Remembering Steve Jobs as Apple becomes a $1-trillion firm
In the midst of unrelenting fusillade of recent political and economic news, genuine or fake, one news report that clearly stood out was this: Apple Inc. became the first publicly traded US company to reach the $1-trillion market capitalization, a great historic feat, a new chapter in the company’s business performance that could likely be maintained in the years to come.
This is the global market's imprimatur of what Apple Inc. has always been known for; its continuing use of business agility, pioneering technology and market savvy with the way it conducts its business that eventually evolves into a very dominant corporate giant regardless of the ups and downs that occur in the market place. What all this means is a confirmation of the vision of its legendary Apple founder, Steve Jobs, to make sure that Apple Inc. isn't going to be a mere hardware company but a market reality, a huge cash machine, and first among its peers.
In a way, credit should also be given to Apple CEO Tim Cook when he started Apple's multi- billion stock repurchase program saying “we are betting on Apple; that we are really confident on what we are doing and what we plan to do.”
Speaking of the late Steve Jobs, Oct. 5 was his seventh death anniversary. You'll recall that he died at age 56 after battling pancreatic cancer for nearly a decade. I wrote then and I still believe it now that “His death was the world’s loss. It still is.” A view not uncommon and shared by Apple’s millions of clients and fans around the world.
I also recall that at the time of his untimely death on 2011, then US President Barack Obama emphatically wrote that “Steve Jobs was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on Feb. 24, 1955, to parents who put him up for adoption at birth. He was raised in San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s and he attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out that same year. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass produced personal computers.
In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple after a long power struggle with the company’s board and its then CEO John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took a few of Apple's members with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher education and business market and he helped develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in 1986.
The new company was Pixar which produced Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated film.
Apple merged with NeXT in 1997, and Steve Jobs became CEO of his former company and within a few months, he helped revive Apple, which had been at the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with others to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications like the iMac, iTunes, iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad.
Steve Jobs was often quoted with his usual advice “to follow your heart and intuition.” That was the core of his 2005 commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University which I quote: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don’t let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”