcomputer show in Boston in the 70’s. There were few actual computers at the show and most of them were like the Altair, which weren’t good for much of anything. The one exception was the Apple booth where Jobs and Woz had an Apple hooked up to a Zenith color television. They had another Apple on the table and a third with the cover removed. Jobs was a smarmy slick salesman and he knew how to keep people interested. He kept talking about their factory that couldn’t keep up with the sales demand. Decades later I found out that there was no factory and the three units at the show were the only ones in existence. I returned to the booth later when there wasn’t a crowd and tried asking Jobs questions about what software they had. He pretended he hadn’t herd me and left the booth. Woz came over and he answered all of my questions and asked if I had any experience using computers. I told him I was learning fortran on an old IBM computer that used a card reader. Woz told me not to give up and that he hoped someday computers like the apple would make it easier to program. I was not terribly impressed with Jobs. But Woz was one of the nicest people I’d ever met.

Over the years I’ve know a lot of people who worked at Apple and not one of them had a nice thing to say about Jobs. One friend had been a product manager (I think) for those odd colored toilet seat Apple laptops. She said on her first day at work at Apple she was told never to talk to Steve, not even to say good morning, or even look at him, especially if you are in an elevator, and that you’d likely be fired if you tried. She later had to report to him on a regular basis and she said everyone dreaded being called in to talk to him. She said once that if Jobs wasn’t there Apple would have been nice place to work.

I honestly don’t understand why so many people lionize and hold Jobs up as a role model or genius. He was an asshole and a control freak who turned general purpose computers into expensive lifestyle consumer electronics, not some visionary messiah.

A business sells products to please customers. A product is designed in Apple - and Jobs designs. Jobs write the script of the movie.

He is the producer. Like G. Lucas is the producer of Star Wars. Does Lucas still sit behind a camera and change actor’s outfits? no.

What Jobs do is to make sure Apple launch worthy products and get a lot of profits, so he has money to pay for great foot soldiers.

Steve Jobs would typically wake up at 6 AM, dressing each day in the same black turtleneck and blue jeans so that he did not have to waste time choosing a new outfit each day. He was more focused on work than on fashion.

He would work for around an hour after getting ready; then, at 7:30 AM, Steve Jobs would eat breakfast with his family. Apparently, many of the fruits and vegetables that Steve Jobs and his family would eat would come from their home garden.

At 9 AM, Steve Jobs would arrive at the office and would typically begin each day with meetings.

“What we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we’re having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week.”

Then, he would eat lunch, visit Apple’s design lab, deal with more meetings, emails, and other miscellaneous business matters. By 5:30 PM, Steve Jobs would be home to eat dinner with his family.

In addition to the practices outlined in the video, Steve Jobs had some other healthy habits that anyone can incorporate into their daily routine. One such habit was to drink a hot herbal tea after dinner, often using ingredients from his home garden.

Herbal tea has many health benefits, including hydration, aiding inflammation, and helping one relax.

Steve Jobs would also talk a walk after dinner, which provides vital exercise and aids in digestion. In fact, he would often hold walking meetings with people instead of sitting down.

He would conclude his day with his family, saying, “I have a very simple life. I have my family, and I have Apple and Pixar. And I don’t do much else.”

Before going to sleep, Steve Jobs would often mediate, which has many well-documented health benefits, including decreasing stress levels and helping brain function.

I have always wanted to be Computer Engineer. Computers have never ceased to amaze me.

In my university, when I was in 2nd semester, there was a course in which they taught us Python.

After learning python, I became big fan of it. I started learning Web2Py and started making my own websites. Then I learned Linux and Computer Networks/Security. I was really fascinated by these things. So, I started giving more time to the thing I loved instead of paying attention to my university courses in which they thought us only theories and no practical applications of those theories.

When the result for the 2nd semester came, I was dropped from a GPA of 7.8(1st semester) to 5.9 , my family and parents were very disappointed . I was very depressed as well.

I almost gave up on learning the thing that I loved and decided to mug up the text books the college offered.

Few days later, someone of Facebook shared this video:

After listening to this speech, I was awestruck. I could hardly express the happiness that was flooding inside me, I had tears in my eyes.

So, I decided to screw the college and its non practical methods of teaching. I continued learning things my way (Thanks a lot to Google) and continuing with a GPA of 5 point something.

