Scan barcode
homs_dream's review
3.0
I discovered that Steve Jobs, a young man, is fit to be a model, and his face and features help him in that.
Read the book in its free electronic version here:
https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/#photo-43
Read the book in its free electronic version here:
https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/#photo-43
capslock's review
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
4.75
A perfect addition to Steve Jobs’s biography by Walter Isaacson. This book feels much more personal because it’s all Steve’s words. Also, the ebook is available for free, so that’s nice.
architr's review
3.0
key takeaways:
### Part I, 1976–1985
It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born. And IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.
It is ten years later, the late sixties. Digital Equipment [DEC] and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing, and therefore unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million-dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market.
It is now ten years later, the late seventies. In 1977, Apple, a young, fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business.
The early eighties, ’81. Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer. Apple has grown to a $300 million company, becoming the fastest-growing corporation in American business history, with over fifty competitors vying for a share. IBM enters the personal-computer market in November ’81 with the IBM PC.
1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, each selling approximately one billion dollars’ worth of personal computers in 1983. Each will invest greater than $50 million for R&D and another $50 million for television advertising in 1984, totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined.
The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for ’83 outshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers.
It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future.
### Unknown chapter
The years after Steve left Apple were among the toughest of his career—and the most formative.
Determined to build a new great computer company, he started NeXT with several members of the Macintosh team. “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least they’ll be new and creative ones,” he predicted.
Around the same time, Steve invested $10 million in a small company called Pixar. It was a tiny computer graphics operation, newly spun off from filmmaker George Lucas’s empire. The technical expertise at Pixar attracted Steve; its initial product was a high-end graphics computer that cost more than $100,000.
Both NeXT and Pixar quickly ran into trouble. The NeXT computer system, which debuted in 1988, was powerful and packed with the humanistic touches Steve loved. It was visually striking and intuitive to use, with high-quality audio and the complete works of Shakespeare built in. But it was also late to market and expensive—and it sold poorly. Within six years of NeXT’s launch, the entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned.
Pixar, meanwhile, was eking out an existence selling computers and software and, later, animating commercials. The company was also making award-winning short films that charmed Steve. This use of technology in service of brilliant storytelling embodied one of his favorite things: work at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. The short films fired Steve’s enthusiasm and kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some $60 million.
But the films were, as Steve put it, “in the background,” not the company’s focus. He described Pixar’s early business strategy as “find a way to pay the bills,” and he later speculated that the only reason the company didn’t fall apart then was that the leadership team “would all get depressed … but not all of us at once.”
If at times in these years he seemed disappointed by the possibilities of technology—“this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t,” he told a reporter in an uncharacteristic flash of pessimism—his world was also expanding beyond his work. He treasured his privacy, saying of his public persona, “I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me.”
Steve learned how to hone a company to its essence, even when it was painful. He shifted NeXT’s focus to selling software. The shift meant closing a factory and laying off more than two hundred of NeXT’s five hundred and thirty employees. Meanwhile, Pixar stripped away its advertising and hardware businesses and entered into an agreement with Disney, all to pursue what sometimes seemed an impossible dream: to make fully computer-animated feature films.
After nearly a decade of difficulty, the streamlined NeXT and Pixar both transformed into unlikely success stories. At the end of 1995, Pixar premiered Toy Story in the same month it held its initial public offering. A year later, Apple, in need of operating-system software, bought NeXT for $427 million. “If you really look closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes took a long time.”
As CEO of Apple and Pixar (he held both roles until Disney acquired Pixar in 2006), he saw his job as “number one, recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, inspire and cajole and persuade.” He said, “You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you.” He gave particular thought to his responsibility for the business aspects of a creative company. A “risk-taking creative environment on the product side,” he said, required a “fiscally conservative environment” on the business side. “Creative people are willing to take a leap in the air, but they need to know that the ground’s going to be there when they get back.”
Key Events
January 1975—Popular Electronics publishes a story about the Altair 8800, sparking the microcomputer revolution. That same year, Bill Gates drops out of Harvard to design programming languages for the Altair. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a club launches for people who want to build their own computers: the Homebrew Computer Club, which Steve occasionally attends with Steve Wozniak.
