In 1985, Apple lost its first time, and Jobs wanted to kick then-president Sculley out of the company.
Who knows, Sculley, who heard the news, not only did not worry, but said angrily: "Jobs, here is up to me to decide, I think you better leave Apple."
Not to be outdone, Jobs said, "I think it's better for me to stay than for Apple, and it was a mistake to invite you in the first place." ”
However, what Jobs did not expect was that he, the founder who single-handedly created the apple myth, was unfortunately swept out of the door.
In fact, Apple is not so cattle from the beginning, its early development, encountered several ups and downs.
Rebellious business genius
Jobs was born in San Francisco, his mother was pregnant out of wedlock and in graduate school. Knowing that she did not have the conditions to raise the child, she decided to give it to someone else to raise.
Jobs's adoptive father was an auto repair engineer, so Jobs had access to a wide variety of electronic components from an early age.
Jobs's father also brought him to the HP Explorers Club. Here, Jobs learned a lot from HP's engineers and laid the foundation for his electronics knowledge.
Jobs's character was rebellious and withdrawn.
He never listened carefully to lectures, often bumped into the teacher, and always liked to play pranks, make a face at the camera of the neighbor's house, and let go of the tire gas of the car.
As soon as he had time, he often studied various electronic products at home alone. After going to college, he felt that what he had learned was boring, and simply dropped out of school, and no one could stop him.
On June 29, 1975, Jobs's good friend Wozniak built a computer, and the two were excited.
Woz was a technical genius, but without the business thinking and brainstorming. Jobs, on the other hand, always came up with ways to sell what Woz designed and make a profit.
Jobs, who has a strong entrepreneurial passion, persuaded Woz to start a business together, and the two cobbled together $1300 as start-up capital.
So, 21-year-old Jobs and 26-year-old Woz set up Apple in their garage.
However, the road to entrepreneurship is not as good as imagined.
Initially, the first generation of Apple computers designed by the two was not optimistic at all. Jobs took it everywhere to market, from schools and stores to businesses and even other people's homes, to demonstrate and illustrate his own products.
Painstaking efforts have yielded little results. Woz was in a very low mood and wanted to give up at one point. But Jobs disagreed, and he was confident in his product.
With this confidence, he continued to find a way out for his products.
In 1976, he and Woz went to Atlantic City for the PC Festival, where they successfully received an order for 50 Apple computer motherboards.
This is Apple's first order, and it is also the first bucket of gold they earned $3,000, they are extremely excited, and the enthusiasm for entrepreneurship is even hotter.
Years later, Jobs said: "It was the most significant event since Apple was founded, and its significance was profound." ”
Indeed, the first order from any startup is significant, not only providing them with funding, but also giving them hope for the future.
From this business, Jobs, who was extremely business-minded, was also keenly aware that their target customers should be extended to all people who had a need for computers, so that the assembled computers could be used directly when they reached the hands of ordinary people.
By this calculation, the market would have expanded 1,000 times more than it is today.
This keen sense of business, even Bill Gates lamented: "He really doesn't know much about technology, but he has an amazing talent for knowing what can succeed." ”
Early Apple
After the Apple generation sold 200 units, it began to go unnoticed. Jobs and Woz realized that apple would have to upgrade its generation to develop more attractive and perfect products.
So, the technical genius Woz decided to use the basic language to compile a special program for the Apple II, and installed a shell for it, while expanding its storage capacity, which became the Apple II.
After the Apple II. was improved, although the performance, appearance, and quality were perfect, the production cost also climbed sharply to a few hundred dollars per unit.
If you mass-produce, you need huge funds, but where to get so much money?
When Jobs was at a loss, McKinner, which had designed a computer logo for him, suggested that he visit Valentine, a director of his own company.
Valentine has invested in McKinner and Attalee and is very successful and a good venture capitalist.
However, he was greatly disappointed by Jobs's company, Valentine said: "You don't understand marketing, you don't have product positioning, you don't know how much market potential your product has, so your sales plan is just talk."
However, Valentine gave full recognition to the performance of Apple's products and introduced Steve Jobs to a venture capitalist, Mike Marcuola.
A graduate of the University of Southern California with a degree in Electrical Engineering, Marcus served as Director of Technology R&D and Marketing at Hughes Corporation and Fairchild Semiconductor. He is not only very familiar with the electronic technology industry, but also has a very accurate grasp of the development trend.