Right now, I am a Open Source Contributor, GSoC Intern and currently working in the biggest MNC in Japan at their headquarters in Tokyo. I find it amazing because being in India , its really hard to do something which is path breaking.

Thanks to Steve Jobs for such an amazing speech. :)

Thank you for the A2A.

If writing code was the only thing that made successful companies then we would have a lot more companies with Apple, Facebook and Google like valuations. Coding is critical to the success of a product but a lot of other very important things are needed to make a world-class company.

Steve Jobs was a visionary leader who gave a new meaning to the word innovation. He was the world’s best Product Manager and Marketer rolled into one. His leadership inspired everyone around him to give their very best. A lot of people in the Silicon Valley including Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page and around the world look up to Steve Jobs as a role model. They have said on record how they followed his advice when they found themselves in a serious dilemma.

Steve Jobs always said, “Don’t ask the consumers what they want. Show them what they need.” This philosophy of Jobs is evident in every single product he has been directly involved with. Let’s look at some examples:

1. iPhone: Before the iPhone came out did anyone in the world felt like they needed something like the iPhone. Weren’t most people perfectly content with Blackberries and Palm phones? When we all saw iPhone for the first time, we went “Holy smokes… we can have a computer in our hands?” Palm disappeared and Blackberry (RIM) has no idea what it wants to do anymore.

2. iPod: We were all perfectly happy with our walkmans and portable music players. I remember I had a Creative Nomad Jukebox in high school and I loved it. What happened when Steve Jobs released iPod in 2001. We suddenly realized that we can’t live without an iPod.

3. Animation Movies: Pixar is synonymous with amazing animation movies. Guess what, there would be no Pixar without Steve Jobs. He didn’t just buy it from George Lucas and save the company but he gave it a new direction.

4. Mobile Apps: I consider Mobile as one of the greatest revolutions of this century. Think about what Steve Jobs created with the App store. Today every single tech company has one goal: Mobile First. The world has shifted from desktop to Mobile. There are companies worth billions of dollars that are thriving only and only because of the app revolution whether it be Facebook or Uber. Can you imagine how many companies and millionaires have been created solely because they can now have an app on smartphone? There would have been no app store, no iphone and no android phone without Steve Jobs.

I can go on and on about Macs, iOS, MacOS but let me come to another important point. Steve Jobs did not just tell programmers what to do. The design, innovation and aesthetics came from Steve Jobs. Please do not get me wrong. I am not taking away anything from the brilliant people that Steve had in his team. He had the best of the best - Jony Ive, Scott Forstall, Craig Federighi and so many other brilliant people. I am not even crediting Jobs for coming up with the idea. But I give him all the credit for taking that idea and creating it into something revolutionary.

Steve Jobs believed in perfection. His attention to detail was incredible. There is a very famous incident. Back in January 2008, Steve Jobs called up Google’s Vic Gundotra on a Sunday morning. Here is what happened in Vic’s own words:

I laughed nervously. After all, while it was customary for Steve to call during the week upset about something, it was unusual for him to call me on Sunday and ask me to call his home. I wondered what was so important?

"So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I've already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow" said Steve. "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 okay with you?"

When I think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson I'll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.

This is Steve for you. As to what exactly did he do? He changed the world.

Jobs is a systems thinker. Systems thinkers are generally seen as "technical" but that does not mean they're engineers, developers or IT people. Systems thinkers look at the entire environment/ecosystem and can see how different pieces affect other pieces, and collectively create and enable an environment. This relatively rare view of the world is why Apple continually "surprises" people with their "it just works" line of products... they rarely launch just a device... they launch an ecosystem and a holistic solution to the problem.

Due to this unique approach, they are not a traditional technology company either. They are actually more of a digital appliance company. Think about it.

Anyway, back to Jobs -- most technical people I know are very detailed oriented, but often lose sight of the broader ecosystem in the process. From this vantage point, Jobs is less technical and more holistic.

Leadership is not about being able to do the work, it is about being able to find talented people, and inspiring them to be exceptional. Steve Jobs was a technologist. Sure, he wasn't the best engineer or programmer, but he had the skill and more importantly, he had a vision, and the ability to inspire other people to make his vision a reality.

