Assignment #1

After watching the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”,

1. What are the factors that contributed to the success and failure of Steve Jobs as a technopreneur?

          Technology and entrepreneurial skills are driving many economies to prosperity. The most famous of them all is, Bill Gates, who makes Microsoft a household name all over the world. Steve Jobs who is well known for his innovations. iPod which is the most carried gadget by young population.

Technopreneurship is not a product but a process of synthesis in engineering the future of a person, an organization, a nation and the world. In a digital, knowledge based society, strategic direction or decision-making processes will be demanding and complex. This requires tertiary level and professional development programs and training to produce strategic thinkers who will have the skills to succeed in a dynamically changing global environment. Traditional education programs, however, lack the methodology to transform today’s students into creative, innovative, and visionary global leaders who understand the importance of technopreneurship.

While Steve Jobs' innovations at Apple have inspired gadget-makers the world over, his personal flair and creative spark also gave rise to a silver screen character, a pirate of sorts, a pioneer, a rebel of Silicon Valley.

Success is what dreams are made of. Success is about making it in life. Fast cars, expensive penthouses, designer labels—in other words, high material viability is the new success mantra. Yet we see large hordes of people demanding to do more than that by trying to find a common denominator for success. No longer weighed in terms of tidy bank balances, success is now regarded as all-inclusive quotient of material, emotional and spiritual gratification. Belying Alvin Toffler`s apocalyptic cry against capitalism and urbanization, success does not remain merely a socially abrasive economic phenomenon in a highly competitive world. Today success represents a holistic and positive attitude to life.

No doubt that Steve Jobs is the heart and soul of the Apple organization. But that is not unusual. Many successful organizations are built around strong personalities and executives with vision. Many people have sought to understand Jobs, a complicated but brilliant man whose flaws and idiosyncrasies played out alongside his genius and foresight. Walter Isaacson’s new biography (authorized by Jobs before his death), sheds some light on his thought processes, visions, insight, and philosophy.

Steve Jobs’ behavior was often eccentric, even off-putting. A control freak, so driven by perfectionism that he couldn’t choose home furnishings, he also had poor hygiene and thought that his vegan diet meant he could go days without bathing. Although a billionaire, Jobs rarely shared Apple’s profits or participated in philanthropy like his peer Bill Gates. In the end, he put off surgery to remove a tumor for nine months, which may have allowed his cancer to spread and ultimately contributed to his death in October 2001 at 56 years old.

The man who helped make Apple a household name could also be tactless in interpersonal relationships. Job’s inability to hide his opinions or soften their delivery manifested itself in “a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, and show he was smarter,” according to Isaacson, who says that Jobs was “rough on people.” This did not exclude family, friends, or employees, which led to strained relationships with Jobs’ children and staff alike. His perfectionism struck fear into the heart of Apple’s employees, who tried desperately to please him, and he raged against competitors who he thought had stolen his ideas. Isaacson’s book notes, “Driven by demons, Jobs could drive many around him to fury and despair.”

Yet despite considerable personal flaws, Jobs was an undeniably successful inventor, visionary, and business leader who raised three struggling companies (including Pixar) to Fortune 500 status. At the time of his death, Apple had more cash than the federal government. What about Jobs, and the way he ran his company, contributed to this astronomical success?

Steve Jobs’ beautiful designs were the beginning of every point of experience. What a lot of people did not realize was that Apple was not just about computers. It was about designing products and designing marketing and it as about the positioning. Steve Jobs looked at things from the perspective of what the user’s experience going to be. The user experience has to go through the whole end-to-end system.  Steve Jobs has no focus on groups. Steve said: ‘How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ He believed that showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go because it was just too big a leap. He was also a person that believed in the precise detail of every step. He was methodical and careful about everything - a perfectionist to the end. he believed that the computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an outrageous idea back in the early 1980's because people thought that personal computers were just smaller versions of bigger computers. That's how IBM looked at it. Some of them were early game machines, which were very simple and played on televisions. But Steve was thinking about something entirely different. He felt that the computer was going top become what he called "the bicycle for the mind." It would enable individuals to have this incredible capability that they never dreamed of before. It was not about the game machines. It is not about big computers getting smaller. He was a huge vision.

On the other side of the coin, Steve Jobs also has his own failures. Jobs’ enormous number of failures: the Apple III computer–the first PC built by Apple from the bottom up rather than as a hobbyist project–was so poorly designed that the company advised owners to pick it up and drop it a few inches whenever it stopped working. The Lisa, a personal computer that, if fully equipped, would have cost almost $20,000 in today’s money, sold very poorly (no surprise) and lost a bundle for Apple.

