Steve Jobs Biography Essay Example for Free

Steve Jobs Biography Essay Steve Jobs’ success story began in 1976 when he and a friend built the first personal computer. He founded Apple in April 1, 1976; he was the Chairman and CEO of Apple Computers Inc. until he walked out due to a power struggle. He did not let this obstacle stop him. He went and started other businesses and developments. In 1984, he developed the Macintosh, which was the first small computer with a graphic user interface. In 1985, he started NeXT, a year later he bought Pixar Animated Studios. At Pixar he held the position as the CEO. Jobs contracted with Disney producing a number of popular animated films. Among these films were Cars, The Incredibles, Toy Story, and A Bug’s Life. He was certainly one of the world’s most successful businessmen. Twelve years after leaving Apple, Jobs returned as Apple’s interim CEO. Jobs changed the way the world thinks and feels about technology. Steve Jobs is also known for his unconventional leadership. He was a high-maintenance worker. He expected excellence from both himself and the employees. He was known for his direct criticism when he felt was necessary. There is no doubt that Jobs was an exceptional leader. Introduction Over the past forty years, the computer industry has taken great leaps to where it is today. One of the most influential people during this time was Steve Jobs. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. Jobs is listed as Fortune Magazine’s most powerful businessman of 2007. His life had many struggles, but he always found a way to make his ideas succeed. Childhood Steven Paul Jobs was an orphan adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California in February, 1955. Jobs was not happy at school in Mountain View so the family moved to Los Altos, California, where Steve attended Homestead High School. His electronics teacher at Homestead High, John McCollum, recalled he was something of a loner and always had a different way of looking at things† (Isaacson 23). After school, Jobs would attend lectures at the Hewlett-Packard electronics firm in Palo Alto, California, where he was hired as a summer employee. Another employee at HP was Stephen Wozniak, a recent dropout from the University of California at Berkeley. An engineering whiz with a passion for inventing electronic gadgets, Wozniak at that time was perfecting his blue box. The blue box was an illegal, pocketsize telephone attachment that would allow the user to make free long-distance calls. Jobs helped Wozniak sell a number of the devices to customers. This was the defining moment of their relationship, Wozniak as the brains, Jobs as the business (Isaacson 28). Instead of attending either Berkeley or Stanford, Jobs decided on the very liberal Reed University in Oregon. This is where he was introduced to philosophies, ideas that would shape how he would treat the business world, and LSD. At this time, school was not important and he withdrew after the first semester of college. When he returned home, he was thin and disheveled. He embraced a new goal of traveling to India in pursuit of â€Å"enlightenment (Isaacson 49). He was a very big advocate of Zen Buddhism. Going to work for Atari after leaving Reed College, Jobs renewed his friendship with Steve Wozniak. Jobs and Wozniak put together their first computer, called the Apple I, in Jobs’ family garage. They marketed it in 1976 at a price of $666. The Apple I was the first single-board computer with built-in video interface and on-board ROM, which told the machine how to load other programs from an external source. They managed to make their first killing when the Byte Shop in Mountain View bought their first fifty fully assembled computers (Isaacson 68). On this basis the Apple Inc. was founded, the name based on Jobs favorite fruit and the logo. The following year, Jobs and Wozniak developed the general purpose Apple II. The design of the Apple II did not depart from Apple Is simplistic and compactness design. The Apple II had built-in circuitry allowing it to interface directly to a color video monitor. Shortly after the release of the Apple II, Apple Inc. went public making the company worth $1. 2 billion (Butcher 94). Jobs was smart in that he positioned himself for success. He knew how to be at the right place at the right time. The downside to this was he always wanted more. He had a hard time putting his vision down in a practical manner. He saw a computer with an elegant exterior but the problem with his vision was that the way he had to have it would make production nearly impossible. These unreal expectations were called his â€Å"reality distortion field† (Isaacson 124). Jobs became fixated with a new idea for a personal computer, called the Macintosh. To help him market these new computers Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi Cola for a position as president at Apple. Jobs was so focused that if you did not work in the Macintosh division, he treated you like an entirely separate person. The Macintosh division received higher salaries, invitations to company sponsored parties, and front row seats to company meetings (Butcher 136-148). While Mr. Jobs stated positions on management techniques are all quite noble and worthy, in practice he is a dreadful manager. It is an unfortunate case of mouthing the right ideas but not believing in or executing them when it comes time to do something†¦Jobs regularly misses appointments. He does not give credit where due. Jobs also has favorites, who can do no wrong—and others who can do no right. He interrupts and doesnt listen. He doesnt keep promises. He is a prime example of a manager who takes the credit for his optimistic schedules and then blames the workers when deadlines are not met (Butcher 161). NeXT and Pixar Jobs treated Sculley as if he were his best friend, but he actually despised him being at Apple. After a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT. His vision with NeXT was to create a computer for the higher-education and business market (Isaacson 211). In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off as Pixar. During his time serving as the CEO of Pixar, movies such as Toy Story (1995) and A Bug’s Life (1998) were credited to Jobs as an executive producer. He served as CEO and majority shareholder until Disney purchased Pixar in 2006. Reinstated After the computer industry at NeXT began to fail, Jobs decided to focus on creating software. While this was happening, Gil Amelio had replaced John Sculley at Apple. Apple’s business was suffering due to there being no creative genius striving to invent something new. Amelio noticed that Jobs had created an operating system called NeXTSTEP and decided that it would be in Apple’s best interests to purchase NeXT, bringing Jobs back into the company that he created. NeXTSTEP platform later became the foundation for Mac OS X (Isaacson 305). Jobs returned to Apple as an advisor, and then took control of the company as interim CEO. During this time, he brought Apple from near bankruptcy to profitable by 1998. As the new CEO, Jobs oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Jobs also developed the Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Store, and the App Store. Apple became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company in 2011 (Isaacson 348-511). Without Jobs’ intervention in 1996, Apple would have went bankrupt and had to close. The reinvigoration of the company is regarded by many commentators as one of the greatest turnarounds in business history (Isaacson 560). In Remembrance In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreas neuroendocrine tumor. Jobs was against going to the doctor for most of his life, so he was reluctant to get his stomach pains checked out. Since he waited so long, the tumor was almost untreatable. In 2009 he received a pancreas transplant, but the cancer had already spread to different parts of his body. Jobs resigned from Apple in August of 2011 and was elected Chairman of the Board. As his health continuously declined, he died on October 5, 2011. Conclusion Jobs’ major strength lies in his curiosity and innovation within the market. To say that Steve Jobs is something of an enigma is an understatement; his style of management and his ability to accurately predict trends made him more than just a valuable industry leader, it almost guaranteed that those who paid attention reaped the profits of his predictions. Apple has been ahead of the curve time after time (Brayan 1). Jobs had the ability to see far beyond the limitations of time and space. He lived in his own little world where success was inevitable and the steps to get there would not always be appropriate, but if it meant that those decisions would lead in the direction he wanted, then those steps would not be questioned.

