8 ms·

Pity about the headline. There’s not a word in the text about revenge or about Jobs’ feelings about Sculley at all—though those are well detailed elsewhere. Ar

by brians 7y ago

Pity about the headline. There’s not a word in the text about revenge or about Jobs’ feelings about Sculley at all—though those are well detailed elsewhere. Are there other stories of people who had one fortune and went on to make another? With $100M, it would be pretty tempting to go back to the fruit commune.

drawkbox 7y ago
Jobs didn't have anything personal against Sculley most likely, but it was revenge on the takeover from product/engineering/creative people to sales/marketing/MBA control at Apple. [1] Steve Jobs knew the problem when the product people get driven out from the decision making, the coup d'état from the value creators to the value extractors. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM
- Angostura 7y ago
  That must have been why Jobs immediately shut down lots of innovative engineering-lead projects such as OpenDoc.
  - tarsinge 7y ago
    Sorry if I don't get the sarcasm but OpenDoc was the typical big entreprise sales/marketing driven project, with corporate partnership and architectural concepts having way more weights than engineering and usage realities. This was nowhere near the original Apple ADN and was more of a typical enterprise IBM services project. It's a no brainer it was shut down given Steve vision for Apple.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      OpenDoc came straight from the Advanced Technology Group. It was definitely engineering led.
      - AlanYx 7y ago
        The initial OpenDoc architecture came out of ATG, but by mid-1992 it had been folded into the AIM Alliance, a shared Apple, IBM and Motorola group. IBM contributed SOM, which was architecturally very heavy/baroque. By 1996 OpenDoc was folded into the OMG umbrella and then it really became bogged down in design by multi-corporate consensus.
    - yardie 7y ago
      I know an engineer from the OpenDoc group. A genius at regex. OpenDoc used a shitload of regex behind the scenes.
  - eej71 7y ago
    Jobs provides a thoughtful answer here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
- scarface74 7y ago
  Well, looking at the history of Jobs in particular before he came back to Apple, I would say just the opposite. The Lisa, Apple ///, original Mac, and the NeXT were all failures because they didn’t get the importance of actually creating products that people wanted. Engineers seldom understand the needs of the broader market. The “Engineers” also gave you great stuff in the mid 90s like PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, and other products that no one wanted. As far as creative people - letting them take over gets you the trash can Mac Pro, iOS 7, and the MacBook keyboard. Engineers are infamous for not wanting to deal with pesky things like customers and usually don’t care whether their designs can lead to products that can be produced at scale. Apple would still be floundering without the “MBA types” like Cook who got operations under control and Schiller who was over marketing. Scully - the “sugar water salesman” - saved Apple the first time around after the missteps of Jobs. Even today you can look at Google to see what happens when you have great engineers but no leadership. They are still an ad business despite years of trying to diversify.
  - foobar_ 7y ago
    Unfortunately, programming is the middle ground between engineering and art. It's a dancing architecture. Because of this value-extractors and their thinking is borderline asine as seen in the case of crappy products in the dotcom bust and the recent wework comedy.
  - socialdemocrat 7y ago
    Kind of an attempt of rewrite of history there. Sure Steve Jobs did many stupid things and had to temper himself. But let us not forget that after he left Apple was on a never ending downward slope. It was when Steve Jobs came back and put product designers in the drivers seat that Apple actually became one of the worlds most valuable companies. I have seen this over and over again. Where I am from an Apple reseller was first started by enthusiasts and made it big until MBA types took over only caring about the short term bottom line. They killed the company because customers stopped having faith in the sales people having their interests at heart. It was all about selling you maximum amount of stuff. They got kicked to the curb by a new upstart mac reseller where the owners really cared about the product and customers enjoying their Mac experience, not just getting money. The problem with the MBA style guys is that don't really see the value of anything. They just see money. That can only take you so far.