Early Macintosh computers were slow, balky, lacked the color graphics that even the Commodore Vic-20 had, and broke far too often. (John Sculley, the CEO Jobs brought to Apple, pushed him out over the Mac’s initially lackluster sales.) Even a few products created after Jobs’ triumphant return to Apple flopped: Apple TV hasn’t caught on. The NeXT-like Apple G4 Cube (a beautiful piece of industrial design) also failed on the market. Apple, despite decades of trying, has never made much of a dent in the applications software market. (Does anyone, anywhere, use Apple’s Pages word processor?) These are not just a few scattered failures: I’d estimate that roughly half of the major ventures Jobs engaged in simply didn’t pan out.

         Of course, Jobs was a huge success overall. But the magnitude of his failures–and his ability to recover from all of them–probably teaches at least as many lessons as the dizzying heights of his overall success.

2. How do you see yourself as a technopreneur?

A technopreneur is the one who is brave enough to operate, to manage, to own and take the risk of operating any legal form of business through the aid of technology known to man, the one who manages all the factors of production to carry on with production. But as time pass by, the purview of the word “technopreneur” changed automatically and became a comprehensive word that signifies a lot of different aspects and forms of business.

Technopreneur essentially means someone who likes solving challenges in life by using technology and then creating a business out of it. I have always loved to apply technology in my own day to day life to make life simpler and hence the passion towards making a business out of it. But one thing to be noted is, while doing all this keeping the user perspective in mind is a really important factor, advances and innovation in technology should make life simpler for the end user instead of making it even more complex. The best example of it would be Google, with all complex algorithms and crawlers running in the background, the user simply has a textbox and a button to interact with to answer his queries, how simple… isn’t it?

Technopreneurs use technology to do something new or invents new devices and then makes a business from selling these new things. As a learner of information technology, I have this vision of making my own technology that every individual could benefit. Technology as we all know is the extension of our human capability, in order to satisfy our needs or wants.

Technology superstars have had their moment on the world stage, but with the global crisis showing no signs of easing it’s time for policy innovators to bring in radical thinking. Technopreneurs think profits not jobs. Successful as they may be, technopreneurs are in the business of making money and not solving socio-economic problems. Profits are good for the pockets of shareholders and governments, but will not necessarily translate into new jobs, at least not in the short run. The objectives of the technopreneur and the public are not always aligned. Profit-making and job creation are increasingly at odds. The technopreneur is not without vested interests. This rise of the celebrity technopreneur as a model for success has been at the expense of the policy innovator. The latter seems to have retreated to think-tanks and consultancy firms, preaching less to government and more to fan groups on social-media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The influence of policy innovators in solving major socio-economic challenges is increasingly diminished. Instead, politicians are seeking safety in the advice coming from successful individuals who enjoy credibility in the minds of the public.

For some, there are no special principles that make technopreneurship unique from entrepreneurship: Both regard innovation critical in remaining competitive in the marketplace, both regard management important to staying in control, and both view profitability as an important constraint that must always be satisfied lest the firm disappear into oblivion. The parameters of both technopreneurship and entrepreneurship are the same and the way I see it is that the term “technopreneurship” is redundant if not misleading (some people tend to only see the “technology” part and forget about the “entrepreneurship” part when the word technopreneurship is used). If a community wants to step up its technopreneurial know-how, what it needs to do first and foremost is learn and master the principles of entrepreneurship. Basically, if technologists wanted to venture or put up a business, then they should learn the principles of ‘entrepreneurship’ as the starting point (and they have to learn much more things along the way). Moreover, as ‘entrepreneurs’ with interests in developing and/or selling technologies, they should know the principles also of “product design and development”. Remember, the worth of products the technologists developed are always less than the value the market it created. An entrepreneur is not familiar with advanced technology. Often he/she did not have technical education and is therefore less comfortable with the technologies used in innovative products or sevices.

The entrepreneurs, compared to technopreneurs, are therefore less familiar with the processes of technological development and their characteristics, like time-consuming, uncertain, etc. Technopreneurship is indeed the same as entrepreneurship. But a technopreneur who has technical knowledge and skills for dealing with technology in business, has a great advantage compared to a ‘normal entrepreneur’.

