October this year.
Around the world, devoted fans
mourned the death of Steve Jobs,
the force of nature behind Apple.
He distorted reality. It's a mixture
of charisma, chutzpah,
bullshit, self-belief, self-delusion,
and insane ambition.
Apple's hi-tech products
have inspired fervour.
Oh, it's beautiful. It's very sexy.
Defining cool consumerism
for a worldwide tribe.
Hyped by the man
who personified the brand.
It works like magic.
They look so good,
you want to lick 'em.
It's unbelievable.
No-one had quite
that mixture of arrogance,
humility, talent
and presence, which Steve Jobs had.
He's changed music, he's changed
movies, he's changed computers
a couple of times.
He's created industries
that we didn't think we needed.
Jobs was a perfectionist.
To Steve, everything was about
taste. Just like someone
writing a great piece of music.
And a tyrant.
Steve Jobs yelling at you with
his full force is kind of
a pretty frightening thing
for most people.
How did a drug-taking college
dropout
create one of the most successful
corporations in the world?
His hippy background made him
a better billionaire.
This is the inside story
of how Steve Jobs took Apple
from a suburban garage
to global supremacy.
This is the launch of the Macintosh
computer in 1984.
An early glimpse of the way
Apple has marketed itself
to the world ever since.
MUSIC: "Chariots Of Fire"
by Vangelis
The Macintosh was the first computer
with a mouse that was meant
for all of us.
It has turned out insanely great.
APPLAUSE
We were all very idealistic
and passionate.
This was our personal cause.
In this auditorium,
three crucial factors
came together for the first time.
A new computer designed to be
easier to use
than any that
had come before.
Sold with an audacious
message of revolution.
And hyped by Steve Jobs himself.
I'd like to open the meeting
with a an old poem by Dylan.
That's Bob Dylan.
LAUGHTER
Come writers and critics who
prophesise with your pens
And keep your eyes wide...
What started here in 1984,
with the launch of the Mac
became the template that certainly
got improved upon as Apple became
one of the great marketing companies
that the world has ever seen.
..for the loser now
will be later to win
for the times they are a-changin'.
APPLAUSE
The whole auditorium of about
2,500 people
gave it a standing ovation.
It was a very, very emotional moment
because it was no longer ours.
From that day forward, it was no
loner ours, we couldn't change it.
Jobs cast Apple
as the plucky underdog,
taking on a domineering rival.
IBM wants it all
and is aiming its guns on its last
obstacle to industry control - Apple.
Will big blue dominate
the entire computer industry?
The entire information age?
Was George Orwell right about 1984?
APPLAUSE
'We celebrate the first glorious
anniversary...'
Apple created an advert
that painted IBM as Big Brother.
the enemy of freedom.
These images have helped define
Apple as a brand ever since.
'We shall prevail.'
That was the birth
of the Apple brand.
It was talked about
and it was literally
focusing on a revolution.
And that revolutionary theme
was absolutely at the core
of what made Apple successful
over the next years.
The 1984 ad was the first time
when you started to get a real
sense of the Apple club.
People who defined themselves by
their association with the brand.
That they weren't IBM clones,
they were these creative thinkers
who had a different attitude,
in some way.
I think that's been
the kind of common currency
that's been carried on since then.
Nearly three decades on,
Apple was still following
the marketing template
set out
all those years ago.
This year, Steve Jobs was
centre stage for the launch
of its latest tablet.
And just like in 1984, his pitch
was that Apple stands for something
more than selling computers.
It's in Apple's DNA
that technology alone is not enough.
That it's technology
married with liberal arts,
married with the humanities
that yields us the result
that makes our hearts sing.
From the launch of the Macintosh
to the unveiling of the latest iPad,
two events,
which span a quarter of a century,
and yet which reveal a consistent
vision in the company Jobs created.
It wasn't a vision
born of a business school education.
It wasn't a product of consumer
focus groups.
The roots of that vision
lay in the Californian
counter culture in which he grew up.
MUSIC: "The Times They Are
A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan
# Come gather round, people
wherever you roam... #
The young Steve Jobs
came to believe technology
COULD change the world.
In California in the 1960s and '70s,
Jobs found himself at the centre
of two colliding worlds.
The hippy movement
and computers.
# Oh, the times,
they are a-changin'... #
We spent a lot of time
driving around in his old Volvo.
I don't remember ever listening to
anything other than Bob Dylan tapes.
We would play them
over and over again.
Born in 1955,
Jobs was adopted by a modest family
and grew up
in the Santa Clara Valley.
It was becoming better known
as Silicon Valley
as hi-tech firms sprang up.
And nearby,
San Francisco was becoming the
epicentre of the counter culture.
Jobs opened himself up to both.
He's got a lot of compartments
in his mind.
He was intense and thoughtful
and I liked that about him.
At college, Jobs met Daniel Kottke.
Jobs quickly dropped out
of his course
and lost no time tuning in.
We both got copies of this new book,
Be Here Now.
It was written by Ram Dass
and all about his trip to India,
searching for a holy man who could
explain what psychedelics do.
It was fascinating for me
and for Steve also and so that was
the basis of our friendship.
Jobs became a hippy,
pursuing paths
to personal liberation.
He and Kottke took their own
trip to India,
and LSD, as this
extraordinary tape reveals.
