Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was not a typical tech company founder. He did not have an engineering background or business training. He did not even have a traditional undergraduate degree, having dropped out of Reed College after just one semester. Yet, he went on to co-found Apple with Steve Wozniak and became one of the most influential tech visionaries of the 21st century. What Steve was good at was figuring out how to make products that were at once simple and pleasing, something to be coveted.

As an employer, Steve Jobs had the reputation of being hot-tempered. In 1987, the New York Times wrote that he "was widely hated at Apple. Senior management had to endure his temper tantrums." He often reduced his employees to tears. However, he was passionate about a few mantras in his work life - he wanted simplicity and aesthetic design in his products. He wanted all his employees to stick to these mantras. He had a very hands-on approach to product design. So, he spent most of his workday in product review sessions.

When the Macintosh computer was being designed, he wanted it to look friendly. He insisted that the computer case be tall and narrow like a face. He placed the disk drive below the screen like a mouth and narrowed the area above the screen to make it look like a short forehead. He insisted that the rows of chips on the circuit boards inside the computer look neat, even though no one would ever see them. He wanted the fonts on the screen to look appealing. Since the Macintosh used a bitmapped display where each pixel on the screen could be independently turned on or off, he hired a graphic artist to design new fonts just for the computer.

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs was ahead of his time. He left Apple in 1985 and went on to found another company called NeXT, which specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business use. Although these workstations were notable for their object-oriented programming and graphical user interface, NeXT ceased as a hardware company by 1993. In 1996, Steve Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant. By then, he had tempered some of his instincts and learned to make sensible trade-offs, but he remained passionate about design.

Steve Jobs' insistence on good design can be credited for the success of many of Apple's subsequent products. These include the iMac, an all-in-one computer, the iPod, a portable media player, the iPhone, a line of smartphones, and the iPad, a line of tablet computers. Apple's first marketing brochure declared in 1977, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Nearly five decades later, that still remains the guiding principle of Apple Inc.