- leoc 7y ago
  Jobs' personal falling out with Sculley is well-documented, not least in the Isaacson bio. Now I suspect there were also hard policy disagreements behind Jobs' departure which haven't got enough attention (I think that NeXT is probably very close to what Jobs had wanted to do as an initiative inside Apple, while the more conservative Macintosh II "Big Mac" is what Apple did instead) but the personal drama was quite real.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And you see why they had to get rid of Jobs. The Next hardware was a failure.
    - leoc 7y ago
      That's a hard hypothetical question, and the failure of NeXT to sell hardware doesn't give that much insight into the answer. What Apple (near-)ideally needed in the mid-to-late '80s was probably both a high-end Macintosh offering and an in-house NeXT: ideally on the same hardware like the early OS X-compatible Macs, though that was probably not a hard necessity in the early stages. Whether Jobs could have been made to go along with that mixed approach is unclear. However we do know that without Jobs Apple flailed around with Taligent/Pink for so long that it almost destroyed the company while NeXT shipped before 1989. (Why Apple didn't just choose to get serious about A/UX is another mystery.) What really seems to have hurt NeXT, at least as a Macintosh competitor or successor, was lack of support from the important Macintosh ISVs. An in-house Apple NeXT would have had a much better shot at charming or squeezing the ISVs into supporting the platform, though again there are questions such as when or if a never-fired late-'80s or early-'90s Jobs would have gone along with something like Carbon. Similarly the Apple branding and imprimatur would have helped to reassure purchasers who were leery of jumping ship to an independent NeXT. By contrast the high cost of NeXT hardware was probably not a critical problem, at least for the NeXT as a next Macintosh: Macintosh IIs cost about the same as equivalent NeXT systems. And in any case NeXT's cost problems seem to have been partly due to the expense of its own, gold-plated manufacturing operation, something even Jobs would not have replicated at an Apple-internal NeXT. The independent NeXT was also hindered by the legal agreements and legal actions between it and Apple. Finally, it also faced increasing pressure to turn a profit at a time when Apple was highly profitable and would have been able to treat an in-house NeXT as a vital strategic investment in its future.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
iseanstevens 7y ago
He did go back to the fruit commune ;)
hkmurakami 7y ago
>Are there other stories of people who had one fortune and went on to make another? David Duffield, Eli Broad,
leesec 7y ago
>Are there other stories of people who had one fortune and went on to make another? Musk, several times over.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  The jury's still out on Musk. I wouldn't be surprised if incumbent automakers beat Tesla to dominate the electric car market or the space launch sector dries up, and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyperloop. Which isn't to say he didn't show the world that you can build an electric car with Lithium ion batteries that looks better than an Prius.
  - mcny 7y ago
    > The jury's still out on Musk. I wouldn't be surprised if incumbent automakers beat Tesla to dominate the electric car market or the space launch sector dries up, and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyper-loop. I would consider it Tesla’s and Musk’s ultimate success if/when the whole auto industry moved away from internal combustion engine. iirc this is how musk defines his own success as well.
    - headmelted 7y ago
      I also think the notion that Tesla is going to go away over night when Volkswagen “gets there” is nonsense. Homework: 1. Use an infotainment system from an “old guard” car maker. 2. Use Android Auto, CarPlay or the Tesla dash. 3. Repeat 1. So much of the experience of your car is terrible because it’s an afterthought to these companies. They hire people to tick a box at the least expense possible. I drive a Nissan Leaf. The build quality is pretty good. The battery life isn’t spectacular but it wasn’t particularly expensive either, and it’s all I need... But it’s no Tesla.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Carmakers should just give up on the infotainment system and simply provide a docking bay for your phone. Last week I rented a car. I gave up on the inscrutable infotainment system and just used my phone, with it flopping around the car because there was nowhere to fix it in place. Edit: the phones are not just better, they are constantly being improved, and the car system stays static. The phones also cost next to nothing compared with replacing a broken system in your car.
