History, Development and Growth of Steve Jobs as Entrepreneur - Coursework Example

Essay (Business) Name: . Course: Instructor: Institution: City: Date: Introduction Steve Jobs is a computer software designer born in 24th February 1955 in san Francesco in the United States. He lived with his foster parents Paul and Ciara jobs together with their daughter Patty. The family moved to California at a time when the city was developing into an electronic center (Isaacson 2011). At some point, people started referring to the area as the Silicon Valley because of the silicon element that is used in production of electronic production. Jobs enrolled in the Hewlett-Packard explorer club where he saw the first computer. He was so happy with what he saw that he decided that computers are what he is going to work with (Advameg, nd.). This essay will analyse Steve Jobs as an entrepreneur. The history, development and growth of the entrepreneur to see what made this person successful Steve jobs attended the reed college situated in Portland, Oregon where he dropped out after one semester to travel to India to study eastern religion in 1974. He later joined a group called Homebrew Computer Club. He married her longtime girlfriend Laurene Powell in March 1991. They were blessed with their children, Reed, Erin and Eve. The family settled in Palo Alto California where he died in October 2011 as a result of pancreatic cancer (Isaacson 2011). A college dropout who travelled to India for spiritual purposes, Steve jobs is regarded as the greatest business magnate ever known. His path to prosperity is not an easy one though. He was involved in the founding of Apple together with a friend and was later kicked out by the then CEO in the 1980s because of his quest to expand the business (Danton, 2014). He was allowed back in the 1996 after which he turned the company into the most valuable company before he died in 2011 (Success story 2016). In addition to the success he enjoyed in Apple, jobs was the Chief Executive Officer of Pixar, an animation company regarded as the most successful animation studio in history. Jobs is reported to have bought the company from George Lucas in 1985 for an estimated 5 million dollars and later sold it to Disney for 7.4 billion dollars in 2006. He hired some of his former employees to launch a new computer called NeXT that was introduced to the market in late 1988 at a huge event in San Francesco. The initial performance was promising because the computer was user friendly, had great speed, outstanding graphics as well as excellent sound systems (Yarow 2015). Despite the promising reception, the cost of the computer shook it off the market. It additionally had a black and white screen and was incompatible with other computers. Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 as consultant after Apple bought NeXT software for 400 million dollars. In the following year, Apple to the surprise of many altered into a partnership with its perennial business rival, Microsoft for corporation on sales and technological advancement. In 1997, Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to sell their computers to the users directly through the internet and the telephone. This became a ready success becoming the largest e-commerce. He was named the interim chief executive officer of Apple that same year (Streeter 2012). He continued coming up with newer products taking advantage of the internet technology to expand Apple to the greatest heights. Discuss the role of their family and socio-cultural background in the development of their entrepreneurial passion Steve Jobs always kept his family secret. What is known however is that he lived with his adoptive parents Paul and Ciara a working class family at the time. He was born to unmarried parents, Joanne a 20 year old woman from Wisconsin and Abdulfattah 24 years from Syria who subsequently got married and gave birth to Mona Simpson who was later to become an award winning novelist (Sherwell 2011). He later reunited with his biological mother who worked as a speech therapist. He never however reunited with his biological father who went on to become a political science professor and later casino venture in Nevada. . His adoptive father worked as a mechanic in the locality and it is believed that job inherited his interest in electronic components from his foster father cartelized by a neighbor who had a job at reed college in Portland. In 1989, on a business talk in Stanford School of Business, he met Laurene Powell a blonde who was one of the event organizers, a former banker with New York Investment, eight years younger than him. The talk was to later develop into a date as the two fell in love and got married in 1991 (Sherwell 2011). It is interesting to note that Steve lived in a radius twenty miles between his birth and death in California.The Silicon valley must also have played a role in molding the computer interest that jobs was to become a successful man dealing with. By 1997 when Steve jobs returned to his former company Apple, he was ready for the world (Sherwell 2011). He had advanced in age and definitely wiser. He had a stable family and it is at this point that job developed to become the greatest entrepreneur in the world The type of businesses they developed and the competitive advantage of the business compared to other