He spent long periods at a commune
on a farm in Oregon.
We spent a whole week harvesting
apples and, while we were at it,
we decided we would just fast
on apples and see how that worked
and, um...
it makes you very light-headed,
cos it's just like sugar.
Jobs was inspired by
the counter culture
to believe society was there
to be reshaped.
As near as I can tell,
Steve Jobs always had that ambition
to change the world.
And he expected to do
that by empowering, um...
everybody.
But Jobs didn't share all the views
of his counter culture buddies.
Many hippies saw computers
as tools of oppression,
produced by big businesses
to extend the sway
of other big businesses.
Jobs, though, had grown up
experimenting with electronics
at home.
People who've done that
have another angle on, er,
whether technology is bad or good.
They think that technology
that pushes them around is bad
and technology that they can
push in their own direction
they think is good.
While he was still at school,
Jobs worked at one of the big
computer companies near his home in
Silicon Valley.
And he made a friend
who would shape his destiny.
We talked about electronics.
I said, "I design computers.
"I can, you know, do any of them."
He had worked at Hewlett Packard
and built himself what's called
a frequency counter.
So we hit it off.
Despite his hippy outlook,
Jobs had a ruthless streak.
He was asked by the fledgling
computer company Atari
to design a new Breakout game.
Jobs asked Wozniak
to do it in just four days,
telling his friend
they would share the fee.
He presented it like we were
splitting the money 50/50,
but actually, it was, you know,
probably a different story.
Wozniak worked round the clock
to deliver the goods
but later discovered Jobs
had paid him considerably less
than half the sum
he had received from Atari.
You didn't think,
"I can't trust this guy"?
or "He's a bit too sharp for me"?
Steve could have just said,
"I need money to buy into
this commune up in Oregon."
Have you never harboured any
bitterness that he might have?
I don't harbour bitterness.
Even if somebody just did
that right to my face,
I would not harbour bitterness.
But I would acknowledge
the truth. Um, I did cry.
I cried, you know, quite a bit,
actually, when I read it in a book.
The seeds of Apple were sown
when Wozniak introduced Jobs
to a subterranean world
of DIY technology enthusiasts.
The Homebrew Computer Club had ideas
of how small, little people
who knew things about computers
could change the world,
could become masters.
The Homebrew Computer Club
took computing
out of the hands of big business.
What happened was you wanted
a computer or a piece of software
or some product that didn't exist.
You looked around, it didn't exist.
So you built it.
Then you showed it to your friends,
cos everyone wants to show off,
and your friends would say,
"This is great, can I have one?"
The values were sharing. If you have
parts that can help people.
If you have knowledge,
you'll share.
Wozniak brought Jobs to
the Homebrew Computer Club
where he was showing
a new computer he had made.
It would become the Apple I.
He saw a business opportunity that
all these people wanted to build
my computer design, but
they didn't have building skills.
And he thought,
"We'll put out some money,
"design a PC board, we'll make
it for $20, we'll sell it for $40."
And I didn't know if we'd sell
enough to get our money back.
We'd have to sell about 50.
And I didn't know if there were
50 people who would buy my computer.
And Steve said, "Yeah, maybe we
won't get our money back,
"but then for once in our lives,
"finally, the two of us
will have our own company."
Wow, man. He was...
OK, he was the leader on that.
In 1976, Wozniak and Jobs
began selling the Apple I computer
from the Jobs family garage.
Buyers had to add their own case.
The birth of Apple as a company
had been masterminded by Jobs,
a hippy with a business brain.
A surprising number of people
who came along as hippies
and counter-culture
folks in the '60s and '70s
wound up going into business.
Business was a way to have
some freedom in the world.
Steve Jobs later said he'd set up
the business almost by chance.
We started Apple simply because we
wanted this computer for ourselves
and our immediate friends wanted one
once they saw us build a prototype.
So gradually,
we were pulled into business.
We didn't set out to build
a large company.
We started out to build computers
for us and our friends.
To Apple's co-founder, the reality
is a little less idealistic.
Steve was always sort of focussed
on if you can build things
and sell them, you can have a
company. And the way you make money
and importance in the world
is with companies.
And he always spoke that he wanted
to be one of those important people.
So he'd got the business side
pretty clearly.
He got the business side but he did
tie it in philosophically with,
"This is how you get
good things to people."
It wasn't, "I only want money."
It was Wozniak's next computer,
which propelled Apple
into the stratosphere.
Released in 1977,
the Apple II was the first home
computer with colour graphics.
Over the next three years,
sales grew rapidly
to more than $150 million,
taking Apple from a suburban garage
to the pinnacle of a new industry...
personal computing.
There are some great partnerships,
aren't there, in the world?
One thinks of Lennon and McCartney
and you and Steve Jobs.
Who was Lennon, who was McCartney?
I am so honoured to be considered
in that kind of category,
and yet it's true, it's true.
You know, Steve and I,
we were like a...
Lennon McCartney partnership,
exactly. I couldn't say who was who.
I always thought people always
attributed me with Lennon
because I had really built
and designed the machines.
And then Steve knew how to take
it to the public.
Um, but he had, you know,
his own type of brilliance too.
When Apple went public in 1980,
it was the most over-subscribed
offering of shares
since that of Ford motors in 1956.
