Obituary - Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and technology visionary

Industry visionary Steve Jobs dies after long battle with cancer

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has died aged 56 after a long battle with cancer.

Jobs started the company that went on to become the biggest in the tech industry along with his school friend, Steve Wozniak, in 1976, launching the first Apple computer the same year.

Apple’s early years laid the foundations for the company’s reputation for eye-pleasing design and slick user interfaces. Jobs’ trademark obsession with aesthetics helped cement the computer mouse and graphical user interface as standards for all modern personal computers.

But it was Jobs’ second stint at Apple that will provide a lasting legacy, leading one of the most remarkable corporate turnarounds in US business history. He transformed a tech company that was on its knees into one vying for the title as the world’s most valuable company.

Jobs had been booted out of Apple in 1985, after the company’s board grew weary of what it considered to be his uncompromising and bloody-minded approach to management.

Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, and was made chief executive the following year.

What followed was a breathtaking run of success, with Jobs widening Apple’s appeal by producing a string of consumer devices, from the iPod, to iPhone to finally the iPad, each redefined the market it entered.

Over the course of his leadership of Apple, there have been critics of Jobs’ approach, dismissing the products as over-priced toys and not serious business computers.

It was a criticism that Jobs himself was happy to take on the chin.

“We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk; our DNA will not let us do that,” he told analysts in 2008.

And while Apple’s personal computers are still relatively rare in most organisations, it is the new wave of consumer-focused devices that continue to redefine the enterprise IT landscape.

Products such as the iPhone and iPad have been at the vanguard of the "bring-your-own" or "buy your own" IT movement that is forcing IT leaders to re-evaluate what tools staff need to do their jobs.

But Jobs’ second stint at Apple was also dogged by illness. He was first diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004, a disease that led him to hand over the company reins in August 2011.

Tributes to Jobs have flooded in, including from industry rivals such as Bill Gates, who said: “The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.”

On news of Jobs' death, President Barack Obama said in tribute: “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."

Jobs is survived by his wife and four children.