By Poornima Gupta | Reuters – 14 hrs ago

• REUTERS – Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs holds the new “iPad” during the launch of Apple’s new tablet computing device in San Francisco, California, in this January 27, 2010 file photograph. Jobs …more

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs on Wednesday resigned as chief executive of Apple Inc in a stunning move that ended his 14-year reign at the technology giant he co-founded in a garage.

Apple shares dived as much as 7 percent in after-hours trade after the pancreatic cancer survivor and industry icon, who has been on medical leave for an undisclosed condition since January 17, announced he will be replaced by COO and longtime heir apparent Tim Cook.

Analysts do not expect Jobs’ resignation — which had long been foreseen — to derail the company’s fabled product-launch roadmap, including possibly a new iPhone in September and a third iteration of the iPad tablet in 2012.

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“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come,” he said in a brief letter announcing his resignation.

The 55-year-old CEO had briefly emerged from his medical leave in March to unveil the latest version of the iPad and later to attend a dinner hosted by President Barack Obama for technology leaders in Silicon Valley.

Jobs’ often-gaunt appearance has sparked questions about his health and his ability to continue at Apple.

“I will say to investors: don’t panic and remain calm, it’s the right thing to do. Steve will be chairman and Cook is CEO,” said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis.

Apple shares slid to $357.40 in extended trading after a brief halt. They had gained 0.7 percent to close at $376.18 on the Nasdaq.

Analysts again expressed confidence in the Apple bench, headed by longtime company No. 2 and supply-chain maven Cook.

“Investors are very comfortable with Tim Cook even though Jobs has been a driver of innovation and clearly an Apple success. Tim has shown Apple can still outperform extremely well when he’s been acting as CEO,” said Cross Research analyst Shannon Cross.

“I don’t know if it’s a health issue. I don’t know if it is a shock. Most likely it was going to happen at some point. Why today versus another day? I don’t know.”

(Reporting by Poornima Gupta and Edwin Chan; Editing by Gary Hill)

http://news.yahoo.com/steve-jobs-resigns-ceo-named-chairman-224223853.html

Jobs at Apple: Master inventor, master marketer

By JORDAN ROBERTSON – AP Technology Writer | AP – 12 hrs ago

• Paul Sakuma, File – FILE – In this June 7, 2010 file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds the new iPhone 4 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Apple Inc. on Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2011 …more

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Steve Jobs started Apple Computer with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was forced out a decade later, then returned to rescue the company. During his second stint, Apple grew into the most valuable technology company in the world.

Jobs invented and masterfully marketed ever-sleeker gadgets that transformed everyday technology, from the personal computer to the iPod and iPhone. Cultivating Apple’s countercultural sensibility and a minimalist design ethic, he rolled out one sensational product after another, even in the face of the late-2000s recession and his own failing health.

Jobs helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.

Perhaps most influentially, he launched the iPod in 2001, which offered “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Over the next 10 years, its white earphones and thumb-dial control seemed to become as ubiquitous as the wristwatch.

In 2007 came the touch-screen iPhone, and later its miniature “apps,” which made the phone a device not just for making calls but for managing money, storing photos, playing games and browsing the Web.

And in 2010, Jobs introduced the iPad, a tablet-sized, all-touch computer that took off even though market analysts said no one really needed one.

Earlier this month, Apple briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company in America, with Apple stock on the open market worth more than other company’s.

Under Jobs, the company cloaked itself in secrecy to build frenzied anticipation for each of its new products. Jobs himself had a wizardly sense of what his customers wanted, and where demand didn’t exist, he leveraged a cult-like following to create it.

When he spoke at Apple presentations, almost always in faded blue jeans, sneakers and a black mock turtleneck, legions of Apple acolytes listened to every word. He often boasted about Apple successes, then coyly added a coda — “One more thing” — before introducing its latest ambitious idea.

In recent years, Apple investors also watched these appearances for clues to his health.

In 2004, Jobs revealed that he had been diagnosed with — and “cured” of — a rare form of operable pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. In early 2009, it became clear he was again ill.

Jobs took a half-year medical leave of absence starting in January 2009, during which he had a liver transplant. Last January, he announced another medical leave, his third, with no set duration. He returned to the spotlight briefly in March to personally unveil a second-generation iPad.

Jobs grew up in California and after finishing high school enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., but dropped out after a semester.

“All of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it,” he said at a Stanford University commencement address in 2005. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”

When he returned to California in 1974, Jobs worked for video game maker Atari and attended meetings of a local computer club with Steve Wozniak, a high school friend who was a few years older.

Wozniak’s homemade computer drew attention from other enthusiasts, but Jobs saw its potential far beyond the geeky hobbyists of the time. The pair started Apple in Jobs’ parents’ garage two years later. Their first creation was the Apple I — essentially, the guts of a computer without a case, keyboard or monitor.

The Apple II, which hit the market in 1977, was their first machine for the masses. It became so popular that Jobs was worth $100 million by age 25. Time magazine put him on its cover for the first time in 1982.