Success on this scale changed Apple.
Any company when it becomes public
and becomes bigger becomes
different. Politics seep in.
The company goal from that point on
wasn't to change the world,
but to increase
the value to shareholders.
It certainly did that.
It was worth nearly $2 billion
by the end of 1980.
And Jobs had a quarter of a billion.
But now money men and women
flooded in to Apple,
and Jobs, just 25, wasn't really
taken seriously by them.
Steve was the chairman, but
he wasn't seen as the person
who had the stature
and the maturity to run the company.
Especially as the world around Apple
was changing fast.
Competition in the personal computer
market was intensifying.
In 1981, IBM launched its response
to the Apple II -
The IBM PC.
'A computer expert will show you
the system that's right for you.'
It was the opening shot of a battle
that would rage for 15 years.
Apple went from the leading
personal computer company
to the second-place company
and actually, was in a very
precarious position in that
because the IBM system could be used
in companies other than IBM
and you could see where Apple would
fall further and further back.
Apple needed a seasoned
Chief Executive to pilot the company
through increasingly tough times.
Steve Jobs' search took him
to New York
and to John Sculley, President
of the soft drinks company, Pepsi.
The two men began poles apart.
The world I came from
was hierarchical.
It was big business.
It was very competitive
and the idea of building a company
that was going to change the world
was completely foreign from anything
that I'd ever been exposed to.
How Jobs persuaded Sculley
to take the job
is the stuff of business legend.
Steve had these deep penetrating,
brown eyes
and he just stared right at me,
probably, you know, 15 inches away.
He said, "Do you want to sell sugar
water for the rest of your life,
"or do you want to come with me
and change the world?"
Kind of knocked the wind out of me,
because no-one had ever said
anything like that to me before.
Sculley was a pragmatic operator,
a marketing expert who knew exactly
what Apple should do.
What they needed was someone
who could keep the Apple II
commercially alive and generating
cash for about another three years.
After several new product lines
had failed to take off,
the income from the Apple II
was keeping the company alive.
But Apple's hopes of a revival
rested on a new home computer,
the Macintosh,
named after a variety of Apple.
Jobs set out to build a computer
that would blow IBM's PC away.
There was enough of the ordinary
corporate executive about him
to want to beat a rival.
But there was little else
conventional about Steve Jobs.
He wanted computers to be simple
and pleasurable to use.
He wanted our relationship with them
to be more human and intimate.
And that approach to technology has
been Apple's hallmark ever since.
The Macintosh team
was full of rebel spirit.
We were all young, we were all
the same age, and we all thought
we could do better
than has ever been done before.
Jobs thought it would take a year
to build the Macintosh.
In fact, it would take
more than three.
He's got a "reality
distortion field".
Steve wanted the impossible
and he was somehow able
to convince everyone
that the impossible was possible.
Jobs was determined
the Macintosh would be easy to use.
It would have a mouse
and icons on screen,
a first for an affordable
personal computer.
The story of how Jobs brought
that mouse to the world
explodes a myth about him -
That he invented revolutionary
technology.
You see, Jobs didn't
operate in an intellectual vacuum.
Nearby, in Silicon Valley, the Xerox
corporation had a research division
called PARC.
'And the function of spatial
frequency is something like this.'
It was full of free-thinking
technological radicals
and inspirational ideas.
It was just a kind of dream place.
We had a general overall
vision about what we called
"the office of the future."
And that was it. We were told
to figure out how to do that.
Jobs was desperate
to take a look inside
this precious storehouse of ideas.
He got his chance when Xerox
made an investment in Apple
and invited him in.
I demonstrated various technologies
that our group had,
but the things that stood out
to the visitors
were the pointing device, the mouse,
which we hadn't invented.
It had been around for 15 years.
We had just improved it,
but it wasn't something that most
people had ever seen before.
Larry Tesler was demonstrating how
a computer with icons
on the screen could be controlled by
this novel gadget. A mouse.
Jobs couldn't believe
what he was seeing.
He started pacing around the room
very nervously almost,
and then more excitedly and then
he just couldn't hold it back.
He just had to talk.
So, he started saying things like,
"You're sitting on a gold mine.
"This is insanely great.
It is just amazing.
"Why aren't you doing
anything with this?"
Unlike the vast XEROX corporation,
Jobs acted swiftly.
I went into his office,
sat down and said,
"Steve, I've been thinking
about a few product ideas"
and hardly had I got the sentence
out and he said, "Stop, Dean.
"I know exactly what we need to do."
When he said "a mouse",
I looked at him and said "A mouse?"
I had no clue what a mouse was.
Xerox saw the mouse as part
of an expensive business computer.
Jobs saw it very differently.
He gave me
a very clear design brief.
The mouse had to have four things.
The first was we had to be able
to build it for less than $15.
Low cost consumer product. Secondly,
it had to last for two years.
Third, it needed to work on a
regular desktop, Formica or metal.
And then, finally,
he leaned back in his chair,
put his hand on his knee and he
said, "And work on my Levi's."
The mouse,
as we now know it, was born.
Jobs had tweaked existing
technology to great effect,
just as he would over
the next three decades.
More editor than inventor,
Jobs had an instinct for innovation,
pouncing on a good idea
when he saw one.
The difference between invention
and innovation is that you execute.
