Apple’s Core

Second written case: Apple’s core

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1) Does Apple have a good founding team? Take into account the skills, goals and values of each founding member.

Apple Computer is definitely the most interesting cooperation between two extremely different persons.

Steve Wozniak, genius in electronics, human friendly, not focused on making money encounter Steve Jobs, funny, full of energy ready to become rich with Wozniak’s knowledge.

Steve Wozniak seems to be the kind man in this story. He grew up in Santa Clara, California. His father taught him honesty, extreme ethics. “I never lie even to this day,” said Wozniak. This sentence explains well what kind of model he followed when he grew up and why he became this extremely straight man.

Steve Jobs had a very different personality. He was very focused on money. The job in the mall is a good example to understand the differences between the two Steve. Wozniak found it a very fun job and Jobs said “No, it was lousy, we hardly paid anything for it.”

Wozniak had a very valuable knowledge in electronics. His goal was to give away the computers he designed, for free. He hoped people would be able to build their own computers from his design. He had a position at Hewlett-Packard, which had a very engineering-driven culture. He was passionate about it, and thought he would spend the rest of his life there.

Jobs found a way to make money out of Wozniak’s skills. He also found the firsts revenue streams and the firsts contracts. Wozniak was not able to sell his competences. He was extremely surprised when Jobs told him that he just had a $50,000 order.

Ron Wayne joined the company for two weeks. He had several interesting skills; he knew how to write down the legal agreements and a third partner would provide a tie-breaking vote in case Jobs and Wozniak became deadlocked over any decisions. The problem is that he was afraid of Jobs. In his opinion, Jobs was an absolute whirlwind and could not handle it because he...