Three years earlier, during a visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Jobs again spotted mass potential in a niche invention: a computer that allowed people to access files and control programs with the click of a mouse, not typed commands. He returned to Apple and ordered the team to copy what he had seen.

It foreshadowed a propensity to take other people’s concepts, improve on them and spin them into wildly successful products. Under Jobs, Apple didn’t invent computers, digital music players or smartphones — it reinvented them for people who didn’t want to learn computer programming or negotiate the technical hassles of keeping their gadgets working.

“We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Jobs said in an interview for the PBS series “Triumph of the Nerds.”

The engineers responded with two computers. The pricier one, called Lisa, launched to a cool reception in 1983. A less-expensive model called the Macintosh exploded onto the scene in 1984.

The Mac was heralded by an epic Super Bowl commercial that referenced George Orwell’s “1984” and captured Apple’s iconoclastic style. In the ad, expressionless drones marched through dark halls to an auditorium where a Big Brother-like figure lectures on a big screen. A woman in a bright track uniform burst into the hall and launched a hammer into the screen, which exploded, stunning the drones, as a narrator announced the arrival of the Mac.

There were early stumbles at Apple. Jobs clashed with colleagues and even the CEO he had hired away from Pepsi, John Sculley. And after an initial spike, Mac sales slowed, in part because few programs had been written for the new graphical user interface.

Meanwhile, Microsoft copied the Mac approach and introduced Windows, outmaneuvering Apple by licensing its software to slews of computer makers.

With Apple’s stock price sinking, conflicts between Jobs and Sculley mounted. Sculley won over the board in 1985 and pushed Jobs out of his day-to-day role leading the Macintosh team. Jobs resigned his post as chairman of the board and left Apple within months.

“What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating,” Jobs said in his Stanford speech. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

He got into two other companies: Next, a computer maker, and Pixar, a computer-animation studio that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million.

Pixar, ultimately the more successful venture, seemed at first a bottomless money pit. Then came “Toy Story,” the first computer-animated full-length feature. Jobs used its success to negotiate a sweeter deal with Disney for Pixar’s next two films. In 2006, Jobs sold Pixar to The Walt Disney Co. for $7.4 billion in stock, making him Disney’s largest individual shareholder and securing a seat on the board.

With Next, Jobs was said to be obsessive about the tiniest details of the cube-shaped computer, insisting on design perfection even for the machine’s guts. He never managed to spark much demand for the machine, which cost a pricey $6,500 to $10,000.

Ultimately, he shifted the focus to software — a move that paid off later when Apple bought Next for its operating system technology, the basis for the software still used in Mac computers.

By 1996, when Apple bought Next, Apple was in dire financial straits. It had lost more than $800 million in a year, dragged its heels in licensing Mac software for other computers and surrendered most of its market share to PCs that ran Windows.

Larry Ellison, Jobs’ close friend and fellow Silicon Valley billionaire and the leader of Oracle Corp., publicly contemplated buying Apple in early 1997 and ousting its leadership. The idea fizzled, but Jobs stepped in as interim chief later that year.

He slashed unprofitable projects, narrowed the company’s focus and presided over a new marketing push to set the Mac apart from Windows, starting with a campaign encouraging computer users to “Think different.”

Apple’s first new product under his direction, the brightly colored, plastic iMac, launched in 1998 and sold about 2 million in its first year.

Jobs later dropped the “interim” from his title. He changed his style, too, said Tim Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for Creative Strategies.

“In the early days, he was in charge of every detail. The only way you could say it is, he was kind of a control freak,” he said. In his second stint, “he clearly was much more mellow and more mature.”

In the decade that followed, Jobs returned Apple to profitability while pushing out an impressive roster of new products.

Apple’s popularity exploded in the 2000s. The iPod, smaller and sleeker with each generation, introduced many lifelong Windows users to their first Apple gadget.

ITunes gave people a convenient way to buy music legally online, song by song. For the music industry, it was a mixed blessing. The industry got a way to reach Internet-savvy people who, in the age of Napster, were growing accustomed to downloading music free. But online sales also hastened the demise of CDs and established Apple as a gatekeeper, resulting in battles between Jobs and music executives over pricing and other issues.

Jobs’ command over gadget lovers and pop culture swelled to the point that, on the eve of the iPhone’s launch in 2007, faithful followers slept on sidewalks outside posh Apple stores for the chance to buy one. Three years later, at the iPad’s debut, the lines snaked around blocks and out through parking lots, even though people had the option to order one in advance.

Jobs’ personal ethos — he is a natural food lover who embraced Buddhism and New Age philosophy — was closely linked to the public persona he shaped for Apple.

Apple itself became a statement against the commoditization of technology — a cynical view, to be sure, from a company whose computers can cost three or more times as much as those of its rivals.

http://news.yahoo.com/jobs-apple-master-inventor-master-marketer-004348760.html

(CNN) — As Steve Jobs steps down as CEO at Apple — perhaps the world’s most valuable and admired company — business and tech pundits are showering him with glowing appellations: Innovator. Visionary. Genius.