You take an, an idea
and you turn it into reality.
You bring it into the marketplace.
Steve connected the dots.
He saw a little bit of this,
he saw a little bit of that,
and he said, "We need to do this.
"We need to take it from an
expensive business experience
"to a personal low-cost experience
and we'll build a company from it."
Along with making the Macintosh
easy to use,
Jobs brought
an aesthetic sensibility
to the computer's design.
A long-time follower
of Zen meditation,
he believed in the beauty
of simplicity.
When I went to his home
for the first time,
I was struck because there was
almost no furniture in the house.
Um...in his bedroom was a small bed,
a photograph of Einstein
over his bed,
another photograph of Gandhi.
In the living room
was a Tiffany lamp,
no place to sit. You know,
we would just sit on the floor.
Steve just was not into possessions.
He was not into money,
he was completely into
the things he believed in.
That integrity went through every
aspect of his life.
His devotion to the products,
to the work, to the ethic.
It permeated everything
and this desire for aesthetic beauty
the importance of the things
that you don't see,
what lies beneath the surface,
and in that sense,
I think there's
a kind of seamless philosophy
that binds everything together.
As the Macintosh neared completion,
the stakes were growing
higher for Apple.
In autumn 1983,
the company's share price tumbled,
wiping nearly half a billion
dollars from its value.
A new home computer
was on its way from IBM
and other versions of the PC
were flooding the market.
Worse still, the man Apple had
turned to, to write extra software
for the Mac was about to
steal a march on them.
Relations with the young Bill Gates
were strained from the start.
Bill Gates would
fly down from Seattle,
down to Cupertino to give
updates on the project.
And, often times, Steve would just
yell at Bill for two straight hours.
And then Bill would leave
and get on a plane and fly back.
We tend to think of Bill Gates
as a buttoned-up geek,
but in this instance, it was Jobs
who showed he was far from laidback.
He thought Apple
should keep complete control
of its software and hardware,
Gates wanted to produce
software for both Apple and the PC.
Tensions came to a head when they
were both working on the Macintosh.
Jobs began to suspect Gates
might be taking advantage
of his inside knowledge
of Apple's work.
Steve Jobs was racing to ensure
the Macintosh
was the first personal computer
to have icons on the screen.
But just before it was due
to be unveiled,
Microsoft suddenly announced
Windows I for the PC,
which Apple feared would be similar.
Jobs couldn't contain his fury.
Steve was saying, "How can
you do this to us?
"We trusted you, you betrayed us."
And I was impressed with
Bill Gate's demeanour
because Steve Jobs yelling at you
with his full force is kind of a...
a pretty frightening
thing for most people!
But he was kind of cool and calm.
Just looked Steve back in the eye
and said, "Well, Steve,
"you know, what you're saying is one
way of looking at it,
"but I look at it a different way.
"It's more like you had a rich
neighbour named Xerox
"and I broke into their house
to steal the television set
"and found you had
stolen it before I could."
Finally, after three years
and millions of dollars,
the Macintosh computer was ready.
It was the distillation
of Steve Jobs' vision
of what technology should be.
Easy to use, intimate,
intended to change
the lives of ordinary people.
The future of Apple rested on
this strikingly-designed beige box.
Computers before the Macintosh
kept us at arms length.
The only way we can control them
was through painstakingly moving
this crazy little cursor
on the screen
and it looked like an alien device
with these glowing green letters.
The Macintosh put it
on human scale.
COMPUTER: Hello, I am Macintosh.
For the first time it was actually,
you know, intuitive.
If you were bright enough
to walk around unaided,
you could just turn it on
and use it.
The Macintosh would be a hit
with graphic designers
and create the desktop
publishing era.
Those of us who used Apples,
who got up early
because we were excited about
the fact
we were in a world full of glide
and flow and smoothness and pleasure,
were told that we were pretentious,
posing, bohemian arty types.
"It's all very well for you, but
I've got to do officey things",
were missing the point.
But however good it was,
the Mac cost $2,500,
over $1,000 more than an IBM PC.
Even so, Steve Jobs was in no doubt
it would take the world by storm.
Like all great entrepreneurs,
in Steve's mind,
"Why wouldn't everybody on
the planet immediately buy a Mac"?
So he had huge expectations.
Expectations that were about
to collide with the real world.
Then the sales numbers
started coming in
and, at best, they were
half of what we were expecting.
One of Steve's great strengths
is his strong will
and imposing his own
version of reality.
So in the face of depressing sales
numbers he wasn't really fazed.
Apple's new Macintosh factory
was running at 50% of capacity.
We did lose money and that was
a huge crisis for everybody.
Of course, that
engendered a panic at Apple.
You know, "What was the problem?
How can we fix it?"
And there, there was disagreement
between different people.
The most serious disagreement
was between Steve Jobs
and the man he had made
Chief Executive, John Sculley.
Steve has a tendency to be
binary about people
You know, sort of,
he flipped on John Sculley.
The two men were battling
over the future of Apple.
I was focused on
the cash-flow of the Apple II.
We had to have that coming in.
Steve wanted to drop
the price of the Macintosh,
and put more marketing
against the Macintosh.
I felt we couldn't afford that.
30-year-old Jobs had picked a fight
with a formidable foe.
