Steve Jobs almost kept Apple from inventing its most successful product – the iPhone
“Apple hit a market cap of $1 trillion on Thursday, becoming the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach the historic record,” Zameena Mejia reports for CNBC. “More than 40 years after [Steve] Jobs co-founded Apple, the late tech visionary continues to be revered for his successful years of leading the company and the 2007 introduction of the iPhone, one of the company’s most successful products.”
“But Jobs wasn’t always so confident the world-changing item would be a wise investment for the company. In The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, Motherboard senior editor Brian Merchant detailed how the smartphone came into existence and how even one of the most intelligent, powerful executives needed smart people to help him land at the right decision,” Mejia reports. Steve Jobs unveils iPhone“Jobs was a powerful source of inspiration, a fierce curator of good ideas and rejector of bad ones, and a savvy and potent negotiator,” Merchant told CNBC Make It last year, in an interview timed for the iPhone’s 10th anniversary. ‘But the iPhone began as an experimental project undertaken without his knowledge, became an official project at the prodding of his executive staff and was engineered into being by a team of brilliant, unfathomably hard-working programmers and hardware experts.'”
“Jobs had faith in a wide variety of talent, ‘from new blood to veteran hands,’ Merchant says. He notes that Jobs gave Scott Forstall — who would go on to create the iPhone operating system (iOS) — the ability to recruit anyone from the existing Apple staff for the new phone project,” Mejia reports. “Then Apple vice president Michael Bell reportedly sent Jobs a late-night email on Nov. 7, 2004, explaining why the company really should make the phone. Jobs called Bell immediately, and they argued for hours until Jobs finally relented, Merchant writes. When it became obvious that smartphones would become competitors to the iPod, Jobs changed his mind. ‘Okay, I think we should go do it,’ Jobs said.”