April 1976—Steve and Woz co-found Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, designed by Woz. (A third co-founder, Ron Wayne, drops out ten days after joining.) Apple I buyers must supply their own keyboards and television monitors, as well as know how to write hexadecimal code and use a soldering iron.
January 1977—Apple incorporates, with ownership split evenly among Steve, Woz, and the angel investor Mike Markkula.
April 1977—The Apple II, a more user-friendly computer, debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. At $1,298, the Apple II costs about twice as much as a year of in-state tuition at the University of California.
May 1978—Lisa Brennan Jobs is born.
May 1979—Apple’s publications department manager, Jef Raskin, begins work on an inexpensive computer he calls Macintosh.
December 1979—During a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Steve sees, for the first time, a networked computer with a mouse, windows, icons, menus, and multiple typefaces. “I was so blown away,” he later recalled. He brings the technology, and several PARC researchers, to Apple.
September 1980—Steve takes over the high-profile Lisa computer project. He is removed nine months later, after the team rebels against his management style.
December 1980—Apple goes public in one of the most successful initial public offerings in American history up to that time.
February 1981—Ten years after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, Woz leaves Apple to re-enroll.
Steve takes over the Macintosh project.
August 1981—Apple faces its first real competition when IBM introduces its personal computer. IBM’s market share soon surpasses Apple’s.
January 1983—Time shakes up its “Man of the Year” tradition to choose the computer as “Machine of the Year.”
Apple introduces the Lisa computer, priced at $10,000, targeting business users. It fails in the market.
April 1983—Jobs recruits the Pepsi executive John Sculley to be Apple’s CEO, using the memorable line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
January 1984—Macintosh debuts.
June 1985—When Macintosh sales fall far short of projections, Apple lays off 20 percent of employees and announces the first quarterly loss in its history.
September 1985—After losing a power struggle with Sculley, Steve leaves Apple with five Mac team members in tow. Within days, Apple sues for breach of fiduciary responsibility and charges Steve with masterminding a “nefarious” scheme to steal trade secrets for his new computer company, NeXT.
January 1986—Steve becomes the majority shareholder in Pixar, after the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay introduces him to the company’s leaders, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.
NeXT and Apple settle their lawsuit over NeXT’s launch and Steve’s recruitment of Mac team members out of court.
August 1986—Steve attends the premiere of Pixar’s first animated short, Luxo Jr., at a graphics industry conference. Luxo Jr. showcases Pixar’s software, but it is the audience’s standing ovation for the storytelling that catches Steve’s attention.
October 1988—Steve unveils the NeXT Computer System at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. A highlight is the machine’s five-minute performance of a Bach violin concerto, accompanied by a violinist from the symphony. The computer did not sell well but had its fans; Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.
March 1989—Pixar’s film Tin Toy wins an Oscar for Best Animated Short, a first for a computer-animated movie.
March 1991—Steve marries Laurene Powell in a ceremony at Yosemite.
July 1991—Facing heavy financial pressure, Pixar signs a deal with Disney that is far more favorable to the larger company. In exchange for financing up to three Pixar films, Disney owns the films and their characters, receives most of the films’ profits, and prohibits Pixar from pitching to another studio any ideas that Disney rejects.
September 1991—Reed Jobs is born.
February 1993—Steve ends NeXT’s production of computers to focus entirely on software.
October 1993—With Apple losing tens of millions of dollars every quarter, CEO John Sculley, who pushed Steve out of Apple in 1985, resigns. Apple will cycle through two more CEOs in the next three years but fail to regain its footing.
August 1995—Erin Jobs is born.
November 1995—Toy Story, the world’s first full-length fully animated feature film, earns $29 million in its opening weekend. It goes on to become the top-grossing animated movie of the year.
A week after Toy Story opens, Pixar holds a successful initial public offering. It was a bold bet placed months earlier; if Toy Story had been a bust, the IPO would have been one, too.
December 1996—In need of a new operating system, Apple acquires NeXT for $427 million. As part the agreement, Steve rejoins Apple as a special adviser to the CEO, Gil Amelio.
February 1997—The success of Toy Story and Pixar’s IPO give Steve leverage to negotiate a more favorable agreement with Disney. The companies sign a five-picture deal.
June 1997—In a public show of no confidence in Amelio, Steve sells a huge block of the Apple shares he received in the NeXT acquisition. Three months later, Steve is named interim CEO.
