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Steve Jobs: Success and Self-Destruction
How Magical Thinking Turns on Itself
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, immediately put up for adoption. His adoptive parents raised him just outside Silicon Valley.
He founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. By 1985, he was ousted from his own company.
Jobs pulled members from Apple and developed a new company called NeXT. He invested in George Lucas to provide capital for his 3D computer-animated film company, Lucasfilm. They created Toy Story with this technology in 1995. This company is known today as Pixar. Jobs saw something in the vision and hardware that few others were looking at. He was already looking beyond rigidity, trying to find the magic.
In 1997, Apple was frightened of what Jobs was doing so they acquired NeXT. The joke was on them because much of NeXT wasn’t really a threat.
In a few months Jobs was CEO of Apple. Within the next few years, Jobs turned Apple into what we see it as today.
He began this advertising campaign revolving around the “Think Different” slogan. Ten years after, Jobs had released the first iPhone, revolutionizing three things:
- The removal of the keypad on smartphones, a screen that uses nearly the full length of the phone.
