Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Founders of Apple) - Entrepreneur Profile October 31

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Steve jobs appleNames: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

Dates of birth: 24/2/1955 (Jobs), 11/8/1950 (Wozniak)

Mini-CV: Co-founded Apple (along with Ronald Wayne, who sold his share to them soon after), on April 1st 1976. Prior to this, Jobs had been a technician at Atari and Wozniak worked for Hewlett Packard. Both were members of the pioneering Homebrew Computer Club. Met as summer employees at Hewlett Packard while they were students.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dropped out of their respective university courses in the mid-1970s - but it soon became clear that both had bigger fish to fry. After the former took a soul-discovering trip to India midway through his job at Atari, the duo joined forces - not for the first time - to form Apple. Based on the concept that there was a market for a completely-assembled and inexpensive computer they showed imagination and bravery to sell some of their favourite possessions in order to raise money to create a prototype, the Apple I motherboard, which served to revolutionise computing as people knew it.

Today, Apple is a vastly different entity and in many ways has completely reinvented itself - its founders have had to move with the times after the late-80s and early-90s success of its initial Macintosh offering began to wane amid the considerable competition in the market. Now the firm has compensated for its diminished share of the computer market by blazing a trail with some of the very latest in new media. The iPod and its various sub-varieties are fine examples of iconic hardware, with Jobs and Wozniak having proved they have the vision to provide offerings which are must-haves for people of all ages today. In the iPod’s case, never before had consumers been able to download music from the internet onto their own stand-alone device with such ease and speed. With a catchy name and a distinctive logo, it effectively cornered for instant music consumption and simultaneously revitalised the name of Apple - making it synonymous with youth, vision and vibrancy. Apple and the iPod have thus become icons of the modern age.

It doesn’t stop there. Other creative and consumer products are bundled into the iLife package, while Apple has this year revamped its computer offerings by announcing a partnership with former rival Intel. The fact that most of its new machines facilitate the Windows operating system is also a major advance for their versatility and demonstrates the firm’s ability to reshape and learn from previous flaws. No longer having to set itself up as a direct competitor to Microsoft, it can now take it on in a more lateral sense.

Jobs is, according to Owen Linzmayer in Wired News, “a master of hype, hyperbole and the catchy phrase. Even when he’s trying to talk normally, brilliant verbiage comes tumbling out.” In a sense he is the Sir Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger of his industry - where mind games are concerned, he loves to play. Having said that “the PC wars are over. Microsoft won a long time ago” in 1996 he now finds his and Wozniak’s firm rivalling Bill Gates’s enterprise once more at the very top of their industry, as they seek to expand their offerings across all kinds of digital media. Masters of the long game, Apple have proved they have staying power - and will not be frightened by new offerings such as Microsoft’s Zune, an iPod rival which suggests that Bill Gates’s company is becoming acutely aware of Apple’s strong relationship with new media ideas.

Wozniak and Jobs are both big, engaging personalities - in an industry where this is a very necessary facet. They operate with humour and a willingness to innovate, but also with a stubbornness and lack of fear. Its corporate culture has long been relaxed and imbued with a very individual character - there are anecdotal stories of Jobs regularly wandering around the office barefoot in the early days and it has long prided itself on liberalness and open-mindedness. Hand-in-hand with this goes the ability to take a gamble, which is exactly what the co-founders did when selling off their own wares to fund their invention in the mid-1970s, and the vision to reshape and completely change tack or direction when required. Acute awareness of the industry’s trends has seen to this. Mixing brio with boldness, they have carved out a brand which � just like the apple which so stunned Isaac Newton - leaves an indelible mark on the consciousness.

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