Profile - Steve Jobs:He was a college dropout who bummed around India, and he was once pushed out of his own company, but this visionary techno-geek just keeps making magic, writes Shane Hegarty
One morning in August last year, at an annual Apple conference, Steve Jobs gave a 90-minute keynote presentation so dull it caused a minor tremor through Silicon Valley.
Jobs has become noted for these speeches, because they are usually anything but insipid.
He has a way of sucking people into what he calls a "reality distortion field", in which he can make people believe almost anything: that a new product will change the world; that the future has been dragged forward about five years; that Apple has made technology hardly distinguishable from magic.
But this particular morning, several of those present noticed a distinct lack of sparkle. The speech was enervating, showing off "one yawn after another", according to Wired magazine's man on the scene. Jobs looked tired and gaunt. This, after all, was not so long after he had been diagnosed with - but supposedly cured of - pancreatic cancer. "He has grown a short beard," one blogger noted, "which almost seems to be there to hide his haggard face." He didn't have one of his usual "one more thing" moments to reveal at the end, looked older than 52 years and, worryingly, seemed to be confirming a pattern: five months earlier he had given a presentation in which he appeared drained.
ALL OF WHICH led Wired.com to ask one simple question: "Has Steve Jobs lost his magic?" On Tuesday, Jobs took to the stage at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled the iPhone to gasps, cheers, applause, laughs and, ultimately, enough media coverage to cover Silicon Valley in several layers of newsprint. It was covered, minute by minute, by technology websites, triggered who knows how many on-line discussions, kept people hovering over their water coolers, and sent shares in the established mobile phone companies sliding.
And Jobs? He was invigorated and invigorating. "I think you'll agree," he told the audience, "we have re-invented the phone." He might as well have added an "abracadabra".
A decade and a half after his success with early personal computers earned him an appearance on the cover of Time, Jobs might be an early contender for the magazine's Person of the Year. Except, he's been down this road before. So impressed was he with getting on the cover in 1982 that he allowed Time reporter Michael Moritz access to the inner workings of Apple as research for his book The Little Kingdom. Until Moritz revealed that Apple's Lisa computer was named after the then unmarried Jobs's daughter.
"He disliked that story. He felt I'd deceived and betrayed him," Moritz later recounted. "He then said he'd do his utmost to see that nobody helped me out with the book. He's a complicated man whose motives aren't always matched by his words. He's one of these kinetic personalities who's difficult to capture. Almost everybody has an opinion of Steve Jobs, but very few people know him."
It is said that Moritz knew Apple's guru well enough that when Time decided to make Jobs its Person of the Year for 1982 he warned its editors off the idea. Instead, "the computer" was Time's Machine of the Year. There was a profile of Jobs, but it was not entirely laudatory. "Something is happening to Steve that's sad and not pretty," said one insider. "He would have made an excellent king of France," remarked another.
It meant that when Jobs was pushed out of Apple Computers by the chief executive he had hired following a disastrous sales period in 1985, sympathy was muted.
"People in the company had very mixed feelings about it, everyone had been terrorised by Steve Jobs at some point or another, and so there was a certain relief that the terrorist would be gone," said computer scientist Larry Tesler. "And on the other hand I think there was incredible respect for Steve Jobs by the very same people, and we were all very worried what would happen to this company without the visionary, without the founder, without the charisma."
What happened? Apple blossomed. Then it rotted. While its co-founder Steve Wozniak stayed behind, Jobs did two things. He bought the company that would eventually become Pixar, the animation firm behind Toy Story that became so successful that, when Disney bought it in 2006, Jobs became the Mouse House's largest shareholder.
And, more ominously, he founded a new company, NeXT, through which he aimed to build "interpersonal computers" by which people could communicate and work together more easily. Following delays, he was asked if he was irritated how it was late hitting the market, and Jobs is said to have remarked: "Late? This computer is five years ahead of its time!" Its distinctive design - a sleek, black cube - reinforced Jobs's reputation for aesthetic perfection. He wanted his machines to work well, but he also wanted them to look good.
Really good.
The expensive desktop computers were never likely to fare well in the mass market, although they earned popularity with professionals, but the company's innovative software proved influential and the superiority of its operating system saw NeXT bought by Apple in 1996 for $400 million. Jobs received 1.5 million shares in the company that he had not only founded, but which had already paid him handsomely to go away. Within a year, he was its chief executive, and - so the story goes - people who got into a lift with him didn't know if they'd have a job when they got out.
BUT WITH THAT deal came something attractively quirky: his salary of just $1 a year. It's a nice contractual twist, even if shares, corporate gifts and the tax advantages that come from earning next to nothing help bump it up by several tens of millions of dollars. And the US government is currently investigating an alleged "backdated options" scheme by which Apple is accused of, to a degree, cooking the books. "His job may be saved by the fact that he did not directly profit," wrote Daniel Gross in online magazine the Slate. "More likely, though, he's been saved by his own special status. Jobs is Michael Jordan in the 1990s, Citigroup in the 1980s, Walter Cronkite in the 1960s."
Yet the $1 wage feeds nicely into Jobs's origins - that of the old hippie, a college dropout who bummed around India in his youth, searching for enlightenment and, on least one occasion, finding it in LSD (one of the "two or three most important things" he has done in his life). He is a pescetarian, meaning that he doesn't eat mammalian meat but will chow down on most things with gills. At Apple, he walked around in bare feet. At NeXT he attempted to foster a staff "community". And so, while in crude terms he can be quantified as a computer geek, he is not a computer geek like Bill Gates - square, unattractive, uncool. And this is one of his great advantages.
Apple has thrived as a counter-culture staple, placing itself at the centre of the digital "lifestyle". The Mac has long been the rebel in a society oppressed by Microsoft's despised monopoly (despite striking a partnership deal), its users guilty of a certain righteousness, but always confident that they'll be proved right when Apple's innovations are inevitably adopted by Microsoft.
Meanwhile, the iPod has managed a marketing rarity, which is to become the dominant music player yet have its iconic status only deepen with sales.
The anticipation over the iPhone grew purely because, when Jobs promised in 2001 that Apple would reinvent the music player, he not only delivered, but did so with something quite beautiful. "Design is a funny word," Jobs told Wired back in 1996. "Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works."
Tenacious, obsessive, controlling, egotistical, with a drive for aesthetics and simplicity, and an imagination prised open by a trip to India and some good acid: all these have somehow come together to bring the world products which have come to define their era. Nothing Bill Gates has ever made will ever be loved like the iMac is loved, like the iPod is loved, and like the iPhone - for this week anyway - is yearned for.
And Jobs is once again in his stride, in his element, and draping the world in a reality distortion field.
The Jobs File
Who is he?The chief executive of Apple Inc
Why is he in the news?Having re-invented the personal music player with iPod, Jobs claims Apple has reinvented the phone with the iPhone
Most appealing characteristic:Has an aesthetic sense that makes ordinary products into modern icons
Least appealing characteristic:His ego has been accused of being far less attractive
Most likely to say:"Can we make one device that does absolutely everything - and has only one button?"
Least likely to say:"Make it boxy. Lots of buttons. Multi-coloured and garish"