Steves Jobs Way

The Steve Jobs Way

Essay

The Steve Jobs Way is a book written by Jay Elliot, a coworker and personal friend of Steve Jobs. In it we can notice that he shows a great admiration for Steve and narrates us from the moment he met him and became part of the Apple’s team, until some of his last years of life achievements. The book focuses on two main things: Steve’s life, and his influence over Apple.

Steve Jobs was known as a great entrepreneur, cofounder of Apple (along with Steve Wozniak), and founder of other successful companies and enterprises. But beyond all this, Steve is presented as a different type of administrator, one that is completely compromised with his products.

Working in a time when the computers were all text, difficult to use and only had by big companies, he saw the necessity of the many, and found the way to improve them so they would be useful and affordable for more people. Some of the improvements he introduced were basis for things we still use nowadays, for example: the mouse and the graphic interface software.

Even though Jay Elliot entered to Apple Computer when it still was a small company, he relates us how Steve always thought big, having great expectations and trying to motivate everyone else at the point of becoming obsessive.

Steve’s presence in Apple was felt by every single employee; he tried to do the working stations the most confortable he could, he created areas where the staff could relax, drink a soda, chat, etc. But sometimes he could be rude when he wanted a thing the staff wasn’t achieving.

Having this kind of personality, made him often to be seem as immature or crazy, sometimes too risky for the company’s shareholders taste.

This gave him for several years a lot of conflicts with Apple’s administration, mostly because many of the shareholders didn’t follow him in the direction he thought the company should follow. For example he thought that the new computer they were developing by that time wasn’t what the market needed and tried to change it, but the directive found a way to avoid it by reassigning him to other area.

Resentful for having taken the control of the company’s main product he found another group in the company which was developing a totally different computer, the Macintosh; seeing this new opportunity he didn’t think twice and took the control over the group and started adding his own ideas trying to do the Macintosh the best product they could ever do in that time. The Macintosh wasn’t a boom in the market as he wanted, but still got to be innovative, got a part of the market share and was the beginning of the line of Macs that came after.

Steve Jobs leaved Apple in the 80’s after having taken most of his influence in the company (he said they fired him but this wasn’t completely true). But instead of retiring and living of the fortune the already had, he founded other companies. One was a computer developing company called: NeXT, and the other one was: PIXAR a computerized animation company which made the very first completely computer made film: Toy Story, and nowadays is one of the biggest companies in the area.

Steve returned to Apple in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT and managed the company until his resignation in 2011. In this period of time he started what is today known as the Apple’s new era. He gave ideas and motivation to create several new and different products.

Steve saw that the company was wasting time and money using the common distribution channels, instead he decided to open the Apple store, high technology designed store where people could see the full working products and interact with them, all this reducing costs and getting to closer to the customers.

Also Steve used his love for music to inspire the creation of iTunes, a virtual shop where it could be possible to easily buy songs at affordable prices for having

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