Even his arch rival and long time nemesis Microsoft founder Bill Gates said about the late founder of Apple that the world will feel the impact of the late legend Steve Jobs for generations to come.
Steve Jobs did more than simply change your world. He used his creativity and brilliance to generate enormous financial wealth for himself, many of his employees, and his shareholders for four decades. In the paragraphs below, you will learn the five principles that he used to accomplish this.
What Are Steve Jobs’ Accomplishments and Inventions?
Steve Jobs’ greatest claim to fame is of course that he started Apple Computers out of his garage basement back in the early 1970′s. These Macintosh computers that he and early partner Steve Wozniak began to build proved to be smaller, sleeker, more attractive, more affordable, and more fun than anything that the eight hundred pound gorilla IBM had built up to that point.In under a decade, Apple Computers owned a major manufacturing facility, captured a coveted share of the personal computer market, and made millionaires out of numerous shareholders who had shown the foresight to trust Steve Jobs with their investment capital.
These achievements alone would have made an important place in personal computer history for Steve Jobs and his beloved Apple Corporation. The tireless inventor and innovator did not rest on his past glories after he left Apple. He developed and built up an incredible new form of animation known to the world as CGI Animated Feature Films with Pixar Animation Studios in the early 1990′s.
This company became so successful in its distribution partnerships with Disney Studios through such international hit releases as Toy Story 1, 2, and 3, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Cars that Disney bought it from him in 2006 for $7.4 billion in cash and Disney stock, twenty years after he had acquired the fledgling venture and 26 Academy Awards wins later. This made Jobs the largest shareholder in the Walt Disney Company and earned him a seat on the revered company’s board of directors.
You probably most remember Steve Jobs like countless millions of others for his triumphant return to Apple in the late 1990′s. When Apple bought out another venture of his called Next, he came back as interim CEO in 1997/1998 and re-gained his old post permanently in 2000. During those eventful next over ten years, you saw Jobs innovate such incredible products that literally changed modern society.
These started with the iPod that allowed you to listen to thousands of songs that you kept on a small cigarette lighter sized device, continued with the iPhone the world’s first smart phone, and culminated in the few last years with the iPad that made even sleek laptops seem like dinosaurs by comparison.
The Five Principles that Steve Jobs Employed When He Created Wealth
1. InnovationInnovation refers to the capability to take ingenious ideas and turn them into marketable products. Steve did this time and again with everything from the affordable and powerful personal computer, to the disc man portable CD deck replacement the iPod.
The idea that you could have a small desk top sized personal computer in your home or office was a great theoretical concept, but only through true innovation could you take this brainstorm from the drawing board successfully to the store shelves. Steve Jobs demonstrated this uncanny ability again with the iPod, when he looked back at the old cassette tape walkman and the portable CD discman and decided that computer technology allowed for a better way to store infinitely more music.
2. Simplicity
Simplicity is the ability for you to take technology and make it less impersonal and more pleasurable. The cell phone was not a new idea when Jobs approached the technology. It had already existed on a widespread scale for over a decade. But cell phones were cold and fairly limited up to that point. Steve Jobs looked at cell phones and said we can make them simpler and more powerful to use.
He made cell phones fun with his iPhones. The proof of his success is obvious in the many companies that have since attempted to copy Apple’s Smart Phone idea. Again, Steve Jobs did not create the cell phone, but with his iPhones, he made it so much more fun to use them.
3. Creativity
Creativity is your ability to think outside of the box, or the normal way of doing things. Steve Jobs approached the iPad this way. Laptops had always required the use of a mouse button or mouse pad to move a cursor or pointer around the screen.
No one bothered to re-design this well worn and proven concept until Steve Jobs asked, what if you could touch the screen directly and move around the Internet simply with the point of your finger, or manipulate pictures, documents, and data without a mouse pad or button at all. This kind of creative thinking made him a huge success on practically every product launch, and it made both he and his shareholders at Apple and Pixar Animation Studios fantastically wealthy several times over.
4. Optimization
When you hear optimization, this has to do with the belief that everything on earth can be made better. In the last year of his life, Steve Jobs walked into a Sony store in a mall and picked up a new model of digital video camera that Sony had recently designed and released.
After he worked with and manipulated it for a few minutes, Jobs said to the person with him that we could do this better. It did not matter to him that Apple did not design digital video cameras. Jobs always saw the potential to take a product that someone else had pioneered and radically improve on it himself.
5. Endurance
You have endurance in life if you can stick with projects, dreams, and goals no matter how they appear to fail or suffer setbacks at first. It is all too easy to look back on Steve Jobs’ life with rose colored sunglasses and only see one brilliant success after another. The truth is far less simple. Consider that Steve Jobs had his cutting edged new operating system stolen from him by a contractor who worked for him at the time.
Bill Gates took Apple’s brilliant ideas, called them Windows, rushed them secretly to market ahead of Apple, then sealed Microsoft’s fate and Apple’s for many years when he signed an exclusive and universal deal with IBM to use this Windows system on all of their platforms and computers in the future. Microsoft’s star rose while Apple’s failed as a result. Finally after years of disappointment and people management problems, Jobs found himself forced out of the computer company that he had personally created in his garage.
He did not let this stop him, but proved his endurance when he co-founded Pixar Animation Studios. Apple’s fortunes waxed and waned after Steve’s departure, and he finally returned to the company in triumph over a decade later to pick up the failing pieces of Apple. He then proceeded to rebuild Apple into the largest and most successful consumer technology company on earth.
How can you argue with the principles that Steve Jobs used to make billions of dollars over and over again?
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