Globalization

 Jobs (2013)

Sometimes, ideas can change the course of history forever, but it takes a determined person to actually put it right to the test. This is exactly what we see in the movie Jobs which tells the remarkable story of Steve Jobs and the creation of Apple. Jobs dropped out of Reed College in Portland, OR and wanted to start a computer company with his friend Stephen Wozniak. They started tinkering with cricut boards and TV screens when lead them to creating the Apple I. Investors started to hear about Apple and Jobs kept inventing products that would "change the world." Today, I would argue that Apple is now a hegemony in the technology world and has since been valued at $2 trillion. While the film does leave out key details about Jobs' journey with the business, such as when Jobs started the failed company NeXT, it does give the audience quite a bit of insight on the company itself.

American Factory and First Cow and some similarities to Jobs. American Factory is about American and Chinese people working together at Fuyao, a glass making company. This factory used to be a General Motors plant where workers made a very good living with high wages, benefits, and safe working conditions. Since the plant was bought out by Chinese investors and has been converted into Fuyao, the American's are working for very low wages with not great benefits and very unsafe working conditions. The Americans and the Chinese workers often clash because both groups of people view work very different and hold different values. To compare to Jobs, there were multiple people who tore Jobs' ideas apart, said he wasn't a good investor, and said that he wouldn't change the world with his technology. Learning how to work with different kinds of people is a skill and some people are better at it than others. Jobs totally believed in his work and he knew that his technology would help people lives for the better. While some of his closest business partners didn't believe in him, a lot of other people around him did believe him and that's how he built such a successful company.

First Cow can also be compared to Jobs as well. First Cow is a story about 2 men wanting to make money and better themselves. This was when cows were first starting to be domesticated so those who were around the cow were wondering how this animal could produce food just by eating grass all day. The 2 men would milk the cow at night so the owner wouldn't see and then make doughnuts with the milk to sell at the market. Everyone was raving about the sweet dough since they have never tasted something so good before. This is very similar to when Jobs created the first at home computer. People were amazed that something that used to take up entire rooms can now sit at your office desk. While Apple computers weren't a huge hit at first, eventually with more tweaking and more product launches, Apple became the largest tech giant in the world.

Jobs (Roger Ebert)

Review: 'Jobs': Career highlights get in the way of human insights (Washington Post)