What Steve Jobs Did In Between Getting Fired And Rehired at Apple
“The most basic question about Steve’s career is this: How could the man who had been such an inconsistent, inconsiderate, rash, and wrongheaded businessman that he was exiled from the company he founded become the most venerated CEO who revived Apple and created a whole new set of culture-defining products that transformed the company into the most valuable and admired enterprise on earth and that changed the everyday lives of billions of people from all different socioeconomic strata and cultures?
The answer wasn’t something Steve had ever been all that interested in discussing. While he was an introspective guy, he was not inclined to retrospection: ‘What’s the point in looking back,’ he told me in one email. ‘I’d rather look forward to all the good things to come.’”
Apple was described as a dying manufacturer of computers in the 1990’s, so how did it become one of the most valuable companies in the world today?
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli make the argument in their book Becoming Steve Jobs, that the company’s success was intertwined with the personal growth that Steve Jobs experienced.
Steve realized at one point that he had to make the most of his strengths as a person and limit how much influence his weaknesses had over his life. In addition to managing his companies, he had to learn to manage himself and his emotions.
The unseen power working in the background were his spiritual beliefs, as a Buddhist he took on the philosophy that everything is constantly changing yet we should still seek enlightenment and perfection. The authors note that the constantly improving beauty of Apple products are a manifestation of Jobs’ meta-physical journey.
In The Beginning
In 1955, Steve Jobs was born. He was a son to an american graduate student and a Syrian PhD candidate, he was given up for adoption but his biological parents insisted that the adoptive parents must be university educated.
Steven was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class San Francisco couple who did their best to give him a good start, even moving to an area with better schools.
It turned out that Mountain View would be the perfect environment for his growing mind, this place was the center of an unfolding electronics and telecommunications industry, the seedbed of Silicon Valley.
Here he meet Scott “The Woz” Wozniak, who was a far more skilled than Jobs when it came to computers, he had even constructed his own “personal” computer, it didn’t need access to a mainframe and had a keyboard and a monitor.
When Jobs saw this, he immediately realized the market potential of such a device, and the two quickly formed a company to build and sell what would eventually be called the Apple I.
The units were built in the garage of Jobs’ parents with the help of friends and family. 200 were sold in total.
The Apple II was released in 1977 and cost $1,295 (about $5,000 in today’s money), this was the first personal computer that worked right out of the box. Jobs made it a point to not have it look industrial, opting for a soft beige casing.
It was a hit despite only having one program on it and sold 500 units a month.
By 1978, the explosive growth had given them a sales figure of $8,000,000.
A year later it was $47,000,000.
A year after that in 1980, they made a whopping $118,000,000.
The Apple II was in production for 10 years and sold 6 million units. Jobs worked on the Apple III during this time and wanted it to revolutionize the personal computer industry.
Instead of having it be a next-step evolution of Apple II, the Apple III was bloated with too many features and a poor user interface.
Apple III flopped.
Up until that point, Jobs believed he was unbeatable so this was quite a shock to him. He had a reputation for being moody and unbearable as a boss.
It was at the age of 30 when he was forced out of Apple, the company he himself founded.
The NeXT Big Thing
Not long after, Jobs came up with a new idea: engineers, scientists, and academics all needed more powerful computing than what was offered on personal home computers, he also knew that it would be useful for those types to have computers with the capability to network with one another.
NeXT was born.
Jobs quickly got to work and had a state-of-the-art factory built, he also decided to have a higher production cost on his NeXT computers because he wanted the casing to be magnesium instead of plastic (this included a paint job).
The fact that he didn’t outsource his production to another country and chose to have fancy design features shows how much Steve Jobs thought he knew better than everyone else on how to do things.
But because of his design decisions, the NeXT computer ended up costing $10,000 a unit which was 3 times more than the originally predicted $3,000.
This price was too expensive for universities (their target customer) to buy, especially with cheaper competition now offering the same capabilities.
The NeXT factory was built to produce 600 units in a day but never pushed out more than that in a month. Unfortunately, Microsoft refused to develop software for the NeXT, and this plus the loss of it’s target market effectively suspended the company.
Despite all this, IBM wanted to purchase the NeXT computer’s operating system “NeXTSTEP” to use on their own PC’s and to provide competition against Microsoft’s dominance of software.
This could’ve been just the thing to save NeXT but the deal fell through because Steve Jobs wanted more money and had always expressed his hate toward IBM.
Schlender and Tetzeli say at this time in his life, he was an “equal opportunity abuser,” anyone who disagreed with him was yelled at from top executives to lower staffers, and even external people who his company partnered with.
By 1991, all the people who believed in Jobs and left Apple with him to start NeXT had quit the company. They were sick of his overspending, micro-management, ridiculous demands, and childish outbursts.
