4 ms·

This is a little revisionist. They ousted him because he was costing too much money and not delivering (or likely to deliver) results (vis-a-vis Macintosh). No

This is a little revisionist. They ousted him because he was costing too much money and not delivering (or likely to deliver) results (vis-a-vis Macintosh). Nobody in a position to fire Jobs cared that he treated employees like dirt, and that isn't anyone's version of the story. What they cared about that he was producing a competing product to the Apple II line which was the company's bread and butter at the time, that would be too expensive for the markets they were targeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Macintosh_and_the_%221984%22_commercial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Macintos...

shadowgovt 6y ago
That's definitely half of it. But companies are sometimes willing to work with someone who has a bad idea but is a good person. When they're costing the company millions and are also an asshole, canning them isn't a hard call.
leoc 6y ago
It seems clear (not an expert) that Jobs wasn't fired because the Mac was unpopular at Apple. It seems the main thing that got him fired was, roughly, an internal conflict about what the next step after Macintosh should be: the Macintosh II Apple actually shipped, or something like the NeXT https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-precursor-mac-ii-next-cube/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... . (The Macintosh IIs were very expensive, easily in the same ballpark as a NeXT Cube system, and very profitable for Apple.) There was certainly also personal ill-will between Jobs and Scully and maybe some other senior people, and likely also a lack of trust in his project management. But yes, all this probably had relatively little to do with his behaviour towards subordinates. It may in fact be the case that Jobs' became more caustic towards subordinates at NeXT than he had usually been in his first time at Apple.

shadowgovt 6y ago

That's definitely half of it. But companies are sometimes willing to work with someone who has a bad idea but is a good person. When they're costing the company millions and are also an asshole, canning them isn't a hard call.

leoc 6y ago

It seems clear (not an expert) that Jobs wasn't fired because the Mac was unpopular at Apple. It seems the main thing that got him fired was, roughly, an internal conflict about what the next step after Macintosh should be: the Macintosh II Apple actually shipped, or something like the NeXT https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-precursor-mac-ii-next-cube/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... . (The Macintosh IIs were very expensive, easily in the same ballpark as a NeXT Cube system, and very profitable for Apple.) There was certainly also personal ill-will between Jobs and Scully and maybe some other senior people, and likely also a lack of trust in his project management. But yes, all this probably had relatively little to do with his behaviour towards subordinates. It may in fact be the case that Jobs' became more caustic towards subordinates at NeXT than he had usually been in his first time at Apple.