BY ANY measure of business achievement, Steve Jobs was the most successful executive of his generation, possibly ever. Even more remarkably, Jobs did it his way and was far from the typically cautious chief executive of a massive US corporation, writes JOHN COLLINS

Apple, the company he co-founded in his adoptive parents’ garage in 1976, is now the world’s largest technology company, valued at $350 billion thanks to sales of iconic products like the iPhone and iPad of which Jobs drove the development.

In 1997, when Jobs was brought back into the fold at Apple as interim chief executive, it had just reported a record loss of $1.8 billion, was months away from bankruptcy and was considered an also-ran in the PC market, which was dominated by machines running Microsoft’s rival Windows system.

Having been effectively pushed out in 1985 after the first Macintosh computers failed to capture the public’s imagination, Jobs came back in a position of power.

The Apple board had sanctioned the purchase of Next, the high-end computer company Jobs had founded during his years in the wilderness, intending to use its technology to inject life into what had become a diverse and rather lacklustre line of products.

At that point, Apple could easily have become a footnote in the history of personal computing. Almost immediately, Jobs began to lay the foundations for the company’s later successes, although it was nearly another decade before investors began to buy into the vision.

In Silicon Valley in 1997, the open source software movement, which emphasised collaboration and sharing of information, was shaking up the computer industry. One of Jobs’s first actions was to cancel the licences of the so-called “clone” makers who built machines running the Macintosh operating system.

Rather than collaborating and letting others build products using Apple technology, Jobs wanted to control everything. That strategy, which gives Apple enviable net profit margins of over 25 per cent, means it designs the devices, the software that runs on them, the online destinations where customers buy music, videos and other content, and increasingly the physical stores where legions of Apple fans flock to get the latest innovations.

The debut of the iMac in 1998, an all-in-one translucent computer which, with its gaudy coloured casing, looked like a cast-off from a Star Trek set of the 1960s, was the first sign that the second coming of Jobs at Apple was going to change the industry. The company adopted the marketing slogan “Think Different” but in this case it was more a statement of intent.

Jobs and Apple weren’t happy with just revolutionising the computer industry. The debut of the iPod in 2001 signalled its intent to the music industry and the arrival of the iTunes store in 2003, the first mainstream legitimate digital music service, shifted the balance of power.

When U2’s Bono and The Edge turned up at one of Jobs’s legendary “Stevenote” product launches in 2004, record company executives must have realised they had helped create a major player in the music industry.

“Computer” was dropped from the company’s name in 2007 in the clearest signal yet that Apple planned to become a major player in the wider consumer electronics space. Within a few short years, Apple surged past the once-dominant companies such as Sony, Philips and Samsung.

Jobs boasted Apple had reinvented the telephone with the 2007 launch of the iPhone. It wasn’t the first smartphone by a long shot but its ease of use – despite Jobs’s insistence that it should have only one button – and innovative design made it an instant hit.

Half a million devices running Google’s Android software are activated every day, but the search engine gives the software away to the manufacturers. In contrast Apple sells 20 million iPhones a quarter. Not only does it extract a very favourable deal from the mobile networks that sell them, it knows that each of those devices are going to become a major source of revenue over their lifetime as their owners fill them with music, videos and apps.

Jobs and his team repeated the trick with the iPad, a product that is even more dominant in its space, despite a raft of competing tablets being rushed to market in its wake. Given Jobs’s day-to-day involvement at Apple, particularly on product design, a number of yet to be released products will have his fingerprints on them – including the iPhone 5.

Jobs was far more than just a businessman. During his hiatus from Apple, he funded Pixar, which is now part of the Disney empire. Originally a provider of computer hardware to animation studios, it got into production as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of its products.

Ultimately it ditched the hardware and the creators of Toy Story, The Incrediblesand Upwent on to win 26 Oscars while breathing life back into animated films.

Jobs also brought his interests from outside computing to bear on Apple. Having dropped out of Reed College after six months, he continued to sit in on lectures that interested him. Reed had one of the best calligraphy courses in the US at the time and the young Jobs became obsessed with typefaces and fonts.

When designing the first Mac, he put that knowledge to use and, as he pointed out at his Stanford University speech in 2005, Microsoft decided to copy that feature in Windows, thus bringing it to a wider world.

Jobs’s desire to have expressive fonts on the Mac was typical of his uncompromising views on design. He famously had no interest in doing customer research and preferred to design products that he would want to use himself. During the development of the iPhone, he reportedly refused to consider that it should have any more than a single button, even though several senior designers said it couldn’t be done.

Jobs wasn’t perfect. He ruled Apple with an iron fist, so much so that senior executives who shared the building as him would use the stairs rather than risk being stuck in a lift with the man.

While everyone remembers his successes, there were also failures such as the G4 Cube, a small square Mac which Apple sold for just two years. In typical Jobs style, he killed the product and moved on to the next thing. He clearly considered himself an outsider and encouraged the first Macintosh design team to call themselves pirates and fly a Jolly Roger flag over the building.

It’s a cliché that is used whenever anyone of note passes away, but in Jobs’s case it is safe to say that the technology industry will never see his like again.