ycombinete 7y ago
Surely Elon Musk?
WalterBright 7y ago
You could say Gates made 3 fortunes. The first was with BASIC on microcomputers, then it was DOS, and then 32 bit Windows. While this was all with the same company, most microcomputer houses failed the transition to DOS, and the DOS powerhouses failed the transition to 32 bit machines. Microsoft has since made another transition to the internet, one that many failed at.
- enitihas 7y ago
  Selling basic most likely didn't get them a fortune though. DOS was the real moneymaker, and Windows, had its success derived from DOS. They did make a successful transition to Applications though, at a time when Lotus 1-2-3 was making a killing and Lotus was the biggest personal computer software company. The cloud transformation too is likewise big, quite possibly securing Microsoft the company for the long run, but Gates is not involved in day to day any more for MSFT.
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
    They won by making a good Office. The "standard" at the time was Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and dBase III. Lotus's suite included AmiPro as a word processor, and while it did WYSIWYG layout like nobody's business, it wasn't really ready for any document-heavy work (legal, etc.). Approach wasn't half bad, though. WordPerfect offered Quattro Pro as a spreadsheet and Paradox as a database, but it was defintely a bunch of applications in a box rather than an office suite. Word had the advantage of the move to Windows and WYSIWYG - WordPerfect for Windows (and WP6 for DOS in WYSIWYG mode) meant nearly as big a change as moving to Word did, so n o loss there. The Excel crew had gone way out of their way to make everything 1-2-3 compatible. And Access was less wacky than Paradox, so the dBase croud didn't miss Borland all that much. None of the Office apps were, by themselves, at the top of the game at the time, but they were all good enough... and they worked and felt as if they were all of a piece.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Microsoft made a lot of money from MS Basic back in the day, it was the standard Basic for most machines long before MS-DOS. This mattered because it effectively made software portable between machines regardless of what OS it ran on. An MS Basic program written on a Commodore machine would run fine on an Atari, a Superbrain, TRS-80, Apple II or later an MS-DOS machine. As a result Microsoft was a major player in the microcomputer software space years before MS-DOS.
josu 7y ago
Jack Dorsey. Most of the PayPal mafia.
jdswain 7y ago
Depending on how you measure it, it could be up to 4 fortunes: Founding Apple. Pixar. NeXT? Apple the second time. I'm not sure if you'd count NeXT as a fortune, it looks like he got something a little under $40m in Apple shares, still not bad.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- eloisant 7y ago
  Apparently most of his fortune came from Disney (because of Pixar).
  - jdswain 7y ago
    Yep, that was what finally made him a billionaire. Probably Apple phase 2 well surpassed that by the end, but I think the first fortune is the most important Apple 1. Millionaire by 21 I think.
mongol 7y ago
Niklas Zennström made a fortune from Skype, twice. First by selling it to Ebay, then be acquiring it back and then selling it to Microsoft.
- simonh 7y ago
  And Kazaa before that, although I don't know how much he made out of it, then Rdio. All based on the same core P2P discovery, peering and negotiations protocols.
chongli 7y ago
Jim Jannard made a fortune on Oakley sunglasses and then later went on to found RED digital cinema cameras, almost singlehandedly destroying the film cinema camera business in the process.
xenospn 7y ago
David Cook. Started an oil company, took it public, then left and started Blockbuster.
- agustif 7y ago
  Then got f* by p2p and piracy on movies, which killed blockbuster way before netflix et amazon prime, etc became a thing lol
dhbanes 7y ago
Bob Parsons
joosters 7y ago
Keynes? He did lose his first fortune, but went on to make another. Also possibly Jesse Livermore, who made many fortunes but also kept on losing them.

