Steve Jobs Remarkable Career Essay

Steve Jobs Remarkable Career

There are two current events that make a discussion of Steve Jobs career an especially interesting endeavor. The first is that the co-founder and notorious Apple visionary stepped down as the company's chief executive (Zweig, 2011). Shortly after Jobs stepped down he passed away. Many health care professionals believe that Jobs death may have been preventable and attribute his early death to his choice of trying to treat his disease through an alternative medicine approach (Michelson, 2011). Jobs was actually aware of his condition fairly early in its development which provided him an opportunity to treat it with traditional approaches however Jobs refused.

Steve Jobs is often accredited as the man who turned around Apple Inc. from the verge of collapse on several junctures. Another headline that dominated many of the major media networks recently is that Apple just passed up Exxon Mobile to become the world's most valuable company (Magee, 2011). It is somewhat ironic that Apple achieved this accreditation with Jobs at the helm just shortly before he passed away. It is almost as if he held on long enough to see Apple reach this defining moment before letting the disease take his life.

Biography

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computers on April 1, 1976 in a garage somewhere in California. The two young entrepreneurs built the first computer by hand and consequently the first Apple computers did not include a monitor, keyboard, or any housing. Despite these modest beginnings, customers flocked to by the early Apple computer. As a result it didn't take long for the Apple team to realize that there was an unbelievable prospect in the future of the market for personal computers.It is also interesting to note that Jobs intuitively knew the importance in the aesthetic value of the brand name as well as the hardware's "user-friendly" look; a dedication that persists in the Apple culture to this day.

Not long after the company was started, there was a difference in opinion among the small businesses leaders. This lead Jobs to leave Apple and begin his own company which was called NeXT. This company's product niche was based on a proprietary operating system that utilized an object-oriented programming environment. Later after Apple realized there mistake of parting ways with Jobs, Apple purchased the NeXT company which returned Jobs to the Apple team.

It was long before the Apple flourished with Jobs back on board. In 1998 Apple reached another benchmark by introducing the Mac OS X operating system, which was Apple's first proprietary operating system. This system had roots in the work that Job did while he was running NeXT. During the same period, the company also gained some market share by focusing on product design. They made their products appear unique and user friendly by adding bright colors to the computers hardware; a move that not only attracted attention but appealed to younger generations. One of Apple's approaches during this period was to gain sales by targeting schools with deep discounts which also worked to produce loyalty among the younger consumers.

The Macintosh computers which ran the proprietary Mac OS software had a lot of success in the late 1980s. However the company experienced remarkable obstacles in the 1990s. In….....