A Review on the Pirates of the Silicon Valley

Long ago, before Microsoft Windows Operating System existed, a tale of glory and downfall at Apple Inc. was already depicted.

Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak formed Apple Computer 1976 to market the Apple I, a computer circuit board that they had designed and built in Jobs’s garage in Los Altos, California. They scrapped their plan to sell the board alone when Jobs’s first sales call yielded an order for 50 units. They were, however, sold without monitor, keyboard, or casing. The company was incorporated in January 1977 by the charismatic Jobs, the meditative inventor Wozniak, and their new partner and chairman, Mike Markkula. Markkula brought credibility, maturity, engineering and product management experience, and an extremely broad-based knowledge of the business world, as well as investment cash of his own and contacts among Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. Markkula also recruited all of Apple’s outside board members and lured away managers from other major high-technology firms, including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and National Semiconductor.

It was in 1983 Apple introduced the Lisa, a personal computer designed for business use that incorporated a handheld mouse to select commands and control an on-screen cursor. The Lisa was followed in 1984 by the Macintosh personal computer, based on the 68000 microprocessor manufactured by Motorola. Like the Lisa, the Macintosh, also known as the Mac, incorporated a graphical user interface, which made the computer easy to operate for the novice user.

However, it was that time that Bill Gates was on loose. He befriended Steve Jobs in order to improved Windows Operating System. Due to this, sales of Apple dropped and Steve Jobs was fired as Apple's Chairman of the Board of Directors. But in 1996, he returned to Apple
as a part-time consultant and in 2000 Jobs accepted the role of permanent chief executive officer and dropped the word interim from his title.

It was depicted on this movie on how big dreams became a reality. Apple just started running business on the garage of Steve Job's house until it became a leading computer company in the world. It can also be drawn from this movie that in order for a business to succeed, risk should be taken. It's like as though everything is a gamble. Competition is always at hand so a company should keep on innovating and reuse other technology. "Keep your friends close, your enemies closer", this was a line said by Bill Gates. Quite true. In this world that's full of sham and drudgery, it is a must to befriend your enemies in order to keep up with them. However, I could not agree on what Steve Jobs did to the mother of his daughter and to his daughter. In reaching a goal, people who happened to be there must not be driven away and be sacrificed. How can you be happy when you had reached your goal but then only to find out that the people who had loved you are not on your side anymore?

Dreams are not impossible to reach but then prices are at stake. Sometimes we don't noticed that in reaching our dreams we had sacrificed important people in our lives. We had wrong others that are part of our success. Life is what we make as they say and so we must learn to live each day knowing that we did our best not to hurt anyone.