entrepreneurs Job’s success story is very interesting, he launched Apple 1and Apple 2 computers and the Macintosh, the most successful companies in history but he was a rough employer to his employees and some cases insulting. Most people are not surprised he was pushed out of Apple in the 1980s because he was apparently a very hard person to deal with. Before his death, Steve Jobs gave an unconditional access to isaacson for the publishing of his authorized biography that gave an insight on how he became a successful businessman (Blumenthal, 2012). He formed the not so successful NeXT computers that he later sold to Apple. In 1998, jobs announced the launching of iMac a product with so much computer features at a very low cost. In 2000, he unveiled a new internet strategy that included Macintosh internet based applications. It was the same year that he announced that he was the permanent chief executive officer of Apple (Yarow 2015). Jobs was a supernaturally articulate person according to the president of Pixar Ed Catmull. He remarks that whenever there was a problem, he would always be the one in solving the problem. He never told anyone what to do; he just told them what he thought (Yarow 2015). The other important factor that led to Jobs’ success is that he always hired the right people to do certain tasks and would always trust them to carry out their duties. The struggles that Apple underwent at its inception is partly blamed on Jobs inability to hire the right people for the job. His departure from the company is attributed to the fact that Sculley the then chief executive officer was not the right person for the job. On coming back as the boss, he appointed a team of individuals he had trust in. He let them do their jobs with minimum interference. Ron Johnson who joined Apple to the run the company retail remarked that Jobs wanted us to be friends because once I knew how he thought, and then we would only have to talk only once or two times in a week (Katzenbach, 2012). It is thought that the reason for Jobs’ success is that he stopped going after the revolutionary in favor of accepting the evolutionary aspects of the business world. At the he was at Apple in the 1980s, Jobs created so many products that changed the world. The innovations apparently were good for the world but not for the company. At Macintosh, he is reported to have gotten rid of the production of a 1,000 dollar personal computer in favor of 1,995 dollar computer at a cost of 1 million dollars (Yarow, 2015). The move was later to cost the company a sizeable market share. On return to Apple, Jobs never invented any products but rather opted to improve the existing ones. Discuss future suggestions for the entrepreneur including different types of businesses or avenues (eg selling their business) they may take The suggestions do not directly target Steve Jobs because he is deceased. However, the suggestions can go to the people he handed over to his ventures when his health was failing him. It is difficult to make recommendations to a company that did so well, with constant innovations that changed the world. My only suggestion would be that the company should invest in the medical sector. The field is still unexploited and that’s the reason we still have so many people including Jobs he dying of cancer because it has no definite cure (Successstory 2016). Conclusion In conclusion, so many of us have got something to learn from the life of Steve Jobs. He never inherited a thing compared to many other entrepreneurs but he definitely left a lot to be inherited by his beneficiaries. His family life too is admirable. He was an adopted child but rose to greatness (Yarow, 2015). The way in which he made decisions always put him at a competitive age. It is a no wonder Bill Gates; his longtime business rival remarked that there can be only one Steve Jobs. Bibliography Advameg (nd.) Steve Jobs biography - life, family, story, history, school, young, information, born, college, house, time, year. Available at: http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ho-Jo/Jobs-Steve.html (Accessed: 3 April 2016). Blumenthal, K 2012, Steve Jobs: The man who thought different, New York, St Martin’s Press. Danton, T 2014, Why apple can’t be insanely great after Steve Jobs, Available at: http://www.alphr.com/technology/34929/why-apple-cant-be-insanely-great-after-steve-jobs (Accessed: 3 April 2016). Isaacson, W 2011, Steve Jobs: A biography, New York, Thorndike Press. Katzenbach, J 2012, The Steve Jobs way, Available at: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00109?gko=d331b (Accessed: 3 April 2016). Sherwell, P 2011, Steve Jobs: A family life shrouded in secrecy. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/steve-jobs/8815860/Steve-Jobs-a-family-life-shrouded-in-secrecy.html (Accessed: 3 April 2016). Streeter, T 2012, ‘Steve Jobs: The lost interview * Steve Jobs--One last thing’, Journal of American History, 99(3), pp. 1015–1018. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas457. Successstory 2016, Steve Jobs success story, Available at: http://successstory.com/people/steve-jobs (Accessed: 3 April 2016). Yarow, J 2015, How Steve Jobs became the greatest businessman the world has ever known. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/becoming-steve-jobs-review-2015-4 (Accessed: 3 April 2016). Read More