From $1 pay to world power

29 August 2011 - 02:33 By Toby Shapshak
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Toby Shapshak. Stuff editor. File photo.
Toby Shapshak. Stuff editor. File photo.
Image: Times LIVE

In 1975, Larry Press, then an editor of an early computer magazine called Interface Age, asked these two guys called Steve at the famed Homebrew Computer Club for an interview.

It was two years before the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, would produce what was to be the ground-breaking first personal computer, the Apple II.

They were at Homebrew to discuss, and give away the schematics of, this very basic computer, from which originated the Apple Mac computers we today all take for granted.

Press approached Jobs, who was showing off the Apple I that they had hand-wired on a breadboard (the Apple I was famously encased in wood), and asked for an interview.

"Only if we [Interface] dedicated a whole issue to Apple, he said," Press remembered this week. "A whole issue on a schematic on a box that hadn't even shipped yet? I was pissed by the kid's arrogance, frankly, and I walked away.

"How silly of me. I should've asked for a job right then and there."

In case you haven't noticed, Stephen P Jobs, as the New York Times always refers to him, has resigned as CEO of Apple, the company that started out making computers and went on to revolutionise the music and cellphone industries.

Jobs has played a pivotal role in four industries - computers (with the Apple and then Mac ranges), music (iPod and iTunes), smartphones (iPhone) and film (he was an early investor in Pixar) - and was named CEO of the decade by Fortune.

A man who famously earned an annual salary of $1, Jobs has lived an amazing life and overseen an utterly astounding comeback for the company he co-founded in his parents' garage. (If you haven't read his inspirational Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish speech, you should: http://j.mp/p10Ihs)

After being fired in a corporate reshuffle, by the very man he'd hired, he was rehired as CEO in 1997. He would preside over the most remarkable come-from-behind victory in all of corporate history, overtaking Exxon Mobil in recent weeks to become the most valued company by market capitalisation.

Only 14 years ago Apple was considered bankrupt, as bereft of innovation as the Springbok coaching staff, written off by tech bible Wired, which infamously wrote: "Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely." The magazine gave the then ailing firm 101 tips on how to save itself - including swop to Microsoft's clunky NT operating system - and its June 1997 cover had a one-word headline: "Pray".

What struck me about Press's recollection is how self-confident and certain the young Jobs was.

I was lucky enough to meet Steve Jobs once a few years ago at an Apple expo in Paris. A few weeks before, in September 2005, he had unveiled the latest iPod nano, a slim sliver of a device. Apple had killed off the previous incarnation of the nano, then the best-selling MP3 player in the world. That was the spirit of ruthless innovation I admired in him and Apple.

Arguably his greatest innovation was convincing Big Music to let him sell songs through iTunes, and get the world to pay for content again after the rise of piracy. He did this by making iTunes easier to use and simplified the payments to $0.99.

Apple has "very strong innovation DNA", as he said in Paris. "We're good at making very state-of-the-art technology and making it easy to use for mere mortals who don't want to read manuals." Well done, Mr Jobs.

  • Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine
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