In becoming a technopreneur, one must be flexible, visionary, practical and realistic. A flexible technopreneur can adapt to changing circumstances and recover from setbacks. One must have a vision of what he wants to achieve so that he is not distracted from his goal. Practical – being pointless to have ideas if they cannot   be executed. And lastly, being realistic, to know that most start ups fail and that in all probability he will fail. Moreover, being technopreneur, one must be romantic. Some one who will beat the odds and succeed. Do not be a loner. To succeed, you must be part of a team, the more number of productive and intelligent people, the higher the probability of success. Being a leader is a plus point. Someone who drives the team towards his vision but to succeed, one must also listen to his team members. For success and rewards to take place, do not be greedy. performance-oriented individual who wants results, yet he has to be mindful of the contributions of his team members and may have to make sacrifices to keep a winning team. And lastly, be discipline. One must manage himself and his team. Else, his team will lose focus, dissipating their energy by duplicating tasks, squabbling and straying down by alleys.

Success comes from attitudes. Accept all challenges in all things, have a desire to do things as best as possible, have a belief that everything can be done better, differentiate yourself from the rest, and challenge the norm.

How I wish I could create my own devices with the help of advanced technology. May it be an appliance, device, web-application, chips, etc. There are a lot of technologies nowadays. The technology industry provides the basis for chip production, information and communication systems, and computer systems. These companies serve as the developers and manufacturers of the products which drive the increasing efficiency and production of cell phones, computers, televisions, as well as other communication and information systems. It is a large industry with a vast growth potential, but it is also subject to sometimes volatile cycles, such as in the semiconductor industry. As chips continue to get smaller and globalization increases, demand for faster, more efficient technology will help drive the tech industry.

3. Would you take the same career path that Steve Jobs took? Why or why not? 

Steve Jobs was the ultimate tastemaster, but the Apple co-founder lived in surprising suburban ordinariness in Silicon Valley.

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series.  Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. During this period he also led efforts that would begin the desktop publishing revolution, notably through the introduction of the LaserWriter and the associated PageMaker software.

From at least the time that he was a teenager, Jobs had a freakish chutzpah. At age 13, he called up the head of HP and cajoled him into giving Jobs free computer chips. It was part of a lifelong pattern of setting and fulfilling astronomical standards. Throughout his career, he was fearless in his demands. He kicked aside the hoops that everyone else had to negotiate and straightforwardly and brazenly pursued what he wanted. When he got what he wanted – something that occurred with astonishing frequency – he accepted at his birthright.

If Jobs were not so talented, if he were not so visionary, if he were not so canny in determining where others had failed in producing great products and what was necessary to succeed, his pushiness and imperiousness would have made him a figure of mockery.

But Steve Jobs was that talented, visionary and determined. He combined an innate understanding of technology with an almost supernatural sense of what customers would respond to. His conviction that design should be central to his products not only produced successes in the marketplace but elevated design in general, not just in consumer electronics but everything that aspires to the high end.

As a child of the sixties who was nurtured in Silicon Valley, his career merged the two strains in a way that reimagined business itself. And he did it as if he didn’t give a damn who he pissed off. He could bully underlings and corporate giants with the same contempt. But when he chose to charm, he was almost irresistible. His friend, Heidi Roizen, once gave advice to a fellow Apple employee that the only way to avoid falling prey to the dual attacks of venom and charm at all hours was not to answer the phone. That didn’t work, the employee said, because Jobs lived only a few blocks away. Jobs would bang on the door and not go away.

For most of his 56 years, Steve Jobs banged on doors, but for the past dozen or so very few were closed to him. He was the most adored and admired business executive on the planet, maybe in history. Presidents and rock stars came to see him. His fans waited up all night to gain entry into his famous “Stevenote” speeches at Macworld, almost levitating with anticipation of what Jobs might say. Even his peccadilloes and dark side became heralded. His accomplishments were unmatched. People who can claim credit for game-changing products — iconic inventions that become embedded in the culture and answers to Jeopardy questions decades later — are few and far between. But Jobs has had not one, not two, but six of these breakthroughs, any one of which would have made for a magnificent career. In order: the Apple II, the Macintosh, the movie studio Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. (This doesn’t even include the consistent, brilliant improvements to the Macintosh operating system, or the Apple retail store juggernaut.) Had he lived a natural lifespan, there would have almost certainly been more.
        For Jobs, when you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Attitude is everything. If you think you can, you most certainly can. Success is not closeted within some kind of brick and mortar premises. It assumes the individuality of a complete act executed with perfection. Material achievements do not define life. We do not remember the sports stars for the products they endorse but the spirit of achievement they represent. In the abundance of positive attitude underlies the grandeur of a truly rewarding and rich life.

We never know, I may be taking the career path that Steve Jobs took. But we, as individuals have our own desires and dreams. If the day comes that I may be like Steve Jobs, I will forever be greatful for his contributions. With his attitude and principles, I may be like him soon.