Over the years we have seen many great companies rise to the top only to fall a few years later. These companies such as Dell, JC Penney, Blockbuster, Kodak, etc. all had good starts, but quickly lost their advantage. Apple Inc. could easily have been one of these failed companies, but was saved by a man named Steve. Steve Jobs created and saved one of the greatest companies of all time. On April 1, 1976, high school buddies Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple Computer. Throughout the two Steves' relationship, Wozniak (nicknamed Woz) had designed many electronic devices. He built computers and other random things, like an illegal device to make free phone calls. After seeing the Apple 1 computer made by Wozniak, Steve Jobs insisted that they market and sell the technology. While the Apple 1 didn't sell as well as they had hoped, its successor, the Apple 2, compensated by offering a smaller, more compact design and its own body. These first two computers were a good start for a company as young as Apple. After the success of Apple's first two computers, they began to gain momentum. In 1981, building on the success of their previous computers, Jobs and his team began work on the Lisa computer, "which would redefine personal computing." (apple-history.com) Shortly after, he was kicked out of the Lisa team and took over the "Macintosh" project. It was also around this time that Jobs recruited former Pepsi-Cola chairman John Sculley to come in and help Apple mature as a company. He didn't know that this man would cause his resignation from the company. “As the Macintosh announcement approached, Jobs went into hyperdrive. He has worked hard to bring developers middle of paper......t into professional environments on all Android phones. - Apple has the fastest adoption rate for mobile operating system updates. 80% of people with phones capable of running iOS 7 use it. - 16,500,000,000 songs have been downloaded from the iTunes Store. - Apple's computer software "OS X Mavericks" is almost at a 50% adoption rate. (bizjournals.com) Who can argue with such statistics? Works Cited on the History/Specifications of Each Apple Computer, Created 1996, Glen Sanford. 1996-2014 April 1, 2014 - April 21, 2014Statistics from www.bizjournals.comIssacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York, Simon and Schuster, 2011Kahney, Leander. Cult of Mac. San Francisco, No Starch Press, 2004 Lashinsky, Adam. Inside Apple. New York: Business Plus, 2013 Segall, Ken. Insanely Simple: the obsession that makes Apple successful. New York: Penguin Group, 2012