Death of A Guru

Steve Job

Steve Job, IPAD inventor dies at 56
By Josephine Scott-Emuakpor
"Mr. IPAD," Steve Job is dead. The father of current internet super highway, IPAD died on Wednesday October 5, 2011 of pancreatic cancer.
Job was a singular figure in American business history and he would go in the pantheon of great American entrepreneurs, inventors, and innovators alongside John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Sam Walton. Job neither invented computer technology, nor the cell phone, or the notion of digitalising music. But he invented methods, business models and devices that turned each into significantly larger cultural and economic phenomena.
Together Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, they founded Apple in 1976. Their first computers were simplistic but revolutionary for the period. Then in 1984, the company introduced the Macintosh 128K, the first computer that abandoned text- only commands in favour of a graphical user interface. Along with it came the mouse, a device which is so crucial to modern computing that it hasn’t changed in nearly three decades.
In 1986, during a brief break from the company, he helped created jobs, snatched up a little known division of film studio, lucas film. He renamed this computer animation company Pixar. After the expensive computer imaging technology that his team created. Shortly thereafter, he negotiated a deal with Disney to produce Pixar’s first full-length feature, Toystory. After a string of record-breaking films, he sold the company to Disney for approximately $7.4 billion.
When Jobs eventually returned to Apple, the company was in shambles. Competing manufacturers held Apple software licenses and were making clones of the company’s hardware, undermining the brand. Jobs immediately cancelled the program and brought all Apple development back under one roof. From there, he slowly built up Apple’s credibility amongst computer users and eventually oversaw the launch of the Imac and 1 Book, two of the most Iconic Apple products in the company’s history. Apple launched the Ipad in 2001, and along with Tunes software. Jobs’ company revolutionalised the way we listen to music. Digital music players can be found in every corner of the globe, and the Ipod line is by far the most popular of them all. Apple made purchasing and listening to music so affordable and easy that over 220 million Ipod devices have been sold since its introduction.
In 2007, Jobs launched what is undoubtedly the best-selling apple product to date, The Iphone, his vision of a smart phone was far different than what most wireless consumers were used to, but now it’s hard to imagine a world without it. In an era frequently characterised by executive greed and massive pay for significant underperformance, Job worked for a dollar a year. At a time when many founding CEOs step down when they hit their late 40s and early 50s to chase other pursuits (a-la Bill Gates), Job stuck with it. In an era in which many experts fretted about the ability of America’s economy to thrive and innovate, he grew into a major exporter. Apple now represents American brand, the way McDonald’s and Coca-cola once did. However, it is to put a tag on what it is precisely that Jobs did.
Steve Jobs got rich in the past decade. But he didn’t do so at the expense of his shareholders, infact, they grew rich along with him. The highest form of charity is helping somebody find a Job or a means to support them. This century is only a decade old. But it’s a safe bet that in 2009, when analysts and historians are looking back, Steve Jobs will be remembered as one of the giants of the 21st century.