Steve Jobs {1955 - 2011}

Steve Jobs – How he has inspired millions across the world

By Natasha Barrett

Steve Jobs was an extremely talented and innovative individual who has been an inspiration to both business leaders and consumers across the world.
A spokesman for Apple spoke of Steve as “the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives.”

He was neither an engineer nor a designer but he had an eye for the needs and desires of consumers which led him to become a very rich and successful man whose death will be mourned by millions around the world.

Apple was founded back in January 1976 in a Homebrew Computer Club meeting at Steve’s house. This was the starting point of a business which has a current market valuation of $351 billion.
Last year Apple had 49,400 employees working under them.

Steve Jobs had an amazing quality of being able to make products practical, compact and desirable. He branded them in such a way that made them attractive to millions all over the world.
His idea of simplicity and great design was no less than a revolution for technology.
For example, the first Mackintosh – rather than having a CPU and monitor separately, Steve thought to integrate the two together and produced the Mackintosh 128K.
He looked at existing products on the market at the time, analysed them and thought about what he could change to make them more accessible/ practical/ desirable and put this in to play.

This was only the beginning, and since then there has been an incredible range of Apple products launched.
These include; iPods, iMacs, iPhones, and even iPads. All of these have been developed into newer versions and host an amazing range of innovative facilities.

The iPhone 4 is set to be top of the charts for best selling phone of 2011, and this is no surprise when the brand new iPhone 4s boasts features such as ‘Siri’ – a feature that allows you to talk to your iPhone like you would a person, for example “Is it going to rain today?” – your phone will send you straight to a weather forecast for today.

Steve was always thinking to the future and this lead Apple to constantly be one step ahead of all other brands, he summed this up perfectly when he said “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give them that. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new."

Steve Jobs was incredibly good at what he did and this was due to him having a genuine interest in making his products better for the consumer. He wasn’t a businessman who was just in it for the money – he had a genuine passion and it was this that led him to achieve so much. He once said, “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”

 It was this attitude that led him to many wonderful things to change the world of technology as we see it.

Sources used: telegraph.co.uk, Google, Alvin Edyvane