Steves Jobs Way

The Steve Jobs Way

Essay

The Steve Jobs Way is a book written by Jay Elliot, a coworker and personal friend of Steve Jobs. In it we can notice that he shows a great admiration for Steve and narrates us from the moment he met him and became part of the Apple’s team, until some of his last years of life achievements. The book focuses on two main things: Steve’s life, and his influence over Apple.

Steve Jobs was known as a great entrepreneur, cofounder of Apple (along with Steve Wozniak), and founder of other successful companies and enterprises. But beyond all this, Steve is presented as a different type of administrator, one that is completely compromised with his products.

Working in a time when the computers were all text, difficult to use and only had by big companies, he saw the necessity of the many, and found the way to improve them so they would be useful and affordable for more people. Some of the improvements he introduced were basis for things we still use nowadays, for example: the mouse and the graphic interface software.

Even though Jay Elliot entered to Apple Computer when it still was a small company, he relates us how Steve always thought big, having great expectations and trying to motivate everyone else at the point of becoming obsessive.

Steve’s presence in Apple was felt by every single employee; he tried to do the working stations the most confortable he could, he created areas where the staff could relax, drink a soda, chat, etc. But sometimes he could be rude when he wanted a thing the staff wasn’t achieving.

Having this kind of personality, made him often to be seem as immature or crazy, sometimes too risky for the company’s shareholders taste.

This gave him for several years a lot of conflicts with Apple’s administration, mostly because many of the shareholders didn’t follow him in the direction he thought the company should follow. For example he thought that the new computer they were developing by that time wasn’t what the market needed and tried to change it, but the directive found a way to avoid it by reassigning him to other area.

Resentful for having taken the control of the company’s main product he found another group in the company which was developing a totally different computer, the Macintosh; seeing this new opportunity he didn’t think twice and took the control over the group and started adding his own ideas trying to do the Macintosh the best product they could ever do in that time. The Macintosh wasn’t a boom in the market as he wanted, but still got to be innovative, got a part of the market share and was the beginning of the line of Macs that came after.

Steve Jobs leaved Apple in the 80’s after having taken most of his influence in the company (he said they fired him but this wasn’t completely true). But instead of retiring and living of the fortune the already had, he founded other companies.

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