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BEING APPLE CASE STUDY

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BEING APPLE CASE STUDY
CASE STUDY

Steve Jobs is currently CEO of Apple and one of the world’s best-known business leaders. The many biographies of Jobs on the internet agree on the basic details. He was born in 1955 in California.
In 1976, he and Steve Wozniak founded the Apple
Computer Company. The next year saw the launch of the company’s second computer – the Apple II – whose success established Apple as one of the main brands in the fledgling personal computer
(PC) industry. Apple went public in 1980 and by
1983 Jobs was looking for an experienced corporate manager to oversee the company’s continuing expansion; he hired John Sculley from
Pepsi Cola. In 1984, Apple launched the
Macintosh, whose innovative design was surely one of the key steps forward in the development of today’s user-friendly PCs.
In 1985, Jobs fell out with the Apple board and with
Sculley and resigned from the company. He went on to found the computer company NeXT, whose workstation products were seen as innovative and influential, but which were too expensive for mass market success. By the early 1990s, NeXT was concentrating on software rather than hardware, and Apple was experiencing significant financial problems as the PC market started to mature. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT and installed
Jobs as interim CEO in 1997. Jobs was back and set about some radical surgery to improve Apple’s profitability. The technology that arrived with the NeXT purchase allowed a new operating system to be developed and Jobs was closely associated with the development and launch of the brightly-coloured and inspirational iMac in 1998.
The ‘i’ prefix was adopted by Apple for a series of further innovations as its renaissance under Jobs continued, including the launch in 2001 of the spectacularly successful iPod music player and the iTunes service to support it. This success has provided the company with a whole new set of strategic options in music and entertainment. Then came the the iPhone
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