/ 16 January 2009

Steve Jobs takes six months off

As news broke on Thursday that Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, would be taking at least six months’ medical leave from the company he co-founded, the internet was abuzz with the question: what is Apple without Steve Jobs?

Less asked, but just as intriguing, is: what is Jobs without Apple? The evidence suggests he’s an obsessively private visionary, with world-beating talents for negotiation, motivation and attention to detail.

That approach has helped him transform the world three times: first in computers, then films, and latterly music. Apple (not Microsoft) gave the world computers with “windows”; Pixar, which he bought in 1986 and funded at great expense, changed the way we think about animation; and record companies might have vanished if not for the online iTunes Music Store, now one of the biggest sellers of music in the US, including physical retailers.

As he approaches his 54th birthday (on 24 February), his enforced absence due to ill-health — the precise nature of which Jobs has, typically, kept secret — will be the longest away from Apple since he returned to the company in 1997, having been thrown out in a boardroom coup in 1985. He’ll spend the time with his family – he has three young children at his family home, a giant mansion in Woodside, California, not far from Apple’s offices. A grown-up child from a previous relationship lives in the UK.

“This would be a hard adjustment for Steve Jobs,” said Van Baker, an analyst with Gartner Group. “I think he would find other pursuits, but it would be difficult to take the Apple out of Steve. The company has defined him for so many years.”

To many people, he is synonymous with the iPod and latterly the iPhone; to some before that he was the progenitor of the iMac, credited with having pulled Apple back from the brink of collapse after he took over again in 1997.

Yet Jobs didn’t design, or initiate, any of those products. The iPod was the idea of Tony Fadell, an outsider who came to Apple with the proposal. The iPhone was an obvious move forward. The iMac was the brainchild of Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer who has been at Apple almost 15 years.

“Steve doesn’t really invent all this stuff in his garage alone, despite the perception he does,” says Michael Gartenberg, a technology strategist.

Jobs has led a complex life. He was given up by his birth mother, a “young, unwed college student”, for adoption by a university-educated couple — except that Paul and Clara Jobs weren’t graduates, a fact that almost derailed the adoption. Jobs senior was a machinist for a laser manufacturer.

But Jobs the person remains elusive. He will cut dead anyone he feels has been disloyal by telling the press about his personal life. That extends to companies: those which let slip any detail of forthcoming Apple launches have found themselves dropped from contracts.

Alan Deutschmann, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, says that it’s as if there were two people: Good Steve and Bad Steve. Good Steve is friendly, charming, amusing; Bad Steve shouts, screams and denigrates whoever has incurred his displeasure.

Chuq von Rospach, who worked at Apple running its critical email and web forum systems for 17 years before leaving in 2007, says it is like being in the path of a flamethrower.

His talent for negotiation — and perhaps exaggeration — can stretch into personal and health matters. When the mother of his first child claimed paternity, Jobs, then 23, denied it for two years, even signing a court document which said he was “sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child”.

But those skills have proved their worth repeatedly. If there’s one thing Apple will miss, it’s his negotiating skills.

Nobody within Apple is talking about the disruption.

But Von Rospach said: “If Steve leaves Apple, I think he leaves satisfied. One could argue that few people have affected computing and society like Steve has; [Bill] Gates is the other really. Proud of his legacy, comfortable with his place in history.”

But, Von Rospach adds: “People forget he’s a husband and father, always very protective and private, and I think if and when he leaves Apple, it’s going to be so he can enjoy that part of his life more. And that’s probably what he’s most proud of.”

Not that Jobs — the complete unromantic, unattached to the past — is likely to be casting backward glances.

Journalist Steven Levy saw him at Apple last October and asked about the upcoming 25th anniversary of the original Apple Macintosh. Jobs “recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia”, says Levy. “When I got back here in 1997 I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff,” Jobs told him.

“I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

CV
Born 24 February 1955.
Family Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, of Syria – students. Adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.
Education Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for one term but dropped out — but attended some classes, including calligraphy which he later said was key to Macintosh’s use of typefaces.

Career 1970-1971 worked after high school at Hewlett-Packard, meeting Steve Wozniak with whom he founded Apple in 1976. Founded NeXT Computer after being ejected from Apple in boardroom row in 1985. NeXT bought by Apple in 1997 and Jobs returned as interim and then full-time CEO.
Health Jobs had operation to remove neuroendocrine tumours from pancreas in 2004. Took two months off. – guardian.co.uk