The iPhone was not the first smart phone, but it was the first smart phone to do it the way they did, and within a few years, everyone was making their phones to work the same way. No one understood just how powerful simplicity could be. Apple did. Before the iPhone was revealed, everyone was bashing Apple on the rumors of an iPod with a phone built in, and how clumsy their interface would be, how slow the phone would be, how bulky it would be, etc…

When it was revealed, no one could believe how powerful and useful the device was, and yet how stupid simple it was. No one thought to do smart phones this way (well, there were one-off linux type phones, but it still was not the same).

When you have effective leaders, you attain positive results. When that leader has a vision, and the know-how to truly understand what he wants, and how to make it a reality, you get wondrous results.

update

I forgot to mention, the iPhone wasn’t even Apple’s first digital assistant. Take a look at the Apple Newton. It was way ahead of its time. It failed, because the world wasn’t ready for it, so the price tag was considered way too high for what it was.

Photo from Wikipedia

1. He brought computers in peoples lives. No, one really wanted a computer till school started requiring it. The first computers most people were introduced too were Apple computers thru school. Almost every school started computer labs to teach kids how to use computers and they were Apple computers. Every kid learned how to use computers from school. Before Apple there pretty much wasn’t a computer market for consumers.
2. in the mid 90’s the internet started growing, as it grew the hard drives, internet speed, ram, and all aspects for computers were getting better and better each year. People were already burning CD’s and selling them illegally, but the breakthrough was P2P sharing. Things like Napster. You could download music, movies, games, software whatever you needed for free off someone else's computer. This was a massive problem but everyone was doing it, so the government tried to put the fire out, but they couldn’t stop it. Apple finally stepped up and gave people what they wanted in a legal way. It was just people rather download these things than buying a physical copy. I remember when PlayStation made there first downloadable game, I didn’t even go to the store to buy the physical copy. I just downloaded it and I knew this would be the future of gaming. Most of my friends were telling me hardcopies are important, but to me I knew this was the way and so did Steve.
3. WIth the world downloading he finally made a product worth having. The iPod! I had about 800 songs and a few movies on my computer in 2000, but mobile wise ehhh. I had to burn cd’s or have a shitty mp3 player that held the same amount of songs an cd player had. I don’t know why a lot of mp3 makers made their products the same amount of memory as a cd, but they did. iPod was basically a computer media player that held 1,000’s of songs, which was the whole point and what people wanted.
4. The iPhone! The iPhone is a computer. Most people didn't have a need for computers, but making a phone a computer was just genius. I remember the best phones out were Blackberries, but I wouldn’t get one because my computer was 1000x better. The early day mobile internet was just fucking horrible. Who would’ve known how long it would’ve taken for other business to figure it out, but he did. He didn’t invent but he sure as hell built the whole mobile internet.
5. Pixar, Yes Pixar! I used to watch this shitty CG cartoon “Starship Troopers” because it was the only CG cartoon around. Then you had Donkey Kong, other than that there wasn’t any really good CG movies or shows. I never liked “Toy Story” but I did like the fact it got producers to finally make CG movies. I did enjoy some of Pixar’s movies, but “Toy Story” I just didn’t like I outgrew those types of shows.

He is close to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. One thing they did very well was take something difficult and bring it into everyone's daily life. Their products were all obtainable for the average person. When Steve jobs entered any market his products were always obtainable. When he made the mac in the late 90’s 2000, they weren’t expensive. It was a pretty cheap computer compared to average computer.

APPLE 2000’s

Average computer 2000’s

Even when Apple didn’t have a lot of money, they were able to make a product underpowered but still pull people away from the average computer. The average computer maker ended up copying Apple. Even with the odds against him, he got the market back which shows he knows what he’s doing.

He also knew the industries he was in and knows the history. He knew what company was good at what market, and he respected what they did. While there was the great Blu-ray vs HDDVD, he knew both wasn’t going to last, he knew downloading and streaming movies was the future. He didn’t even bother!

Compared to a lot of people in history he’s really changed how everyone does things. He captures markets in all age ranges, which is rare. What he makes is useful and he doesn’t get a handicap like most people today get. I probably won’t get a new iPhone or iPad, it’s pretty much a nice phone and that's about it. I never seen Steve Jobs force anything. He knew what he made was good, he never had to do anything to force consumers to get it. Cough, Cough, Bill Gates. If you didn’t know Bill Gates bought out or harassed his competition out. Steve never did he embraced competition.

