The Rise of Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. was originally a company that sold computers and motherboards hand-made by one of the three founders, Steve Wozniak. In 1976, Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Ronald Wayne created the start-up in the garage of Steve Jobs's house in California. Wozniak put together the units in the garage of a house on Crist Drive in Los Altos. The original Apple computer just a motherboard called the Apple I and only included RAM, CPU, and graphic capabilities. Businessman Mike Markkula provided the capital needed to turn Apple into a legitimate corporation. One of the founders, Ronald Wayne, sold his shares of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 per share. Today, those shares would be worth over $70b. During the first three years of business, Apple earned an annual growth rate of close to 550%. Apple saw enormous success and growth for the first 15 years of business with the creation of the Apple II, Apple III, and the Macintosh systems.

Apple was the company that products of equal quality as their competitors, but at lower costs. This became an issue when they released higher-end models. Those products did not sell well and Apple stock dive bombed as a result. Microsoft was doing so well at the time that Bill Gates was worried that the government would fine the company for being a monopoly. As a preventative measure, Gates invested $150m dollars in Apple in exchange for putting Microsoft office on Mac computers. At the same time, this created competition and made Microsoft less of a monopoly. Jobs took Gates’s investment and used the capital to produce the iMac which soon brought Apple’s stock back up. The iMac, in combination with other innovative products such as the iPhone allowed Apple to become the company it is today.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/history-of-apple-steve-jobs-mac-3606104/

http://www.smh.com.au/news/laptops--desktops/wozniak-tells-his-side-of-the-story/2006/09/28/1159337270259.html