Sculley came from PepsiCo,
a very political organisation,
and he was a skilful infighter
who knew how to play the games,
and Steve didn't.
I said, "Steve, I'm going
to the board of directors."
He didn't think I'd do that,
but I did,
and the board said,
"We agree with John.
"We don't agree with you, Steve."
They asked Steve to step down
from heading the Macintosh division.
Jobs had been forced
out of the company he had created.
It was a humiliating
taste of failure.
I got a phone call,
late at night and it was Steve.
He sounded really despondent
and very, very sad.
And I knew he was all alone
at his great big unfurnished mansion
up in Woodside.
I got in my car, drove up there,
and it was totally dark
and rather creepy,
and I found the house
and went in and climbed up
stairs by myself and found him
in his bedroom just laying down
and he was very, very sad.
And I just stayed there,
as a friend.
11 years later,
Jobs was still bitter.
What can I say?
I hired the wrong guy.
That was Sculley? Yeah,
and, er, he destroyed everything
I'd spent ten years working for.
Erm, starting with me,
but that wasn't the saddest part.
I'd have gladly left Apple if Apple
had turned out like I wanted it to.
Sacking Jobs seemed natural to the
man schooled in selling sugar water.
In hindsight, that was a terrible
decision. I was part of it.
Coming from my vantage point,
out of corporate America,
people were asked
to step down all the time
when there were disagreements
so I didn't appreciate what it
meant to be a founder of a business,
the visionary of the business.
I was focused on
how do we sell Apple computers,
he was focused on
how do we change the world?
Jobs severed all ties with Apple,
except one.
He kept a single share in the
company he had founded,
selling off the rest
for more than $100 million.
He hated the company. He couldn't see
that it would succeed without him.
He didn't want it
to succeed without him.
Over the next 11 years,
Jobs didn't relent.
Once again centre stage,
he set up a new company called Next,
building high spec computers.
With cases made of magnesium
and a price to match,
they didn't sell well.
Though one important computer
scientist was impressed.
Steve Jobs had arranged that,
whenever you get a Next machine,
there would be a message from him.
One of the things I remember he said
was that it's not just about personal
computing, which was the rage,
he said this should be about
interpersonal computing.
And I thought, yeah, that's...
Yeah, he's got it.
Jobs recognised technology was on
the cusp of allowing us
to communicate through computers.
And, in fact, the Next's powerful
operating system
helped Sir Tim Berners-Lee connect
computer users together.
I developed the World Wide Web
on this Next machine
in a couple of months,
whereas on another machine
it would've taken me a lot longer.
YOU ARE A TOY!
As well as high-tech,
Jobs invested in a struggling
computer animation company.
He ploughed $50 million into Pixar,
keeping it afloat
until it created the first
computer-animated feature film.
Toy Story was a blockbuster,
and taking Pixar public made
Steve Jobs super rich.
He did stay in there
and made the company successful,
and we made him
a billionaire in return.
Seems like a pretty good deal.
Now the hippy computer mogul
had become a Hollywood player.
Jobs had the world,
but he didn't have Apple.
They say that there are no second
acts in American life,
but there clearly are.
One of the astonishing things
about the Apple phenomenon
is it goes in two halves.
In the 11 years
since Jobs left Apple,
the computer market
had changed radically.
Now Microsoft was the dominant
force in computing.
Its operating systems powered
nearly 90% of personal
computers in America.
Apple had tried to compete
by allowing other manufacturers
to make and sell copies
of its machines and software,
but it wasn't working.
The company had
lost its lead in the computer market,
customers were leaving in droves, the
company had no future, no roadmap.
The company was in serious trouble.
I, and other Apple users,
were being told with malicious grins
from our Windows-using friends that
if we wanted to keep our machines
we'd have to go to hobbyist shops
because there would be
no Apple computer.
At Next, Jobs had focused
on developing its powerful
operating system.
Apple needed just such a system.
Apple was in technical trouble.
Next was absolutely in financial
trouble, and the two came together.
Apple bought Next for $400 million.
It got the new operating system
it needed, and Steve Jobs.
Steve was truly excited to be linked
up with Apple again.
It was the company he founded,
the company he was kicked out of.
It's the company that had lost
its way, it was starting to fail,
so he had this opportunity to go back
and start fixing Apple at large.
A few days later,
Apple revealed just how much trouble
it was really in.
They announced that they were going
to lose something like $1 billion,
and back then $1 billion
was a lot of money.
I said, "Steve,
what did we just get ourselves into?"
And he was wondering himself! Because
this was a big surprise to us.
To bring Apple back from the brink,
Jobs had a conventional
business challenge.
He had to stop the company
haemorrhaging money,
but he also had to do more.
He had to help the company
rediscover itself,
and for that he thought he needed to
take it back to the future,
to the values that had built it
up in the first place.
He decided to put all of Apple's
products and people under review.
He was demanding, erm, he would not
hesitate to call someone
at two o'clock in the morning
if he had an idea
that he wanted to be pursued.
He had no time for people
that he did not respect.
It got so bad that people
were afraid to get into the elevator
with Steve.
He was on the fourth floor
of the first building
when you first come in, and it's
been rumoured that he's fired people
in that 25-second elevator ride
as he walked out of the elevator.
It wasn't just people who were axed.
