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main index Narrative
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Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was an American inventor and business executive who pioneered much of the popular penetration of personal computers and their related applications in popular culture.Although a post-secondary dropout, his flair for technology and how to design and market it combined with the technical mastery of his partner, Steve Wozniak helped create Apple Computers in 1976. From that partnership, Apple grew to be a major player in the embryonic consumer market with innovative products like the Apple II and the Macintosh personal computers. However, Jobs' abrasive personality and stubbornly selective acknowledgement of reality alienated much of the staff and management and the subsequent market difficulties in the later 1980s gave a convenient rationale to dismiss him from the company.On his own, Jobs founded the NeXT computers, which struggled under his exacting design specifications and slow sales of P Cs that proved to be ahead of their time in many respects. Along the way, Jobs also purchased the computer graphics organization, The Graphics Group, from George Lucas. This organization was later renamed Pixar and would go under Jobs' corporate management to become a major innovator in computer animation and a dominant artistic force in Western Animation, first in cooperation with Disney in feature films like Toy Story in 1995 and then as a purchased subsidiary of the film in 2006 with its artist head, John Lasseter, put in charge of all of the company's animation.In 1996, NeXT was bought by Apple and Jobs returned to the company and soon resumed control. Under his leadership, the lagging company soon prospered with the Imac PCs, but soon branched out into new products that made deep impacts in the American culture. For instance, Jobs oversaw the creation of the Ipod MP3 player that became the preeminent example of a new music market, which was complimented by the Itunes store that redefined online recorded media retail while he manipulated desperate media companies such as the music industry to cooperate in an arrangement shamelessly stacked in Apple's favor.After those successes, Job's prescient technology business sense and his almost obsessive commitment to innovative design led to other subsequent successes. These included the Iphone, which opened the smart phone market from a business oriented one to a general consumer item and the Ipad, that kicked started the tablet market largely by itself.However, his stubborn personality and eccentricity also lead to him no properly dealing with his declining health and he died of cancer in 2011. As such, he was hailed as one of great American business innovators and leaders of modern times with a popular culture impact at least as profound.
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