Book of Jobs: Steve has a different operating system

Hard to understand, difficult to work with and deemed irreplaceable by many Apple fans and investors, Steve Jobs has made a life defying conventions and expectations. And despite years of signs of poor health, his resignation as chief executive of Apple caused a global gasp as the world contemplated the future of an icon and the company he symbolizes. Steve Jobs is the most successful CEO in the US of the last 25 years, said Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who used to sit on Apples board but stepped down because of overlapping business interests. He uniquely combined an artists touch and an engineers vision to build an extraordinary company, one of the greatest American leaders in history, Schmidt said in a statement. A college dropout, Jobs floated through India in search of spiritual guidance prior to founding Applea name he suggested to his friend and cofounder Steve Wozniak after a visit to a commune in Oregon he referred to as an apple orchard. With his passion for minimalist design and marketing genius, Jobs changed the course of personal computing during two stints at Apple and transformed the mobile market. The iconic iPod, the iPhone dubbed the Jesus phone for its quasi-religious followingand the iPad are the creation of a man known for his near-obsessive control of the product development process. Most mere mortals cannot understand a person like Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple employee who considers Jobs the greatest CEO in the history of man, said recently. Hes just got a different operating system. Charismatic, visionary, ruthless, perfectionist, dictatorthese are some of the words that people use to describe the larger-than-life figure of Jobs, who may be the biggest dreamer the technology world has ever known, but also a hard-edged businessman and negotiator through and through. Steve Jobs is the business genius of our generation, former eBay Inc chief Meg Whitman said recently. His contributions to Apple, his contributions to technology, frankly his contributions to America, are unparalleled in the business world. He is amazing. Former nemesis Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has called Jobs the most inspiring person in the tech industry and President Barack Obama has held him up as the embodiment of the American Dream Its hard to imagine a bigger success story than Steve Jobs, but rejection, failure and bad fate have been part and parcel of who he is. Jobs was given away at birth, driven out of Apple in the mid-80s and struck with cancer when he finally had regained the top of the mountain. His resignation as CEO on Wednesday comes at the relatively young age of 56. Jobs grew up with an adopted family in Silicon Valley, which was turning from orchards to homes for workers at Lockheed and other defense and technology companies.Electronics friend Bill Fernandez introduced him to boy engineer Wozniak, and the two Steves began a friendship that eventually bred Apple Computer. Woz is a brilliant engineer, but he is not really an entrepreneur, and thats where Jobs came in, remembers Fernandez, who was the first employee at Apple. Wozniak said that his goal was only to design hardware and he had no interest in running

Apple. Steve Jobs role was defined youve got to learn to be an executive in every division of the company so you can be the worlds most important person some day. That was his goal, recently joked Woz, who is still listed as an employee reporting directly to Jobs, even though he has not worked at Apple for years. REUTERS

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