August 1997—Bill Gates appears on a giant video screen at Macworld to announce Microsoft’s commitment to developing Microsoft Office for Mac. When the audience begins heckling, Steve reprimands them: “We have to let go of […] this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
September 1997—Apple introduces the “Think Different” advertising campaign. One year later, it wins an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.
March 1998—Steve hires Tim Cook as Apple’s chief of operations.
July 1998—Eve Jobs is born.
August 1998—Apple debuts the Bondi Blue iMac. The “i” stands for “internet,” targeting consumers who want to“surf the web” as easily as catching a wave at Australia’s Bondi Beach.
October 1998—Apple announces its first profitable year since 1995.
January 2000—In the last three minutes of his Macworld presentation, Steve surprises the audience with the announcement that he will drop “interim” from his CEO title.
March 2000—The wave of internet optimism crashes. The NASDAQ loses nearly $1 trillion in a single month, and hundreds of start-up companies fail in a “dotcom bust.”
November 2000—Pixar’s new campus in Emeryville, California, opens. Steve has been so involved in the headquarters design—from the town hall atrium to the bathrooms—that people call it “Steve’s movie.”
May 2001—The first Apple retail stores open in Tysons, Virginia, and Glendale, California.
March 2001—Apple releases OS X, an operating system based on the NeXTStep software developed at NeXT. Updated versions of the operating system remain at the heart of many Apple products today.
October 2001—Apple introduces the iPod. It’s a new kind of product for the company, not a computer but a portable device built to sync with a computer. Apple built a music player, Steve says, because “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”
April 2003—Apple opens the iTunes Music Store, making it easy to buy individual songs online. The store is only available for Apple computers, but users download one million tracks in the first week. Six months later, at the urging of his executive team, Steve agrees to make the store compatible with non-Apple computers.
March 2004—Pixar’s fifth film, Finding Nemo, wins an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
July 2004—Steve undergoes surgery to remove a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
January 2006—Disney acquires Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. Steve becomes Disney’s largest shareholder and joins the board of directors, while John Lasseter and Ed Catmull assume leadership of Disney Animation.
January 2007—The iPhone debuts. Steve calls it “the most revolutionary and exciting product in Apple’s history.”
March 2009—On leave from Apple, Steve receives a liver transplant in Memphis, Tennessee.
January 2010—Steve introduces the iPad, calling it“a magical and revolutionary device.”
August 2010—Toy Story 3 becomes the highest-grossing animated movie of all time.
### Part II, 1985–1996
For those of you who didn’t see the Academy Awards last night, Pixar won an award in the category of short animated films: for their computer generated film Tin Toy
Tin Toy is the first computer generated film to ever win an award, and was competing against several very good traditionally animated (non-computer-animated) films!
The computer graphics industry just achieved a major milestone, and Pixar led the way!
Well, I don’t know what a corporate lifestyle is. I mean, Apple was a corporation; we were very conscious of that. We were very driven to make money so that we could continue to invest in the things we loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had a few very big differences to other corporate lifestyles that I’d seen. The first one was a real belief that there wasn’t a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization. In other words, great ideas could come from anywhere and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.
And Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we’re paying them all this money, their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a very different corporate culture, and one that’s really much more collegial than hierarchical.
Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. The most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things that everyone and everything tries to convince you to strive for. Most of you know that deep inside. Think back on this spring—the last three or four months—when you are winding down high school, know where you are going next year, and begin to really have strong intuitions about the world you will encounter. Maybe you see an image of yourself in Paris, sculpting in an artist’s studio as the setting sun shines in the paned windows. Maybe you’re in India, running a hospital for poor children, and you hear the distant clatter of the outdoor marketplace in the early morning. Maybe you see yourself in a recording studio laying down a track for your album. Maybe you see yourself alone in a rented room at 4:30 in the morning being the only person alive to understand a new law of physics you just figured out.
Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true.
People will come at you with reasons why you shouldn’t do these things:
You can’t make a living writing songs. (Right, just ask Bob Dylan.)
Helping children in India is nice, but you need to prepare for real life. ( Just ask Mother Teresa.)