A lot of things you do is built of Steve’s work. The Phone really was the biggest change. Everything is based on your phone and we don’t work off the old paradigm anymore.

He never took all the credit, you knew his story you knew who played a big part in it. Like all other great people do eventually get forgotten, and Steve already said it himself, he knew his fate!

Andy Cunningham served as Steve Jobs’ communications consultant, beginning in 1983, for the launch of the first Apple Macintosh computer, and remained through his ouster from Apple and re-birth with his second company, NeXT.

She spoke on working with Steve Jobs at a PRSA event in Palo Alto, CA on Tuesday, October 17 2017.

In Andy’s words:

“He was so compelling with his vision. As soon as he walked in you were on. It was exhausting. You were being tested every minute of every day. But if you passed 80% of those tests you could stay and if you didn’t get 80% you were out.

“The greatest joy of working with Steve Jobs was that his agenda in life was clearly to change the world. He had no other interests. Money didn’t matter to him. Power didn’t matter to him and women didn’t matter to him. As a person on his team it was so refreshing to work in that kind of environment. Even though he was challenging and difficult, it was very refreshing.

“The main thing I learned from Steve was this notion of super-duper high quality everything. He was about quality no matter if it was the staircase he was putting into a building, pixel color on screen or the actual words on paper…it had to be exact and perfect. I learned a lot about quality from him and about environment. He was big on creating an environment that people wanted to work in.

“If you ever visited the Macintosh building at Apple with the pirate flag - the offices were on the outside and in the middle was a piano, which he didn’t play by the way. He put it there on purpose so people would gather and create and play and be creative.

“Under Steve Jobs, Apple was a missionary company. They were out to change the fundamental behavior of human nature.

“Apple is going through a genetic change - not because of a conscious shift - but because of what happened to Steve Jobs. With his passing, he handed over the keys to an amazing steward of the assets he created. Tim Cook has done a God-like job of taking the assets he was given and making them even more valuable and Apple an even bigger company. But what he hasn’t been able to do is keep that missionary status. So the company is moving from missionary to more of a mechanic status. With that shift they are going to have to pay a lot more attention to their products. This thing that happened recently with their batteries - something like that is not going to be tolerated in their new environment. We used to tolerate stuff like that from Apple because it was so cool to buy Apple products. You felt like you were part of this changing the world movement. But if you’re just going to buy another product it better be a great product.”

Andy Cunningham, PR Pro who worked with Steve Jobs

Photo credit: Christopher Michel

Steve pushed the Woz into building the first Apple I back in the 80's.

Steve pushed his team into bringing a competitive family computer to the market in the 90's.

Steve pushed his company to produce revolutionary personal computers and the iPods, iPhones, iPads in the 00's.

You might have noticed a recurring theme up there. This is simply because Steve never physically "changed the world" himself. Steve did, however, change the world by (metaphorically) building a company from the ground up and delegating the actual product making to skilled engineers and designers such as Steve Wozniak, Jony Ive, and Phil Schiller. Steve demanded excellence and his principals have brought the company to be one of the most successful and profitable in the existence of mankind.

If you doesn't have a technical degree, it doesn't mean that you don't have the technical knowledge.

Jobs was an electronics enthusiast.

He created an instrument which acts like a speaker as well as a mic.

He asked William Hewlett (Co founder of HP) for some parts to complete his school project.

He was a member of Hewlett Packard Explorer club,where he saw a computer for the first time.

He met wozniak at the homebrew computer club.

He&woznaik invented blue box from which they made some good profit.

He is a full time worker at Atari.

It was his idea to make a computer and he forced wozniak to collaborate with him who was a permanent worker at HP by 1976

So, when jobs founded apple he has enough knowledge about electronics and computers. His work is to think how a personal computer must be. “People doesn't know what they want until we show them”

Think intuitive rather than rational thinking this was his belief.

In the process he revolutionized personal computer industry with Apple 2,Lisa, macintosh, imac, Mac book.

He revolutionized music industry with ipod

He brought the first smart phone the iPhone.

Today apple is a tech gaint with a revenue of $200 billion