by brians 7y ago

drawkbox 7y ago

Jobs didn't have anything personal against Sculley most likely, but it was revenge on the takeover from product/engineering/creative people to sales/marketing/MBA control at Apple. [1] Steve Jobs knew the problem when the product people get driven out from the decision making, the coup d'état from the value creators to the value extractors. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM

Angostura 7y ago
That must have been why Jobs immediately shut down lots of innovative engineering-lead projects such as OpenDoc.
- tarsinge 7y ago
  Sorry if I don't get the sarcasm but OpenDoc was the typical big entreprise sales/marketing driven project, with corporate partnership and architectural concepts having way more weights than engineering and usage realities. This was nowhere near the original Apple ADN and was more of a typical enterprise IBM services project. It's a no brainer it was shut down given Steve vision for Apple.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    OpenDoc came straight from the Advanced Technology Group. It was definitely engineering led.
    - AlanYx 7y ago
      The initial OpenDoc architecture came out of ATG, but by mid-1992 it had been folded into the AIM Alliance, a shared Apple, IBM and Motorola group. IBM contributed SOM, which was architecturally very heavy/baroque. By 1996 OpenDoc was folded into the OMG umbrella and then it really became bogged down in design by multi-corporate consensus.
  - yardie 7y ago
    I know an engineer from the OpenDoc group. A genius at regex. OpenDoc used a shitload of regex behind the scenes.
- eej71 7y ago
  Jobs provides a thoughtful answer here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
scarface74 7y ago
Well, looking at the history of Jobs in particular before he came back to Apple, I would say just the opposite. The Lisa, Apple ///, original Mac, and the NeXT were all failures because they didn’t get the importance of actually creating products that people wanted. Engineers seldom understand the needs of the broader market. The “Engineers” also gave you great stuff in the mid 90s like PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, and other products that no one wanted. As far as creative people - letting them take over gets you the trash can Mac Pro, iOS 7, and the MacBook keyboard. Engineers are infamous for not wanting to deal with pesky things like customers and usually don’t care whether their designs can lead to products that can be produced at scale. Apple would still be floundering without the “MBA types” like Cook who got operations under control and Schiller who was over marketing. Scully - the “sugar water salesman” - saved Apple the first time around after the missteps of Jobs. Even today you can look at Google to see what happens when you have great engineers but no leadership. They are still an ad business despite years of trying to diversify.
- foobar_ 7y ago
  Unfortunately, programming is the middle ground between engineering and art. It's a dancing architecture. Because of this value-extractors and their thinking is borderline asine as seen in the case of crappy products in the dotcom bust and the recent wework comedy.
- socialdemocrat 7y ago
  Kind of an attempt of rewrite of history there. Sure Steve Jobs did many stupid things and had to temper himself. But let us not forget that after he left Apple was on a never ending downward slope. It was when Steve Jobs came back and put product designers in the drivers seat that Apple actually became one of the worlds most valuable companies. I have seen this over and over again. Where I am from an Apple reseller was first started by enthusiasts and made it big until MBA types took over only caring about the short term bottom line. They killed the company because customers stopped having faith in the sales people having their interests at heart. It was all about selling you maximum amount of stuff. They got kicked to the curb by a new upstart mac reseller where the owners really cared about the product and customers enjoying their Mac experience, not just getting money. The problem with the MBA style guys is that don't really see the value of anything. They just see money. That can only take you so far.
leoc 7y ago
Jobs' personal falling out with Sculley is well-documented, not least in the Isaacson bio. Now I suspect there were also hard policy disagreements behind Jobs' departure which haven't got enough attention (I think that NeXT is probably very close to what Jobs had wanted to do as an initiative inside Apple, while the more conservative Macintosh II "Big Mac" is what Apple did instead) but the personal drama was quite real.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And you see why they had to get rid of Jobs. The Next hardware was a failure.
  - leoc 7y ago
    That's a hard hypothetical question, and the failure of NeXT to sell hardware doesn't give that much insight into the answer. What Apple (near-)ideally needed in the mid-to-late '80s was probably both a high-end Macintosh offering and an in-house NeXT: ideally on the same hardware like the early OS X-compatible Macs, though that was probably not a hard necessity in the early stages. Whether Jobs could have been made to go along with that mixed approach is unclear. However we do know that without Jobs Apple flailed around with Taligent/Pink for so long that it almost destroyed the company while NeXT shipped before 1989. (Why Apple didn't just choose to get serious about A/UX is another mystery.) What really seems to have hurt NeXT, at least as a Macintosh competitor or successor, was lack of support from the important Macintosh ISVs. An in-house Apple NeXT would have had a much better shot at charming or squeezing the ISVs into supporting the platform, though again there are questions such as when or if a never-fired late-'80s or early-'90s Jobs would have gone along with something like Carbon. Similarly the Apple branding and imprimatur would have helped to reassure purchasers who were leery of jumping ship to an independent NeXT. By contrast the high cost of NeXT hardware was probably not a critical problem, at least for the NeXT as a next Macintosh: Macintosh IIs cost about the same as equivalent NeXT systems. And in any case NeXT's cost problems seem to have been partly due to the expense of its own, gold-plated manufacturing operation, something even Jobs would not have replicated at an Apple-internal NeXT. The independent NeXT was also hindered by the legal agreements and legal actions between it and Apple. Finally, it also faced increasing pressure to turn a profit at a time when Apple was highly profitable and would have been able to treat an in-house NeXT as a vital strategic investment in its future.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

iseanstevens 7y ago

He did go back to the fruit commune ;)

hkmurakami 7y ago

>Are there other stories of people who had one fortune and went on to make another? David Duffield, Eli Broad,

leesec 7y ago

>Are there other stories of people who had one fortune and went on to make another? Musk, several times over.

