Introduction
Apple is one of the most successful companies in the world today. It is worth billions of dollars, and it has millions of loyal customer across the world. The history of its success is closely connected with the name of Steve Jobs, its co-founder, and ideologist. The story of Apple cannot be called an easy road to success. The company went through the financial gains as well as through tremendous losses.
The situation was even critical several times and as the result, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. He was frustrated but never broken. Jobs did not give up and established other businesses such as Pixar and NeXT. However, his greatest passion was Apple. He returned to the company to make it a world-recognized leader in design and style in technological are. Only the comeback of Steve Jobs in 1997 to the position of Apple’s CEO has made possible the company’s huge success.
Steve Jobs Is Back
Apple was going through the hard times when Steve Jobs returned to the company as the consultant. At that time, Jobs had Pixar and NeXT already, but Apple was his passion (Stone par. 5). He stepped in the position of CEO when the company had a tremendous decline in sales, lost the competition to Microsoft, and produced numerous versions of several products to provide retailers with what they requested (Guglielmo par.2 ).
Thus, for example, Apple produced numerous Macintosh clones. Jobs wondered why and then eliminated this practice, reducing the bulk of Apple’s products to 30% of the existed in 1997. The personal assistant Newton was not among the remaining part (Fell par. 3-5). It was the first implementation of the future iPhone ideology. In 1999, the company started to develop and produce only four products: for professional users there were Power Macintosh G3 (desktop) and the PowerBook G3 (portable), and for regular users there were iMacs and iBooks (Fell par. 7).
In 2001, Apple presented the new operating system Mac OS X. The same year, the company decided to open several stores across the country. October 2001 became the first turning point in the history of Apple. Steve Jobs introduced iPod (Stone par. 11).
It was the revolution in the world of music players. The launch of the iTunes Store where Apple customers were able to purchase music for moderate price only developed iPod’s popularity. In 2006, another epochal event happened: Apple made a deal with Intel and started to use its processors in the products (Stone par. 23). However, the biggest success of Steve Jobs and Apple was yet to come.
The First iPhone
In 2007, Apple Computer, Inc. became just Apple Inc. The reason was in the product lines’ expansion that included music players and Apple TV but not only Macintosh computers. The same year, on January 9, Steve Jobs presented revolutionary product not only for Apple but the entire market of mobile phones (Vogelstein par. 6). It was the iPhone. This event has changed the story of success of both Jobs and Apple forever.
The phone had a large touchscreen with only one button below it and attractive slick design. It was the success of Steve Jobs who saw the future of mobile devices in this form. The next versions of iPhone in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 were the continuation of his ideology – simple but beautiful, slim but powerful, with the user-friendly interface (Stone par. 28). The appearance of iPhone on the market has changed it. Eventually, all large producers of mobile devices started to develop and release very similar products. However, people all over the world wanted only the best product from Apple. It has conditioned the tremendous growth in sales and further great success of Apple.
Great Success
In 2008, Jobs’ health began to worsen. In 2009, he had to announce medical leave and fight pancreatic cancer. However, it did not affect the company’s sales because the company sold millions of iPhones, iPods, and iPads already. In 2011, Steve Jobs had to leave the position of CEO but remained the chairman and the participant of the strategic meetings. Unfortunately, the same year, on October 5, Steve Jobs died because of cancer he could not defeat (Stone par. 35). The greatest success of Apple was the idea to return Steve Jobs in 1997. Otherwise, the company would become either a mediocre market player or would have been acquired one of its more successful competitors back then. Steve Jobs saved Apple and revolutionized the idea of personal computing and communications.
Conclusion
Summing, there are no doubts that if Steve Jobs had not returned in 1997, the company would not have such results as it has today. He was a difficult person, a dictator who required perfection in everything. However, Jobs was a dreamer who had managed to create, lose, and return to the greatest passion of his entire life to make it tremendously profitable and successful. The influence of Apple on the modern market of computing and communications cannot be overestimated.
Works Cited
Fell, Jason. How Steve Jobs Saved Apple. Entrepreneur. 2011. Web.
Guglielmo, Connie. A Steve Jobs Moment That Mattered: Macworld, August 1997. Forbes. 2012. Web.
Stone, Brad. Steve Jobs: The Return, 1997-2011. Bloomberg Businessweek. 2011. Web.
Vogelstein, Fred. And then Steve Said, ‘Let there Be an iPhone’. The New York Times Magazine. 2013. Web.