Steve Jobs# summary

In the late 1960s, the interests and curious cultures of geeks and hippies began to overlap.

So it was perhaps inevitable that, in addition to his passion for math, science and electronics, Jobs would immerse himself in the counterculture and begin experimenting with LSD.

It seems an odd match: a spiritually-minded, LSD enthusiast and the staid computer industry. Yet in the early 1970s, many people were starting to see computers as a symbol of individual expression.

So while Jobs was immersed in drugs and Zen, he was also dreaming of starting his own business. And around the same time, his friend Steve Wozniak came up with an idea for the modern personal computer.

Those who knew Jobs personally would agree that he was an erratic, even quirky individual. If work didn’t meet his high standards, he would throw temper tantrums and verbally assault people.

But why was Jobs so controlling and temperamental?

The Apple II, with some six million computers sold, was considered the spark that led to the creation of a personal computer industry.

But for Jobs, it wasn’t a complete success, as the Apple II was Wozniak’s masterpiece, not his own.

After Jobs recovered from the blow of being fired from Apple, he realized he could now do things exactly the way he wanted to – indulging both his good and bad sides.

He first created a new business venture aimed at the educational market, a computer called NeXT.

In addition to learning a lot professionally during his 12 years away from Apple, Jobs also developed in his private life.

In 1986, after the death of his adoptive mother, Jobs became curious about his roots and decided to search for his biological mother.

In the years following Jobs’s dismissal, Apple started to fail as a company.

To halt this decline, Gil Amelio was appointed CEO in 1996. Amelio knew that to get Apple back on the right path, it needed to team up with a company with fresh ideas.

When Jobs discovered the visionary talent of designer Jony Ive, he made Ive the second-most powerful person at Apple, after himself. Thus began a partnership that would come to be the most important industrial design collaboration of its era.

The first product that Jobs and Ive designed together was the iMac, a desktop computer priced at around $1,200 and designed for the everyday consumer.

Following his success with the Apple Store and the iMac, Jobs came up with a new, grand strategy. His vision was a personal computer at the center of a new digital lifestyle.

He called this his digital hub strategy.

Throughout his entire career, Jobs maintained that a closed, tightly integrated system produced the best consumer experience. This ideal reflected Jobs’s desire for control, since by sealing his systems shut, he prevented consumers from modifying them.

This obsession with control generated some major conflicts – especially with Microsoft and Google.

Jobs first learned that he had cancer during a routine urological exam in October 2003.

Unfortunately, Jobs approached the problem of his cancer the same way he approached a design problem: he ignored all conventional wisdom and decided on his own method for fighting it.