Apple’s heritage and Steve Job’s mentors!

APPLE’s $18bn (£11.8bn) net profit in its first fiscal quarter,  a world record for the biggest quarterly profit ever made by any public company is no surprise to many. Apple’s profit margin was 39 per cent on each  iPhone 6 sold.

Is  Apple making too much profit on their products? Or should we really applaud and learn from them for producing such a perfect product about which the whole world got crazy and embraced it.

In the late 80’s  before the advent of iPhones  there were mobile phones which were fit for purpose, but unattractive in design  – remember the earlier brick mobile phones brought by Motorola? Then came Nokia and Blackberry who  made designs more presentable and catered to the business needs. Finally it was however, Apple who relentlessly pursued an aim to produce the ultimate perfect mobile phone, smaller, thinner, and smarter  which became part of everybody’s life.  A team of entrepreneurs who contributed to Apple’s success, was initially led by late Steve Jobs, a real genius.  His mentors included computer scientist Alan Kay, a researcher at Xerox PARC, exceptionally brilliant and considered one of the fathers of the graphical user interface and object-orientated programming.  Based on Alan Kay’s work Apple popularised GUIs and NeXT, object-oriented software. Kay also introduced Jobs to George Lucas, who wanted to get rid of a small team of computer animation scientists — who eventually became the Pixar founders.

Steve Jobs was a huge fan of  famous folk singer Bob Dylan all his life. In his youth, he would play his songs all day, and even dated Joan Baez — mostly because she was Dylan’s ex-girlfriend. Steve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in April 1976. The two became friends despite their age difference,  and  their common interest in electronics and Bob Dylan. Woz is the hardware genius behind the Apple I and the Apple II, the world’s first popular personal computers. Nolan Bushnell founder of Atari and Steve’s first employer (after an initial internship at HP at the  age of  13). He is widely regarded as the father of the video game industry. According to Woz, he was an inspiration to Steve Jobs to start Apple.

Steve Jobs poached PepsiCo CEO John Sculley with the famous phrase: “do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Sculley became Apple’s CEO in 1983, and that post lasted about two years.

Akio Morita co-founded Sony Corporation with Masaru Ibuka, and widely acknowledged as the father of the consumer electronics industry, having brought to market the transistor, colour TV, Walkman. Steve Jobs admired Sony very much and always talked of making Apple “the Sony of computers”.  Apple perfected product after product and eventually became much better than Sony not only at computers but also at its core business of consumer electronics.

And of course, Larry Ellison the world’s fifth richest man, the co-founder of business software company Oracle which he started in his garage is  one of Steve Jobs’s best friends, who was instrumental in bringing him back to Apple in 1997,  publicly claiming he intended to buy the company (he is worth $33 billion – a 2011 statistic).

Even Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder was one of the first companies to write software for Macintosh in 1982-84. They eventually stole many ideas from the Mac to build the first version of Windows. Fifteen years later, in 1997, Jobs called Gates to make a deal with Apple and settle patent disputes. The two tech titans eventually learned to appreciate one another, even though Gates was always more respectful of Jobs.

Steve Jobs head hunted, Tim Cook –  a highly accomplished manager at Compaq  and hired him in 1998 to run Apple’s supply chain. Cook’s logistics mastery made Apple the industry leader in inventory management in less than a year.  Apple could not have sustained its explosive growth or lower its prices without Tim Cook. Cook became COO of the company in 2007, and replaced Steve during his two medical leaves, before eventually replacing him as CEO after his resignation in August 2011.

Al Gore was US Vice President from 1993 to 2000, and under Bill Clinton,  promoted legislation to fund the expansion and deeper penetration of the Internet in America. He is often credited for popularising the term ‘information super-highway’, as he  joined Apple’s board of directors in 2003 and became friends with Steve Jobs. He spoke during the memorial ceremony at Apple after Steve’s death.