ARTICLE

Remembering Steve Jobs

By InCinemas / 07 Oct 2011 (Friday)

[Watch Steve's inspiring speech at Stanford University below!]
[Get to know about Steve Jobs' 5 most important deals]
If you visit the homepage of Apple's website, you'll find an image of Steve jobs with the text, "Steve Jobs 1955-2011." And clicking on the image, you'll read: "Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."

This is how much Steve Jobs has meant to Apple and to many of us, whether we use apple products, we share the sorrow of losing a great person. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com.

Many pictures and videos about Steve Jobs were being shared online on social media and this particular speech made by Steve Jobs during the Standford Commencement Address back in 2005 has caught our attention. It is one of the most encouraging and inspiring speech we have ever heard. Spend some time listening to it. It's most worthwhile.. Steve Jobs will be remembered.

[Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address]

"Steve Jobs was an extraordinary visionary, our very dear friend and the guiding light of the Pixar family. He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined. Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply 'make it great.' He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar’s DNA. Our hearts go out to his wife Laurene and their children during this incredibly difficult time."

- John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer & Ed Catmull, President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios

Get to know about Steve Job's top 5 important deals according to blogs.wsj.com. The selection is made base on the criteria: What deals helped catapult Jobs or Apple to new heights, or signaled the next phase of the company’s strategy?

In short, what deals - to borrow from Apple’s hyperbolic language about its products - were "magical and revolutionary"?

5) Siri, 2010, reportedly more than $200 million
Last year, Apple bought Siri, the company behind a mobile application that functions as a personal assistant. The speculation in Silicon Valley is that Siri’s voice-recognition technology will be baked into the next generation of the iPhone. If searches by voice replace the traditional typed search for mobile phones and other on-the-go gadgets, Apple may have found its beachhead in Siri. (UPDATE: When Apple introduced a new iPhone this week, Siri’s voice-recognition “personal assistant” was one of the heralded new features.)

4) Lala, 2009, Reportedly $85 million
Apple in late 2009 agreed to buy Lala, which allowed users to stream music from its collection of Web-based songs. Apple shut down Lala just months later, but not before Lala became an important foundation for Apple’s own plans for a Web-based version of the iTunes music store. This year, Apple announced a Web-based version of iTunes. The Lala acquisition also marked another instance of Google and Apple tussling over the same acquisition prize, a sign of the growing rivalry between the two tech giants. The two also fiercely competed for AdMob, a mobile-advertising firm that Google won.

3) P.A. Semi, 2008, $278 million
Apple bought the chip designer, whose talent is responsible for building the guts of the iPad and iPhone. ”P. A. Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” Jobs announced at Apple’s developers conference in 2008. Without P.A. Semi, it’s possible Apple wouldn’t have been able to install the battery-efficient, fast processors that have became an important selling point for gadgets such as the iPad.

2) Pixar, 1986, $10 million
Jobs agreed to buy a controlling interest in a computer-aided special effects business from “Star Wars” creator George Lucas. The price tag for the business, Pixar, was just $10 million. Pixar went on to create some of the most successful and critically acclaimed movies in Hollywood, including the “Toy Story” films, “Finding Nemo” and — the personal favorite of your Deal Journal blogger — “Wall-E.” In 2006, Disney bought Pixar for $7.5 billion in stock. Jobs owned just over half of Pixar’s stock. Jobs remains the biggest individual shareholder of Disney, a roughly $60 billion company by market value. His 7.3% stake in Disney is valued at $4.4 billion.

1) Apple-NeXT Inc., 1996, more than $400 million
This one technically wasn’t made under Jobs’s watch, so it gets a modest asterisk. Apple’s purchase of NeXT Inc. –- this was the computing company Jobs set up after he was fired from Apple in 1985 -– started the Seer of Silicon Valley on a remarkable run of technology innovation. Apple was criticized for overpaying for NeXT at the time, and the deal remains Apple’s biggest corporate acquisition to date. Obviously the true value of the acquisition was in bringing Jobs back into the Apple fold. Last year, Randall Stross, who penned a book about Jobs and NeXT, wrote that Jobs “probably never could have made Apple what it is today if he hadn’t embarked on a torment-filled business odyssey.”

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Remembering Steve Jobs