Jobs ended the licensing of Apple's
technology to other companies,
and he killed off most of Apple's
product lines,
including a clunky handheld
device, the Newton.
He taught the company what
he learned
when he was at Next and Pixar,
which was focus matters.
Watching expenses matters.
We'll do more if we do less.
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits, the rebels.
The troublemakers.
Always the marketing man,
now Jobs started to talk Apple up
with a TV advert called
Think Different.
This emotional recasting
of Apple's rebel roots
was about more than just the brand.
The real reason Think Different was
created was for the employees.
It really meant a wake-up,
a call to action,
a call to arms for the employees to
say, "Wait a minute,
"we still have something great to
do for the world."
Because the people who are crazy
enough to think they can
change the world...
..are the ones who do.
After renewing Apple's sense
of its own identity,
Jobs needed a product
that could bring about
the company's financial revival.
He had a new vision
of what computers could be,
and it centred on an unknown Apple
employee, British designer
Jonathan Ive,
who'd been working on an unusual
prototype for a new computer.
He went into Steve's office,
and he came out ten minutes later,
and sort of leant against the wall,
not quite believing what he'd heard,
which was, "We're going to stop
everything at Apple and we're going
to make this prototype of yours."
Johnny said, "You do know that the
prototype is transparent and that's
how I want it to be?"
Steve said, "Sure."
This...is iMac.
APPLAUSE
The whole thing is translucent,
you can see into it. It's so cool.
Jobs and Ive had put the design
of the computer centre stage.
It created quite a stir.
It looks like it's from another
planet, and a good planet!
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
A planet with better designers.
Behold this extraordinary
transparent object.
It was friendly!
It's a silly thing to say!
It looked like a nice thing to own.
The back of this thing looks better
than the front of the other guy's
by the way!
This was a desktop computer
but conceived as a thing of
pleasure, ironic fascination.
It meant that, you know,
a computer wasn't just a dreary
piece of office equipment.
They look so good,
you kind of want to lick 'em.
The iMac fused striking design
with the ability to connect
to the internet easily.
Steve was super-proud of the design
and also the idea that he called it
the iMac and the "i" for internet.
The "i" was a stroke
of deft branding,
transforming the new impersonal
internet into something
more intimate.
The iMac was a huge success and
propelled Apple back into profit.
In four and a half months,
iMac has become the number one
selling computer in America.
The iMac was no better a product
than the computer it replaced
but it was packaged and marketed in
a way that became classic Steve Jobs.
It was the sort of packaging
that attracted people
who'd previously had no
interest in computers.
A third of sales were to those
who'd never bought one before.
Who'd have thought you could have an
emotional bond with your computer?
Apple wanted to change people's
relationship with computers.
Steve wanted it to be fashionable but
it was Jonathan who was saying,
"We have to make this
something that people will love."
The word "love" started becoming
part of Apple's motif.
And now there was a new
partnership at the heart of Apple.
Jonathan Ive and Jobs had a very,
very, very special relationship
and it was united by this
almost Zen-like meditative intensity,
which they both have.
Ive's approach to design
would be the new foundation on
which Apple's future would be built.
You've got this incredibly powerful,
this potent technology and people,
and I think design makes
a very sort of important, erm...
..I think, contribution
to the nature of that connection.
I think we're trying to create
products that make sense,
and that people really develop
some sort of affinity with.
They are products that become
personal.
There is a poetic dimension to
some technological artefacts
because they have been crafted into
it, and that is not accidental.
It's absolutely part of a mission,
a focus, and part of the
functionality.
And over the years,
Apple has generally
positioned its products
as expensive,
but oh-so-elegantly designed.
There are people who say,
when you compare the Apple product
with the functional equivalent...
..You see that it's more style
over substance.
No, no, no!
Evan, you couldn't be more wrong.
I wouldn't wish to be rude to you
but it's astonishing to think
that, in the 21st-century,
people still think
there's a distinction
between style and substance,
that the two are not the same.
The better it looks, the more you
want to use it, the more function
you get out of it anyway!
Around the turn-of-the-century,
technology was changing rapidly.
Consumers were rushing to buy
new digital devices
like cameras and music players,
and Jobs saw how Apple could weave
itself deeper into people's lives,
IF it could exploit the trend.
We are living in a new digital
lifestyle with an explosion
of digital devices,
and we believe that the Mac can
become the digital hub of our new
emerging digital lifestyle.
We think this is going to be huge.
Jobs' insight was the beginning
of Apple as we know it today.
Computers were becoming powerful
enough to store and play video,
music and other media.
Apple began working secretly on
a digital device of its own.
It would revolutionise the company
and our increasingly digital world.
The iPod came about because somewhat
of a convergence of technologies.
We learned that we could marry
a really small hard drive -
small in size, large in capacity -
with some small electronics
and build a really good
music player.
Just as with the mouse in the 1980s,
Jobs and Apple did not invent
the MP3 player,
but they did redefine it
for consumers.
The iPod could hold 1,000 songs,
but its real innovation
lay in Jonathan Ive's design.
There were lots of MP3 players
around before the iPod
but they all looked as ugly as car
batteries and it was only Apple
who had the sense to make the
iPod into a gorgeous, gorgeous thing.
The colour of the first iPod
was no accident.