He successfully invested in Intel's microprocessor R&D projects and became rich overnight.
When Makula came to Apple, saw Woz's presentation, and listened to Jobs's plans and goals for Apple's future, he was very appreciative of the young couple.
At the same time, Jobs's passion for work, deep desire for success, high persistence in his goals, and his highly contagious speech deeply touched Marcuola.
Marcuola believes that Apple, under Jobs's leadership, will surely be able to succeed. He immediately decided to invest in Apple and assisted Jobs in a detailed business plan.
Backed by this business plan and personal assets, Marcuola borrowed $250,000 from bank of America, plus $90,000 of his own, and he received a 1/3 stake in Apple.
Jobs's management ability was not yet mature at the time, so Marcuola poached Scott, the executive director of National Executive Semiconductor Corporation, to serve as Apple's first CEO. Woz served as vice president of technology and Jobs served as the company's director.
These four men created Apple II, which has a turning point for Apple.
On April 17, 1977, Apple's Apple II debuted at a high price of $1298. As soon as it was unveiled, it became the focus of attention of the audience.
Soon a large number of wholesalers and distributors flocked to the market, and three years later, Apple successfully went public, the stock soared, and overnight, Jobs made a hundred million, and Apple's market value was 2.5 billion.
Consequences of the "lone wolf" leader
Jobs's success attracted the envy of society as a whole, especially young people in the United States. They all longed to be able to seize the opportunity with their wisdom and courage like Jobs and become famous in one fell swoop.
Even U.S. President Ronald Reagan personally received him and called him "a hero in the minds of Americans."
Jobs was a hero in the United States, but he was in a very awkward position at his own company.
Marcuola is in charge of strategic deployment, Scott is in charge of day-to-day operations, Woz is in charge of technology, and only Jobs's work seems very unclear.
None of the employees knew what Jobs was doing all day, thinking they were working for Marcuola or Scott.
This frustrated Jobs, who has been immersed in the pleasure of wealth, but desperately desires to have rights, so that employees can turn his ideas into reality and use their abilities and wisdom to create more miracles.
Even to this end, he did everything he could to suppress his partners who fought side by side.
For example, when Apple went public, only the top executives with a college degree could get shares in the company, but the low-educated people who also contributed to the company did not.
The move made Jobs' friend Fernandez leave in anger.
Woz was also very unhappy about this, but he could not do anything about it, and he ended up selling his shares at a very low price to the elders who had contributed to Apple.
Later, Woz was unhappy that the company had reduced its support for Apple II improvements and spent all its resources on other plans, and left Apple in anger.
Still, to take care of Jobs's mood, Woz continued to serve the company part-time and represented the company at events and exhibitions.
Subsequently, the first president, Scott, because of the huge cost of the Lisa and Macintosh plans developed by Jobs and Makula, he downsized the company and announced layoffs in order to reduce unnecessary projects and expenses.
The move caused dissatisfaction among Marcuola, who dismissed Scott on the grounds that he was not in line with the direction of the company and was tough and unacceptable.
And Jobs was on Makula's side.
Because Scott had kicked Jobs out of the Lisa project team, he approved of Marcoola's decision with both hands, causing Scott to leave the scene.
The departure of the two partners has made Jobs's ability to be questioned.
In order to maintain control of Apple, Jobs hired Pepsi CEO Sculley to "change the world" with him.
But then he discovered that Sculley didn't want to listen to him and that his ability wasn't satisfactory to him, so he planned to kick him out of the company. But it didn't occur to Jobs that someone had told Sculley about the plan. Thus, there was the beginning, the fierce conflict that broke out between them.
Everyone was strongly dissatisfied with Jobs's arrogance and arbitrariness, so they all supported Sculley. This year, Jobs was 30 years old, swept out by the Apple company he founded, and lost face.
In order to achieve his business ideals, Jobs spared no expense to drive away the comrades who fought together in the early days. He also paid a huge price for his "lone wolf" behavior.
Obsessed with perfection
Leaving Apple's Jobs was painful, after all, it was the company he had founded himself, like a child.
He once described how he felt at the time: "It was like someone hitting me in the stomach with a fist, causing my whole body to fly out at once." It made me feel breathless and I was almost unconscious. ”
Still, he didn't falter, and soon he started a computer company called NeXT, which focused on education.
He also acquired the computer graphics division of George Lucasfilm and renamed it Pixar.