He clearly had a lot more growing to do.
Toy Story Saves Steve Jobs
While at NeXT, Jobs bought a tiny graphics computing company from George Lucas for $5,000,000 , he thought the company’s mastery of 3D graphic manipulation would be useful to NeXT somehow.
Jobs for whatever reason, kept putting his money and resources into this company without much return.
The company was named Pixar.
Ed Catmull, the head of Pixar expressed to Steve Jobs that it was his dream to create a full-length computer animated movie.
Jobs decided to take on the role of promoting the movie and made a deal with Disney to fund the huge project.
Toy Story would go on the change the entire film industry.
Pixar went public in 1995, one week after Toy Story’s release and Jobs (who owned 80% of the stock) became a billionaire.
But it wasn’t just the money that made him happy: he was also now part of a very creative team; working on something that he was passionate about, and he learned so much from Catmull’s style of management.
“Without Pixar, there would be no second act at Apple.”
At the same time Jobs was having success with Pixar, NeXT had become a financial mess. Apple was also in the dire straits, it was losing money and struggling to maintain it’s relevancy.
It became clear to Apple that NeXT’s operating system would be the best fit for the company. Apple purchased NeXT and all of it’s intellectual property.
Jobs was now in the awkward position of being intimately connected to his old company but not in the role of running it. Although when Apple’s then current CEO Gil Amelio was fired, Jobs was reluctant to take on the position.
Jobs now had a family, and he was very involved in Pixar. Returning to the topmost leadership position at Apple would introduce unnecessary risk and stress.
After thinking about for a while, Jobs came to the conclusion that he still loved Apple and thought it was worth trying to save, even if he failed.
In 1997, Steve Jobs was again the CEO of Apple and immediately began to set a dramatic transformation into place. He shrank down Apple’s product line to two desktops and two laptops.
Putting a stop to many of Apple’s promising technologies, he made the new mission of Apple to create a handful of great products and sell them to the high-end consumer and business markets.
Jobs learned that he shouldn’t try to make every product a revolutionary breakthrough, but make something that works amazingly and that people love to use.
The Revival of Apple
In the late 90s’ every desktop computer looked similar to one another, this created the potential for more personal home computers, ones that were focused on the user’s experience and not just the stats like speed, or processing power.
Around this time Steve Jobs became close with Jony Ive, a british designer that help Jobs rethink his ideas about home computing.
It was Ive’s idea for the iMac to have it’s iconic clear round plastic casing, you could see the inside of the machine and the computer didn’t look like anything else that was available at the time.
It wasn’t faster or more powerful than anything else but people really wanted it.
Apple made a comeback as a genuinely personal and creative computer company. It sold 12,000,000 iMacs within one year.
After only a couple of years after facing bankruptcy, Apple was back from the brink.
But they weren’t out of the woods just yet, the September earnings report was still considered poor and even with Jobs’ help the sales on all products were shrinking.
Fortune magazine was quoted as calling Steve Jobs “the graying prince of a shrinking kingdom.”
Around this time, Microsoft was worth over $600,000,000,000 and if you had said that the next 10 years of personal computing would be led by Apple, you would have been laughed out of the room.
Apple was a financially struggling company who only made niche products for creatives.
Apple’s success from the early 2000s and on, came as a shock to everyone. From the technology industry, the public, to even Apple employees themselves.
While the iMac gave Apple it’s comeback, it was the products that came after that cemented it’s place at the top. Starting with the iPod, then iTunes, followed by the iPhone and iPad, these not only made Apple cool, they made it rich as well.
Steve Jobs told Schlender, “we followed where our own desires led us and we ended up ahead.”
Apple soon became the leader in digital music distribution thanks to the iPod and iPhone. These devices also combined the previously separate technologies of telephones, computing, and touch screens.
Schlender writes that Jobs had “a belief that the intersection of the arts and technology could lead to amazing things.”
The technologies had all existed before hand but it was Jobs who realized that they could all be combined into a single almost mystical object and help their customers days become more productive and enjoyable.
In Conclusion
In 2003 Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and in 2011 he died.
Most of the stories that are written about Steve Jobs place emphasis on the “half-genius, half-asshole” aspect of his personality.
I believe this is the best Steve Jobs biography because unlike Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs (which was released immediately after Jobs’ death and has remained the most popular ever since), Brent Schlender knew Steve personally and didn’t just focus on his glamorous Apple years.
Schlender makes it a point to write mostly about Jobs’ years between his firing and rehiring at Apple, when he started NeXT and Pixar, and molded himself into a better person.
The Jobs that Schlender knew was “more complex, more human, more sentimental and even more intelligent” than he was given credit for.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you want to truly become. Everything else is secondary.”
- Steve Jobs
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Originally published at http://forgefinancialfreedom.com on July 23, 2019.
