Steve Jobs and the Apple Success Story Point

 

On Aug. 2, 2018, Apple (AAPL) made history by becoming the world's first publicly traded company to achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion.1 On April 30, 2019, Microsoft (MSFT) joined Apple's exclusive club, also catapulting past the $1 trillion mark. On Jan. 16, 2020, Alphabet (GOOGL) became a $1 trillion company, followed by Amazon (AMZN) on Feb. 4. As to be expected, the market value for each of these companies has swung up and down as prices fluctuate, and maintaining the $1 trillion valuation can be elusive. However, the fact that Apple was the first company to surpass the $1 trillion mark is in no small part connected to the legacy and lessons learned from Steve Jobs. On Oct. 5, 2011, Steve Jobs gave up the ghost at the age of 56.2 He had just left the CEO post at Apple, the corporate he co-founded, for the second time. Jobs was an entrepreneur through and thru , and therefore the story of his rise is that the story of Apple as a corporation , along side some very interesting twists. In this article, we'll check out the career of Steve Jobs and therefore the company he founded, also as a number of the teachings Apple offers for potential entrepreneurs. 1:59 Steve Jobs And The Apple Story KEY TAKEAWAYS Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1977, introducing first the Apple I then the Apple II.

Apple went public in 1980 with Jobs the blazing visionary and Wozniak the shy genius executing his vision.

Executive John Scully was added in 1983; in 1985, Apple's board of directors ousted the combative Jobs in favor of Scully. Away from Apple, Jobs invested in and developed animation producer Pixar then founded NeXT to make high-end computers; NeXT eventually led him back to Apple. Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s and spent the years until his death in 2011 revamping the company, introducing the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming technology and communication in the process. From Blue Boxes to Apple Steve Jobs got his start in business with another Steve, Steve Wozniak, building the blue boxes phone phreakers wont to make free calls across the state .

The two were members of the HomeBrew Computer Club, where they quickly became enamored with kit computers and left the blue boxes behind.

The next product the 2 sold was the Apple I, which was a kit for building a PC. In order to do anything with it, the customer needed to add their own monitor and keyboard.3 With Wozniak doing most of the building and Jobs handling the sales, the 2 made enough money off the hobbyist market to take a position within the Apple II. It was the Apple II that made the corporate . Jobs and Wozniak created enough interest in their new product to draw in risk capital . This meant they were in the big leagues and their company, Apple, was officially incorporated in 1976.3 Steve Jobs was a month shy of turning 22 and would be a millionaire before his next birthday. The Roller Coaster Ride Begins

By 1978, Apple was making $2 million in profits solely on the strength of the Apple II.

The Apple II wasn't state of the art, but it did allow computer enthusiasts to make and sell their own programs. Among these user-generated programs was VisiCalc, a kind of proto-Excel that represented the primary software with business applications. Although Apple didn't profit directly from these programs, they did see more interest because the uses for the Apple II broadened. This model of allowing users to make their own programs and sell them would reappear within the app market of the longer term , but with a way tighter business strategy around it. By the time Apple went public in 1980, the dynamic of the corporate was more or less set. Steve Jobs was the fiery visionary, with an intense and sometimes combative management style, and Steve Wozniak was the quiet genius who made the vision work. Apple's board of directors wasn't too fond of such a power imbalance in the company, however. Jobs and therefore the board agreed to feature John Sculley to the chief team in 1983.

In 1985, the board ousted Jobs in favor of Sculley.

The Gap Years Steve Jobs was rich and unemployed. Although he wasn't performing at Apple, he was faraway from idle. During this point , from 1985 to 1996, Jobs was involved in two big deals; the primary of which was an investment. In 1986, Jobs purchased a controlling stake during a company called Pixar from Lucas .

The company was struggling, but their eventual success in digital animation led to an initial public offering (IPO) that earned Jobs around $1 billion.

The second was a return to his old obsession with computers, founding NeXT to make high-end computers. These were expensive machines with an OS representing the simplest attempt yet at making the facility of UNIX fit into a graphical interface . When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, he did so using a NeXT machine.4 Of these two deals, NeXT proved the foremost important, because it clothed Apple was looking to exchange its OS . Apple bought NeXT in 1996 for its OS , bringing Steve Jobs back to the primary company he founded. 1996 The critical year in which Steve Jobs sold NeXT, the computer maker he had founded, to Apple, returning him to the company eleven years after he had been ousted. .

Getting Apple Back on Track When Jobs returned, the company wasn't in a good place.

Apple had begun to flounder as cheap PCs running Windows flooded the market.

Jobs found himself within the driver's seat again and took some drastic steps to show around Apple's decline. The company asked for and received a $150 million investment from Bill Gates.5 Jobs used the money to ramp up advertising and highlight the products Apple already offered while choking off research and development (R&D) money in non-producing areas. The NeXT OS was wont to create the iMac, Apple's first hit PC during a while . Jobs followed this up with an inventory of successes from the iPod in 2001 to the iPad in 2010.

The years between saw Apple dominate the smartphone market with the iPhone, open up an e-commerce store with iTunes, and launch branded shops called, what else, the Apple Store.

When Jobs stepped down as CEO, Apple was scrapping with Exxon for the world's largest market cap