You could be doing so much more with your life. (You can hear Albert Einstein’s parents encouraging him to get a real job, when he was working a low-level job in the Swiss patent office rather than teaching in a university, so that he could stay up late at night working through his new ideas.)
If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them.
Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.
So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself—especially those that carry a romantic scent.
But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful thing about it, in a way.
### Part I, 1976–1985
It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born. And IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.
It is ten years later, the late sixties. Digital Equipment [DEC] and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing, and therefore unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million-dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market.
It is now ten years later, the late seventies. In 1977, Apple, a young, fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business.
The early eighties, ’81. Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer. Apple has grown to a $300 million company, becoming the fastest-growing corporation in American business history, with over fifty competitors vying for a share. IBM enters the personal-computer market in November ’81 with the IBM PC.
1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, each selling approximately one billion dollars’ worth of personal computers in 1983. Each will invest greater than $50 million for R&D and another $50 million for television advertising in 1984, totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined.
The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for ’83 outshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers.
It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future.
### Unknown chapter
The years after Steve left Apple were among the toughest of his career—and the most formative.
Determined to build a new great computer company, he started NeXT with several members of the Macintosh team. “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least they’ll be new and creative ones,” he predicted.
Around the same time, Steve invested $10 million in a small company called Pixar. It was a tiny computer graphics operation, newly spun off from filmmaker George Lucas’s empire. The technical expertise at Pixar attracted Steve; its initial product was a high-end graphics computer that cost more than $100,000.
Both NeXT and Pixar quickly ran into trouble. The NeXT computer system, which debuted in 1988, was powerful and packed with the humanistic touches Steve loved. It was visually striking and intuitive to use, with high-quality audio and the complete works of Shakespeare built in. But it was also late to market and expensive—and it sold poorly. Within six years of NeXT’s launch, the entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned.
Pixar, meanwhile, was eking out an existence selling computers and software and, later, animating commercials. The company was also making award-winning short films that charmed Steve. This use of technology in service of brilliant storytelling embodied one of his favorite things: work at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. The short films fired Steve’s enthusiasm and kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some $60 million.
But the films were, as Steve put it, “in the background,” not the company’s focus. He described Pixar’s early business strategy as “find a way to pay the bills,” and he later speculated that the only reason the company didn’t fall apart then was that the leadership team “would all get depressed … but not all of us at once.”
If at times in these years he seemed disappointed by the possibilities of technology—“this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t,” he told a reporter in an uncharacteristic flash of pessimism—his world was also expanding beyond his work. He treasured his privacy, saying of his public persona, “I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me.”
Steve learned how to hone a company to its essence, even when it was painful. He shifted NeXT’s focus to selling software. The shift meant closing a factory and laying off more than two hundred of NeXT’s five hundred and thirty employees. Meanwhile, Pixar stripped away its advertising and hardware businesses and entered into an agreement with Disney, all to pursue what sometimes seemed an impossible dream: to make fully computer-animated feature films.
After nearly a decade of difficulty, the streamlined NeXT and Pixar both transformed into unlikely success stories. At the end of 1995, Pixar premiered Toy Story in the same month it held its initial public offering. A year later, Apple, in need of operating-system software, bought NeXT for $427 million. “If you really look closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes took a long time.”
As CEO of Apple and Pixar (he held both roles until Disney acquired Pixar in 2006), he saw his job as “number one, recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, inspire and cajole and persuade.” He said, “You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you.” He gave particular thought to his responsibility for the business aspects of a creative company. A “risk-taking creative environment on the product side,” he said, required a “fiscally conservative environment” on the business side. “Creative people are willing to take a leap in the air, but they need to know that the ground’s going to be there when they get back.”
Key Events
January 1975—Popular Electronics publishes a story about the Altair 8800, sparking the microcomputer revolution. That same year, Bill Gates drops out of Harvard to design programming languages for the Altair. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a club launches for people who want to build their own computers: the Homebrew Computer Club, which Steve occasionally attends with Steve Wozniak.
April 1976—Steve and Woz co-found Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, designed by Woz. (A third co-founder, Ron Wayne, drops out ten days after joining.) Apple I buyers must supply their own keyboards and television monitors, as well as know how to write hexadecimal code and use a soldering iron.
January 1977—Apple incorporates, with ownership split evenly among Steve, Woz, and the angel investor Mike Markkula.