The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown and Hawthorne :: Scarlet Letter essays

The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown and Hawthorne Writing under the influence of his Puritan background, Hawthorne's attention was on individuals and their relationships within their community. Theocratic Puritans punished sinners as deviants of society and used the punishments to restate the boundaries within the group. The five tenets of Puritanism reveal the curious nature of a religion that promoted goodness as a constant goal of each individual, but provided only negative reward of no punishment for good behavior and actions. The tenet of Unconditional Election made predestination clear. No matter how hard one tried to be good, only those elected were going to heaven. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne introduces the community by way of the prison house and the women of the community "being of mature age and church members in good repute." In the conversation that the women have about Hester their jealous hearts and vengeful attitudes are revealed. In this way he shows us that this community, although it was designed to be the perfect Christian community, interprets itself as something else. We can assume that Hawthorne shows us the bitchy ways of the women of the church, the ones who supposedly care for the sick and tend to the elderly, nurturing and comforting in a Christian-like manner, and the prison house to inform us that Puritan society has problems, the same problems that any society might have. We can begin to read Hawthorne from the romantic perspective and see society as the guilty party. Indeed, the author sets us up to see Hester as a heroine, a rose, even though a wild rose. And Young Goodman Brown takes his place as hero in his tale. Although we know that he embarks on an "evil purpose," we also know his intentions are to return to his good Faith. But how can a Puritan return to his good faith when he is a sinner? There is no way to achieve goodness, because Adam sinned, so sinned we all. And if you accept that, even if you reject communion with it, who can be trusted? Not even your self. Young Goodman Brown's happiness could only come from a life with Faith/faith and all he could believe in was the reality of his faith, which was that all were sinners. That means that communion has to be communion with sin. The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown and Hawthorne :: Scarlet Letter essays The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown and Hawthorne Writing under the influence of his Puritan background, Hawthorne's attention was on individuals and their relationships within their community. Theocratic Puritans punished sinners as deviants of society and used the punishments to restate the boundaries within the group. The five tenets of Puritanism reveal the curious nature of a religion that promoted goodness as a constant goal of each individual, but provided only negative reward of no punishment for good behavior and actions. The tenet of Unconditional Election made predestination clear. No matter how hard one tried to be good, only those elected were going to heaven. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne introduces the community by way of the prison house and the women of the community "being of mature age and church members in good repute." In the conversation that the women have about Hester their jealous hearts and vengeful attitudes are revealed. In this way he shows us that this community, although it was designed to be the perfect Christian community, interprets itself as something else. We can assume that Hawthorne shows us the bitchy ways of the women of the church, the ones who supposedly care for the sick and tend to the elderly, nurturing and comforting in a Christian-like manner, and the prison house to inform us that Puritan society has problems, the same problems that any society might have. We can begin to read Hawthorne from the romantic perspective and see society as the guilty party. Indeed, the author sets us up to see Hester as a heroine, a rose, even though a wild rose. And Young Goodman Brown takes his place as hero in his tale. Although we know that he embarks on an "evil purpose," we also know his intentions are to return to his good Faith. But how can a Puritan return to his good faith when he is a sinner? There is no way to achieve goodness, because Adam sinned, so sinned we all. And if you accept that, even if you reject communion with it, who can be trusted? Not even your self. Young Goodman Brown's happiness could only come from a life with Faith/faith and all he could believe in was the reality of his faith, which was that all were sinners. That means that communion has to be communion with sin.