The skinny man in the black mock turtleneck, and the company he created, have had arguably more impact than anybody on how we consume content in the digital age.

“Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera told CNN’s Piers Morgan Wednesday night. “His intuition has been phenomenal over the years.”

But four decades ago, you might have been hard-pressed to spot clues to Jobs’ future success.

He dropped out of Oregon’s Reed College after one semester, although he returned to audit a class in calligraphy. He quit one of his first jobs, designing video games for Atari, to backpack around India and take psychedelic drugs.

But those early experiences, Jobs would say later, shaped his creative vision. The graceful brush strokes of the calligraphy class influenced his elegant Apple aesthetic. His LSD trips as a young man expanded his mind and helped breed Apple’s counterculture, “think different” spirit.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future,” he told Stanford University graduates during a commencement speech in 2005. “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Why Steve Jobs is so fascinating

Born February 24, 1955, and then adopted, Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California — Apple’s longtime home — and showed an early interest in electronics. As a teenager, he phoned William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, to request parts for a school project. He got them, along with a summer job offer at HP.

While at HP, Jobs befriended Steve Wozniak, who impressed him with his skill at assembling electronic components. The two joined a Silicon Valley computer hobbyists club, and Jobs soon teamed with Wozniak and two other men to launch Apple Computer Inc.

It’s now the stuff of Silicon Valley lore: Jobs and Wozniak built their first commercial product, the Apple 1, in the garage of Jobs’ parents in 1976 (the same year Microsoft began developing software). Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to help finance the venture. The primitive computer, priced at $666.66, had no keyboard or display, and customers had to assemble it themselves.

The following year, Apple unveiled the Apple II computer at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire. The machine was a hit, and the personal computing revolution was under way. Jobs was among the first computer engineers to recognize the appeal of the mouse and the graphical interface, which let users operate computers by clicking on images instead of writing text.

“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there,” he told Newsweek in 2006. “But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”

For Jobs, that solution was Apple’s pioneering Macintosh computer, which launched in early 1984 with a now-iconic, Orwellian-themed Super Bowl ad. Jobs has long had a reputation as a demanding taskmaster, and the mustachioed computer whiz — a multimillionaire by age 30 — drove his Macintosh engineers hard to produce the machine he wanted.

The boxy beige Macintosh sold well, but Jobs clashed frequently with colleagues, and in 1986, he was ousted from Apple after a power struggle. Then came an 10-year hiatus during which he had high-profile successes (buying Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas before they made it big with “Toy Story”) and failures (founding NeXT Computer, whose pricey, cube-shaped computer workstations never caught on).

In 1996 Apple bought NeXT, returning Jobs to the then-struggling company he had co-founded. Within a year, he was running Apple again — older and perhaps wiser but no less of a perfectionist. And four years after that, he took the stage to introduce the original iPod, the little white device that revolutionized portable music and kick-started Apple’s furious comeback.

Internet mourns Jobs’ resignation | iReport: Share your thoughts

“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,” he said at Stanford in 2005. “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.”

When it comes to Apple, you pretty much know the rest. Over the next decade, Jobs wowed launch-event audiences, and consumers, with one game-changing hit after another: iTunes (2003). The MacBook (2006). The iPhone (2007). The iPad (2010).

Observers marveled at his skills as a pitchman, his ability to inspire God-like devotion among Apple “fanboys” (and scorn from PC fans) and his “one more thing” surprise announcements. Time after time, he sold people on a product they didn’t know they needed until he invented it. And all this on an official annual salary of $1.

By the mid-2000s, however, Jobs was having serious health problems. In 2004, he announced to his employees that he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He lost weight and appeared unusually gaunt at keynote speeches to Apple developers, spurring concerns about his health and fluctuations in Apple’s stock price. One wire service even accidentally published Jobs’ obituary.

Jobs, 56, who is married with four children, had a liver transplant in 2009 during a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple. He took another medical leave in January this year. Because of this, some observers said they weren’t surprised by Wednesday’s news that Jobs was stepping down as Apple’s CEO.

Read Jobs’ resignation letter

“There is a certain sort of sad inevitability to this moment,” the Times’ Nocera told CNN, adding that Jobs wouldn’t give up control of his company easily. “Apple is his life. He cares about it almost as much as he cares about his wife and children.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Jobs once famously said, “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He even flew a pirate flag over his engineers’ building while they were building the Macintosh. But the reality is his once-renegade tech company, the David to Microsoft’s Goliath, is long been part of the mainstream. Apple has more than $70 billion in cash reserves and even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil this month as the world’s most valuable company.

Jobs doesn’t give many interviews, especially about his personal life, and Apple has been tight-lipped about his health. But perhaps mindful of his legacy, he has cooperated on his first authorized biography, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.

“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that,” Jobs is quoted as saying in the promotional material for the book, being penned by Walter Isaacson. “But I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.”

By contrast, Jobs has always spoken with immense pride about what he and his engineers have accomplished at Apple.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” he told the Stanford grads.

“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”

http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/08/25/steve.jobs.profile/index.html

 

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