April 1977—The Apple II, a more user-friendly computer, debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. At $1,298, the Apple II costs about twice as much as a year of in-state tuition at the University of California.
May 1978—Lisa Brennan Jobs is born.
May 1979—Apple’s publications department manager, Jef Raskin, begins work on an inexpensive computer he calls Macintosh.
December 1979—During a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Steve sees, for the first time, a networked computer with a mouse, windows, icons, menus, and multiple typefaces. “I was so blown away,” he later recalled. He brings the technology, and several PARC researchers, to Apple.
September 1980—Steve takes over the high-profile Lisa computer project. He is removed nine months later, after the team rebels against his management style.
December 1980—Apple goes public in one of the most successful initial public offerings in American history up to that time.
February 1981—Ten years after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, Woz leaves Apple to re-enroll.
Steve takes over the Macintosh project.
August 1981—Apple faces its first real competition when IBM introduces its personal computer. IBM’s market share soon surpasses Apple’s.
January 1983—Time shakes up its “Man of the Year” tradition to choose the computer as “Machine of the Year.”
Apple introduces the Lisa computer, priced at $10,000, targeting business users. It fails in the market.
April 1983—Jobs recruits the Pepsi executive John Sculley to be Apple’s CEO, using the memorable line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
January 1984—Macintosh debuts.
June 1985—When Macintosh sales fall far short of projections, Apple lays off 20 percent of employees and announces the first quarterly loss in its history.
September 1985—After losing a power struggle with Sculley, Steve leaves Apple with five Mac team members in tow. Within days, Apple sues for breach of fiduciary responsibility and charges Steve with masterminding a “nefarious” scheme to steal trade secrets for his new computer company, NeXT.
January 1986—Steve becomes the majority shareholder in Pixar, after the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay introduces him to the company’s leaders, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.
NeXT and Apple settle their lawsuit over NeXT’s launch and Steve’s recruitment of Mac team members out of court.
August 1986—Steve attends the premiere of Pixar’s first animated short, Luxo Jr., at a graphics industry conference. Luxo Jr. showcases Pixar’s software, but it is the audience’s standing ovation for the storytelling that catches Steve’s attention.
October 1988—Steve unveils the NeXT Computer System at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. A highlight is the machine’s five-minute performance of a Bach violin concerto, accompanied by a violinist from the symphony. The computer did not sell well but had its fans; Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.
March 1989—Pixar’s film Tin Toy wins an Oscar for Best Animated Short, a first for a computer-animated movie.
March 1991—Steve marries Laurene Powell in a ceremony at Yosemite.
July 1991—Facing heavy financial pressure, Pixar signs a deal with Disney that is far more favorable to the larger company. In exchange for financing up to three Pixar films, Disney owns the films and their characters, receives most of the films’ profits, and prohibits Pixar from pitching to another studio any ideas that Disney rejects.
September 1991—Reed Jobs is born.
February 1993—Steve ends NeXT’s production of computers to focus entirely on software.
October 1993—With Apple losing tens of millions of dollars every quarter, CEO John Sculley, who pushed Steve out of Apple in 1985, resigns. Apple will cycle through two more CEOs in the next three years but fail to regain its footing.
August 1995—Erin Jobs is born.
November 1995—Toy Story, the world’s first full-length fully animated feature film, earns $29 million in its opening weekend. It goes on to become the top-grossing animated movie of the year.
A week after Toy Story opens, Pixar holds a successful initial public offering. It was a bold bet placed months earlier; if Toy Story had been a bust, the IPO would have been one, too.
December 1996—In need of a new operating system, Apple acquires NeXT for $427 million. As part the agreement, Steve rejoins Apple as a special adviser to the CEO, Gil Amelio.
February 1997—The success of Toy Story and Pixar’s IPO give Steve leverage to negotiate a more favorable agreement with Disney. The companies sign a five-picture deal.
June 1997—In a public show of no confidence in Amelio, Steve sells a huge block of the Apple shares he received in the NeXT acquisition. Three months later, Steve is named interim CEO.
August 1997—Bill Gates appears on a giant video screen at Macworld to announce Microsoft’s commitment to developing Microsoft Office for Mac. When the audience begins heckling, Steve reprimands them: “We have to let go of […] this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
September 1997—Apple introduces the “Think Different” advertising campaign. One year later, it wins an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.