Choosing white for the iPod
wasn't just a Johnny decision,
it was a Johnny and Steve decision.
They really looked into the idea
of the colour white.
It was something, which carried on
a certain spirit and purity.
They went to many, many iterations
of white and had to look at special
materials, special polymers,
to produce and convey and maintain
the certain whiteness of the iPod.
Carefully chosen colours,
white or otherwise,
had a distinctive
presence in the advertising.
And with this product,
unlike some in the past,
Apple was not going to
overestimate demand.
Indeed, quite the reverse.
When we were planning the launch
of the iPod across Europe,
an important thing we had to
manage with the iPod
was to make sure
we kind of undersupplied the demand
so that we'd only roll it out
almost in response to cities crying
out for those iPods to be available
and that's how we kept
that kind of cachet for the iPod
in its early years.
And we'd use extensive data research
to understand
what the kind of relative strength of
doing that in Rome versus Madrid
would be.
Unlike most other MP3 players,
which worked with either
Macs or PCs,
the iPod needed Apple software
running on an Apple computer.
For Steve Jobs, this closed system
seemed to be a virtuous circle.
When they sell iPods
at the beginning,
it locks you into the system,
and iPods have an immediate impact
on Apple Mac sales within the
profitability of the corporation
as a whole.
Ultimately, Jobs realised that Apple
could make even more money
by creating an iPod for Windows.
Steve knew that, for him
to take Apple to another place,
he had to break out of
the Mac ghetto,
which is his gated community
of loyal fans
who love the product.
Music became his way of reaching
that larger audience.
..is the new iPod.
Apple was on a roll.
The iPod quickly became
the number one digital music
player in America and beyond.
You suddenly saw them everywhere,
and its success set
the company on a new course.
There was no vision of
there's going to be an iPod,
then an iPhone, then an iPad.
However, there was a vision that
we're going to be more consumer,
more of a consumer electronics
company.
This is our store, and the store
is divided into four parts.
The first quarter of the store
has our home section...
Apple was on its way to becoming
a global phenomenon.
Wanting to build a consumer
electronics company,
the next step was to go into
consumer electronics stores,
Apple style,
with shops designed to match
the products in them.
What's interesting about Apple's
move into retail
is it wasn't so much Apple
opening up a shop,
but rather Apple opening up
its experience
and allowing people to buy
Apple products in the kind of style,
in the kind of environment, that
actually really suited that brand.
Every facet of the way the stores
look was influenced by Steve Jobs.
He even held the American patent
for the design of the glass stairs.
The fact that Steve Jobs was
a sort of hippy control freak was
an extraordinary collision,
but it's worked absolutely
brilliantly for Apple,
which is you've got this
impression of hippy chic and relaxed
and everything else,
whereas actually this organisation
is one of the most controlled
organisations in the world.
Apple boasts some of the world's
most profitable retail space,
but the shops are about far more
than selling products.
An Apple Store is a temple
to a belief system.
They conform to the structure
of a religion.
They have the objects of veneration,
the phone, the tablet,
they have a powerful priesthood.
They have a congregation of people
who belong and who believe in Apple,
but ultimately they have the Messiah,
the religious leader,
the late Steve Jobs.
Apple's ethos, defined by that
Think Different slogan,
turned out to be a remarkably
valuable business philosophy.
It had helped the company reinvent
computing and retailing,
and next it would take Apple to yet
another revolutionary endeavour.
Steve Jobs was one of those people
who recognised that, in the digital
age, content would be key.
The iPod was designed to be a way
to synchronise your music
from your computer to get it into
your pocket.
It was after the success of the iPod
that Apple said there's
a market for us to sell music,
but that was not the original plan.
While Jobs needed music
for the iPod,
the music industry
had a problem of its own.
The rise of file-sharing websites
like Napster was threatening the way
the industry made money.
So you went from a world in which you
had to go buy stuff in a store
to a world in which you had this
cloud of music
that was, in effect,
an unlimited source of free music,
which was a very threatening idea
to the music industry.
Faced with this crisis, the record
industry had tried to close
Napster down
and sue people
who downloaded music for free.
They were alarmed by Apple's iPod.
The record labels were very unhappy
with that and felt that,
only because Napster was hard to use,
could the music survive,
and here was Apple coming out with
a digital music product
that was easy to use and was
going to make it much more popular.
Even so, some in the music industry
thought Apple might be able to help.
In 2002, a delegation
of music executives travelled
to Apple's headquarters
to present a vision
for how they might collaborate.
Steve Jobs did not exactly warm
to their ideas.
He listens,
but he isn't listening patiently.
At one point he waves his arms
and says, "Stop, stop,
that's not why I'm here.
"I didn't come here to listen to you.
"I have my own views
on what we need to do.
"You guys in the music business
have had your heads up your asses
all these years!"
Which made everybody on my side of
the table mute, silent.
And I said, "Steve, that's exactly
why we're here. We need your help."
Other technology companies
had tried and failed
to persuade the major labels
to license their music online,
but Jobs was different.
Jobs was the biggest share
owner in Disney.
Because he was in such a strong
position as a Hollywood player
that he was able to bang the heads
together of the music companies and
say this is how it's going to be.
To Jobs, it was obvious the record
labels didn't understand
the new internet-savvy consumers.