With half of his fortune weighed on both companies, he thought he could make a comeback soon, but for 10 years, his NeXT and Pixar companies have been losing money.
But Jobs was paranoid and confident, persistently insisting that sooner or later there would be a turnaround.
After a long wait of 10 years of losses, finally, he waited for the opportunity to work with Disney.
To this end, he gave up his interests and only fought for the right to create. Under jobs' efforts, the two sides successfully reached cooperation. With the help of Disney, Pixar is strong and developing smoothly.
In 1995, Pixar's first animated feature film, Toy Story, was released, and the scene was full, constantly breaking the box office record of the animated film, and the cost was recovered in just one week.
Subsequently, Pixar's development was in full swing, and it was successfully listed, and Jobs created a myth overnight, worth more than $1.2 billion.
At this time, Apple, under the leadership of Sculley, achieved a leap in annual revenue from $800 million to $8 billion. But Apple's computer market share fell from 20 percent to less than 8 percent, missing out on a great opportunity to grow.
The market is gradually seized by Microsoft, HP, Dell, etc., and Apple's former glory is no longer there.
With the failure of Sculley's "personal digital assistant" project, he left Apple in 1993. Spindler, the new head, is still unable to change Apple's sales problems and the profitability of new products.
He even delayed the company's decline by reducing expenses and costs, and successively cancelled various benefits and allowances for employees, including parties and parties, and employees' work meals.
Later, layoffs were also carried out, which made people panic, so that the company was also in crisis and on the verge of bankruptcy.
In 1996, when Jobs heard that Spindler was going to sell Apple Computer Company, he decided to return to Apple and make Apple comeback.
After Jobs returned to Apple, he reorganized Apple's business, did subtraction, and successively developed iMac, iOS system, iPhone and other popular products around the world, which profoundly changed modern communications, entertainment and people's lifestyles.
Apple's products with a very aesthetic appearance, the ultimate operating experience and excellent quality, quickly set off a frenzy around the world, creating a myth of the electronics industry one after another.
This process is inseparable from Jobs's almost strict control of details. As early as the choice of Apple2 chassis color, he was not satisfied with the 2,000 colors provided by the designers, so he told them to create a color at any cost.
He clamored all day to change the shell of the Apple II, to put a plastic shell on it, although the price was to increase the cost of the entire machine, but Jobs did not listen.
Jobs also asked to design the entire chassis to be beautiful and smooth, and each interface must also meet this requirement.
At the same time, apple II is also instructed not to have fans, because the noise of the fans will disturb the user's state of mind, affect the user's experience, and make people become restless.
The R&D staff thought his idea was simply absurd and incomprehensible. But Jobs ignored this, he wanted to try, change, is the result.
Before each new product is released, he will tirelessly cut the last version of the packaging, the final packaging of the Macintosh computer, before and after a total of no less than 50 times!
Jobs was always personally involved in the development and design of major products, and every link and every detail of the product needed to be decided by himself.
Employees felt that Jobs was harsh and imperious and inhuman. But it is this spirit of ingenuity that pursues perfection and the attitude of treating products as works of art that have created one miracle after another for Apple.
So much so that later entrepreneurs said their companies needed to form a dedicated team to fine-tune their products, but Apple had Jobs alone.
With his control of details and continuous innovation of products, Jobs has enabled Apple to achieve cornering overtaking under the pinch of IBM and Microsoft.
His unique management style, the concept of product design, the persistent pursuit of perfection, the courage and wisdom to innovate are all the core reasons why Apple created the myth.
Jobs never looked at things through a secular perspective, much less did he consider subjugating himself to worldly standards. But he also knows that the world's vision will definitely hinder his creativity, and will not sway his thoughts because of his feelings. He resisted pressure to drive away his partners in order to put his ideas about Apple into reality.
In order to get rid of the great pressure of the world and public opinion, he asked himself: "If this is the last day of my life, what would I do?" ”
It was this death hypothesis that miraculously freed him from outside stress.
We always do not have the courage to face the various difficulties of life and the various criticisms of the world, choose to succumb to the vision and values of others, and dare not insist on our dreams.
And Jobs told us to go every day as if it were the last day of your life and do what you want to do the most.
Even if it is stormy, they will not knock you down!
This article is written by Qingyuan
Editor-in-Charge: Small Ocean
Review: Blue Orange