March 1998—Steve hires Tim Cook as Apple’s chief of operations.
July 1998—Eve Jobs is born.
August 1998—Apple debuts the Bondi Blue iMac. The “i” stands for “internet,” targeting consumers who want to“surf the web” as easily as catching a wave at Australia’s Bondi Beach.
October 1998—Apple announces its first profitable year since 1995.
January 2000—In the last three minutes of his Macworld presentation, Steve surprises the audience with the announcement that he will drop “interim” from his CEO title.
March 2000—The wave of internet optimism crashes. The NASDAQ loses nearly $1 trillion in a single month, and hundreds of start-up companies fail in a “dotcom bust.”
November 2000—Pixar’s new campus in Emeryville, California, opens. Steve has been so involved in the headquarters design—from the town hall atrium to the bathrooms—that people call it “Steve’s movie.”
May 2001—The first Apple retail stores open in Tysons, Virginia, and Glendale, California.
March 2001—Apple releases OS X, an operating system based on the NeXTStep software developed at NeXT. Updated versions of the operating system remain at the heart of many Apple products today.
October 2001—Apple introduces the iPod. It’s a new kind of product for the company, not a computer but a portable device built to sync with a computer. Apple built a music player, Steve says, because “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”
April 2003—Apple opens the iTunes Music Store, making it easy to buy individual songs online. The store is only available for Apple computers, but users download one million tracks in the first week. Six months later, at the urging of his executive team, Steve agrees to make the store compatible with non-Apple computers.
March 2004—Pixar’s fifth film, Finding Nemo, wins an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
July 2004—Steve undergoes surgery to remove a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
January 2006—Disney acquires Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. Steve becomes Disney’s largest shareholder and joins the board of directors, while John Lasseter and Ed Catmull assume leadership of Disney Animation.
January 2007—The iPhone debuts. Steve calls it “the most revolutionary and exciting product in Apple’s history.”
March 2009—On leave from Apple, Steve receives a liver transplant in Memphis, Tennessee.
January 2010—Steve introduces the iPad, calling it“a magical and revolutionary device.”
August 2010—Toy Story 3 becomes the highest-grossing animated movie of all time.
### Part II, 1985–1996
For those of you who didn’t see the Academy Awards last night, Pixar won an award in the category of short animated films: for their computer generated film Tin Toy
Tin Toy is the first computer generated film to ever win an award, and was competing against several very good traditionally animated (non-computer-animated) films!
The computer graphics industry just achieved a major milestone, and Pixar led the way!
Well, I don’t know what a corporate lifestyle is. I mean, Apple was a corporation; we were very conscious of that. We were very driven to make money so that we could continue to invest in the things we loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had a few very big differences to other corporate lifestyles that I’d seen. The first one was a real belief that there wasn’t a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization. In other words, great ideas could come from anywhere and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.
And Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we’re paying them all this money, their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a very different corporate culture, and one that’s really much more collegial than hierarchical.
Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. The most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things that everyone and everything tries to convince you to strive for. Most of you know that deep inside. Think back on this spring—the last three or four months—when you are winding down high school, know where you are going next year, and begin to really have strong intuitions about the world you will encounter. Maybe you see an image of yourself in Paris, sculpting in an artist’s studio as the setting sun shines in the paned windows. Maybe you’re in India, running a hospital for poor children, and you hear the distant clatter of the outdoor marketplace in the early morning. Maybe you see yourself in a recording studio laying down a track for your album. Maybe you see yourself alone in a rented room at 4:30 in the morning being the only person alive to understand a new law of physics you just figured out.
Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true.
People will come at you with reasons why you shouldn’t do these things:
You can’t make a living writing songs. (Right, just ask Bob Dylan.)
Helping children in India is nice, but you need to prepare for real life. ( Just ask Mother Teresa.)
You could be doing so much more with your life. (You can hear Albert Einstein’s parents encouraging him to get a real job, when he was working a low-level job in the Swiss patent office rather than teaching in a university, so that he could stay up late at night working through his new ideas.)
If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them.
Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.
So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself—especially those that carry a romantic scent.
But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful thing about it, in a way.