dehrmann 7y ago
The jury's still out on Musk. I wouldn't be surprised if incumbent automakers beat Tesla to dominate the electric car market or the space launch sector dries up, and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyperloop. Which isn't to say he didn't show the world that you can build an electric car with Lithium ion batteries that looks better than an Prius.
- mcny 7y ago
  > The jury's still out on Musk. I wouldn't be surprised if incumbent automakers beat Tesla to dominate the electric car market or the space launch sector dries up, and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyper-loop. I would consider it Tesla’s and Musk’s ultimate success if/when the whole auto industry moved away from internal combustion engine. iirc this is how musk defines his own success as well.
  - headmelted 7y ago
    I also think the notion that Tesla is going to go away over night when Volkswagen “gets there” is nonsense. Homework: 1. Use an infotainment system from an “old guard” car maker. 2. Use Android Auto, CarPlay or the Tesla dash. 3. Repeat 1. So much of the experience of your car is terrible because it’s an afterthought to these companies. They hire people to tick a box at the least expense possible. I drive a Nissan Leaf. The build quality is pretty good. The battery life isn’t spectacular but it wasn’t particularly expensive either, and it’s all I need... But it’s no Tesla.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Carmakers should just give up on the infotainment system and simply provide a docking bay for your phone. Last week I rented a car. I gave up on the inscrutable infotainment system and just used my phone, with it flopping around the car because there was nowhere to fix it in place. Edit: the phones are not just better, they are constantly being improved, and the car system stays static. The phones also cost next to nothing compared with replacing a broken system in your car.

ycombinete 7y ago

Surely Elon Musk?

WalterBright 7y ago

You could say Gates made 3 fortunes. The first was with BASIC on microcomputers, then it was DOS, and then 32 bit Windows. While this was all with the same company, most microcomputer houses failed the transition to DOS, and the DOS powerhouses failed the transition to 32 bit machines. Microsoft has since made another transition to the internet, one that many failed at.

enitihas 7y ago
Selling basic most likely didn't get them a fortune though. DOS was the real moneymaker, and Windows, had its success derived from DOS. They did make a successful transition to Applications though, at a time when Lotus 1-2-3 was making a killing and Lotus was the biggest personal computer software company. The cloud transformation too is likewise big, quite possibly securing Microsoft the company for the long run, but Gates is not involved in day to day any more for MSFT.
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  They won by making a good Office. The "standard" at the time was Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and dBase III. Lotus's suite included AmiPro as a word processor, and while it did WYSIWYG layout like nobody's business, it wasn't really ready for any document-heavy work (legal, etc.). Approach wasn't half bad, though. WordPerfect offered Quattro Pro as a spreadsheet and Paradox as a database, but it was defintely a bunch of applications in a box rather than an office suite. Word had the advantage of the move to Windows and WYSIWYG - WordPerfect for Windows (and WP6 for DOS in WYSIWYG mode) meant nearly as big a change as moving to Word did, so n o loss there. The Excel crew had gone way out of their way to make everything 1-2-3 compatible. And Access was less wacky than Paradox, so the dBase croud didn't miss Borland all that much. None of the Office apps were, by themselves, at the top of the game at the time, but they were all good enough... and they worked and felt as if they were all of a piece.
- simonh 7y ago
  Microsoft made a lot of money from MS Basic back in the day, it was the standard Basic for most machines long before MS-DOS. This mattered because it effectively made software portable between machines regardless of what OS it ran on. An MS Basic program written on a Commodore machine would run fine on an Atari, a Superbrain, TRS-80, Apple II or later an MS-DOS machine. As a result Microsoft was a major player in the microcomputer software space years before MS-DOS.

josu 7y ago

Jack Dorsey. Most of the PayPal mafia.

jdswain 7y ago

Depending on how you measure it, it could be up to 4 fortunes: Founding Apple. Pixar. NeXT? Apple the second time. I'm not sure if you'd count NeXT as a fortune, it looks like he got something a little under $40m in Apple shares, still not bad.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
eloisant 7y ago
Apparently most of his fortune came from Disney (because of Pixar).
- jdswain 7y ago
  Yep, that was what finally made him a billionaire. Probably Apple phase 2 well surpassed that by the end, but I think the first fortune is the most important Apple 1. Millionaire by 21 I think.

mongol 7y ago

Niklas Zennström made a fortune from Skype, twice. First by selling it to Ebay, then be acquiring it back and then selling it to Microsoft.

simonh 7y ago
And Kazaa before that, although I don't know how much he made out of it, then Rdio. All based on the same core P2P discovery, peering and negotiations protocols.

chongli 7y ago

Jim Jannard made a fortune on Oakley sunglasses and then later went on to found RED digital cinema cameras, almost singlehandedly destroying the film cinema camera business in the process.

xenospn 7y ago

David Cook. Started an oil company, took it public, then left and started Blockbuster.

agustif 7y ago
Then got f* by p2p and piracy on movies, which killed blockbuster way before netflix et amazon prime, etc became a thing lol

dhbanes 7y ago

Bob Parsons

joosters 7y ago

Keynes? He did lose his first fortune, but went on to make another. Also possibly Jesse Livermore, who made many fortunes but also kept on losing them.