The Steve Jobs legacy

As Steve Jobs temporarily steps down, Conrad Quilty-Harper asseses his time at the company he founded. It's a story of two chapters.

Established on April Fools Day in 1976, Apple's first product was not much more than a motherboard, and was hand-built by co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Only a few years later, Jobs headed up the development of the Macintosh, which popularised two concepts which have defined the personal computer age: the graphical user interface, and the mouse.

The Macintosh announcement at the 1984 Superbowl - to much fanfare in the famous commercial directed by Ridley Scott - could be seen as his most enduring legacy.

At the age of 30 and only just after the launch of the Mac, Jobs was ousted from the company he founded, although Jobs later recalled that "it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me".

In the period between his resignation from Apple and his return in 1997 Jobs kept a low profile, although the things he worked on during that time allowed him to come back much stronger than he had left.

In 1985, he founded a computer company called NeXT, which was bought by Apple in 1997 to form the core of the Mac OS X operating system and "the heart of Apple's current renaissance". (Interestingly, one of NeXT's innovations was NeXTMail, an email system that allowed graphics and audio to be embedded within emails - so we can all thank Jobs for those annoying email signatures that everyone hates).

Also during this down period, Jobs bought Pixar for $10m from George Lucas, which premiered Toy Story, the first fully 3D-animated motion picture in 1995, and went on to be bought by Disney in a deal worth $7.4bn.

Apple's buyout of NeXT in 1997 and Jobs return as 'interim-CEO' brought about a near instant return to profitability after half a decade of decline for Apple.

The company had over 15 individual product lines at the time of Jobs' return to the company, half of which Jobs cut and consolidated into the half dozen different products that make up Apple's current offerings.

One of the most important - and overlooked - aspects of Jobs' legacy at Apple is the change in the way the company is run internally.

Without his assertion of control over every aspect of the company in 1997, the subsequent resurgence of the "cult of Mac", and masses of press attention that the company enjoys after every product release would have been unlikely, if not impossible.

The years after his return have been an unrelenting rise: the launch of the iMac in 1998 saw the fastest selling product in the company's history up until that point, the unveiling of the iPod in 2001 has since seen over 100 million of the players sold across the world, and the iPod's coupling with the iTunes Store has seen the establishment of Apple as one of the most dominant forces in the music industry for years to come.

Apple's market capitalisation, even with the recent 10 per cent drop after the announcement of his sabbatical, has risen to $75bn - nearly four times bigger than its spiritual rival, Dell.

With Apple's recent success so inexorably tied to the presence of Jobs, it is hard to say with complete confidence that it will be able to maintain its winning streak.

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