He insisted the way to beat
file-sharing was not to punish
people for doing it
but to offer a more convenient
reasonably-priced alternative.
In less than a year,
every major label had signed up to
the Apple iTunes store.
He just got the deal done and that
was an incredible achievement.
That in pure business terms
is deal-making,
which is a recognisable
feature of your great tycoon.
In its first week, the iTunes store
sold more than 1 million tracks.
It was so successful by the end
of the first year,
the leverage had shifted from the
owner of the content to Apple.
Some artists believe Apple
now wields too much power
through iTunes,
putting profits before musicians.
..whose works it bleeds
like a digital vampire
for its enormous commission,
that it decides, you know,
we'll take 30%.
It's a bit of a pity that
everyone's online these days.
But you can't blame them.
It's just the modern world, innit?
But what a business it is.
IPods give Apple power
over the music industry
through the connection to iTunes,
and, in turn, the appeal
of iTunes boosts sales of iPods.
If I can fulfil all your needs,
then I'll get all your money,
and that's Steve's approach.
He wanted to give people the devices
they would use to consume video
and audio,
then he wanted to
give them video and audio to consume.
He's created the future
of entertainment.
Jobs was usually very
guarded about his private life,
but in 2005 he chose a very public
stage, a speech to graduating
students,
to reveal he had been battling
serious illness.
About a year ago,
I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7.30 in the morning
and it clearly showed
a tumour on my pancreas.
My doctor advised me to go home
and get my affairs in order,
which is doctor's
code for "prepare to die".
It turned out to be a very rare
form of pancreatic cancer
that is curable with surgery.
I had the surgery
and thankfully I'm fine now.
In reality, Jobs would continue
his struggle with cancer
for the next six years.
His diagnosis had a profound impact.
Death is very likely the single
best invention of life.
It's life's change agent, it clears
out the old to make way for the new.
Your time is limited so don't waste
it living someone else's life.
It's a philosophy that Jobs
himself followed.
It's really amazing in hindsight what
he accomplished while he was sick.
Not only was he fighting this
debilitating disease,
he was leading a huge corporation
doing earth-shaking work
that affects hundreds of millions
of people.
Steve Jobs' next major project
would bring together
everything he stood for,
a bold raid into a market into which
the company had never been a player.
IPod. A phone.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Are you getting it?
It would revolutionise the way
a long-established industry worked,
and make Apple billions.
And we're calling it... iPhone.
He said, "I think that we'll
succeed in this marketplace
"because we're a software company,
"and everyone we're going to compete
with are hardware companies."
I didn't realise at the time
just how profound that was.
Apple's iPhone became the fastest
selling handset on the market.
People weren't buying them
just to make phone calls.
Steve, I love you!
What made the iPhone different
was apps.
The iPhone was the gateway to
a world of downloadable software
for anything from shopping
to finding love, or lust, nearby.
He came into the marketplace
and absolutely demonstrated to people
how you could package up bits of the
internet and present it to people
in a way that was really simple
and fast and digestible
in the form of apps.
With apps, Apple had worked out how
to open up its closed system
just enough to keep earning
money from its latest iPods,
iPhones and iPads,
even after you've bought them.
The money keeps rolling in.
For the first time ever,
Apple briefly topped Exxon Mobil
as the world's most valuable company.
All the more amazing as android
phones and Dell and HP computers
outsell Apple.
Oddly enough, the market share of
Apple is very low.
It's incredibly low in computers but
they make enormous profit out of it.
It's actually low in smartphones.
It's not the leader in the world
by any means, yet the money they make
make them the largest company
on Earth.
Apple is much stronger
than its competition,
and so they need to make sure
they don't get complacent
because the way they'll lose
some day is when someone
quietly comes up behind them
and does something
that is now better.
Over the course of more than
three decades,
some might argue that Apple has
travelled far from its origins,
as a bunch of Californians
railing against IBM to become,
itself, an all-powerful Big Brother.
But it is a more complicated
and interesting story.
If Steve Jobs had just been a rebel,
he wouldn't have got far,
but it's because he always had
that inner-hippy
that Apple became so much more than
just another computer company.
There was one aspect of Steve Jobs'
battle with cancer
he hadn't revealed.
He'd delayed having surgery for
nine months after he was diagnosed.
Instead he'd tried
alternative remedies
and a strict vegan diet, against
the advice of those closest to him.
And the cancer had spread.
He was the kind of person that could
convince himself of things
that weren't necessarily true,
and that always worked with him
for designing products,
where he could go to people
and ask them to do something
that they thought was impossible.
And I think he truly thought that,
through some unconventional means,
he could cure himself.
A Californian suburb.
This was Steve Jobs' house
after his death at the age of 56.
Home to no ordinary CEO,
billionaire or hippie.
# Buckets or rain, buckets of tears
# Got all them buckets
coming out of my ears
# Buckets of moonbeams
in my hand... #
He wasn't an inventor,
he wasn't a code writer,
he wasn't a designer,
he wasn't a businessman really.
I mean the word people use
is visionary.
If you break it down in the sense
of he saw things,
in that sense he was a visionary.
He just saw things.
As near as I can tell, Steve Jobs
never left his counter-cultural
frame of reference,
and so his way of staying forever
young was to stay forever hippy.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all very much.
APPLAUSE