In 1978 Apple moved into its new headquarters in Cupertino, CA with already more than 250 employees. .
In 1989. Apple went public with 4.6 million shares which were sold out within minutes. However, the release of the Apple III led to disappointing sales due to an upcoming competition with IBM and Microsoft in the corporate computing market. .
In 1984, an in-fighting between the CEO John Sculley and Steve Jobs escalated and ended up that Steve Jobs left Apple to found the NEXT software. The next years Apple released many products and became very successful in producing high quality computers. Nevertheless, it also released a bunch of products that flopped, like the Newton which was an early version of a tablet-computer. This development led to a three-year-record-low-stock price and major financial losses in 1997. After Apple had acquired Jobs' Next software company one year before, Jobs was then named CEO again. Today this can be seen as a milestone in Apple's history. Since then Apple has been growing enormously in the following 15 years. Furthermore, Jobs began to cooperate with Windows in developing software for Apple's operating systems and eventually launched the iMac.
The iPod was launched in 2001 and turned out to be a huge success, especially combined with the iTunes store which opened in 2003. Even though the iPod was by far not the first Mp3-Player on the market, it offered a unique usability and design to its customers and made it easy to download digital music contents due to its linkage with the iTunes store. .
In the next years, Apple identified the usability within its products as a key competence, which set its way to be an outstanding technology producer. In order to fit with this new development in 2007 Apple Computer, Inc. became Apple Inc. because computer were no longer the company`s singular focus. The same year Apple was able to launch the iPhone which was a great success, since it was the first mobile phone only using a touch screen as well as it was the first version of what people are considering as a smartphone today.