Back in the closet

The main point of this essay is that even though free speech protects a lot of things it doesn’t protect every kind of â€Å"free† speech because there are boundaries when one is forced to look instead of given the choice to look or not. The author’s purpose in writing it is to show that she is in agreement with most of the foundational aspects of the American Constitution but that she, in a very patriotic way or even a humanist way does not believe that pornography should be protected by free speech.Her attitude is challenging to precisely pin down because she seems so loyal to what the supreme court ultimately decides. While it’s reasonable to believe that she favors making the distinction that pornography should not be protected because it expounds on a hatred of women and is too prevalent to be simply ignored, she leaves it to the courts to decide in the end. So we can say that she has the status of an invested concern that aims towards a neutral attem pt that allows for the judicial process to do its work.Some of her most provocative and supporting details are when she clearly outlines a difference in what was being protected by the free speech amendment. It shifts from the political to the violent, from political statements to personal biases and intense hatreds. While political statements can be very biased and members may share intense hatreds this often is not as explicit and in your face as pornography.A major component of pornography’s offensiveness lies in the growth of technology and how easy it is for people to make, distribute, and popularize things called pornography that used to be mostly hidden and not really talked about openly or as offensively. In our contemporary society there is so much pornography that one becomes numb to it and in a strange way there seems to be less of it. There are more outright protections against pornography and more public outrage against in your face pornography like Janet Jackson ’s wardrobe malfunction incident.This shows that pornography has become more of a private issue with the measure being less what the courts say and more what the audience of a particular media thinks and makes known. I think this is a definitive step and one can wonder how much court rulings played into how we live in a world full of pornography today but manage to ignore or are simply not confronted by most of what does exist.

Colonization in Kenya - 782 Words

Colonialism occurs when one nation takes control of another. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the British did to the Africans. The British took over their land basically without the Africans knowledge. Although the British created a more developed civilization with the many aspects they brought to Kenya, they greatly affected Africans economically, politically, socially and culturally. With that being stated, Kenya would not be the country it is this very day if it weren’t for the British colonizing the Africans. British colonialism drastically affected Kenya economically.The people of Kenya became more civilized and more developed (Doc 5). Instead of wearing traditional clothes, Africans wore more formal and appropriate clothes†¦show more content†¦Despite the confusion that colonialism brought, it introduced the people of Kenya to many new possibilities. Kenya was rapidly evolving. â€Å"Despite its many abuses, colonialism eliminated slavery, human sacrifice, and internecine warfare while providing opportunities for Africans with modern skills to rise socially and economically regardless ofShow MoreRelatedThe Colonization Of Uganda And Kenya1973 Words   |  8 Pages â€Æ' 1. Introduction The colonization of Uganda and Kenya is the reason why they are bilateral countries meaning they share many of the same interest such as political interest, economic interests etc†¦ Being colonized by the United Kingdom has affected their history forever, and has made it extremely difficult to be in the same state as the rest of the world but also allowed both countries to be close with each other as they shared the same experiences. 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