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Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first. We could a

Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first. We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO

signatoremo 3y ago
> but he got very, very lucky first. Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes. Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)
- FullyFunctional 3y ago
  Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
  - jen20 3y ago
    The quote could equally have been about Pixar, another wildly successful company of which he was the CEO.
    - bart_spoon 3y ago
      And yet isn’t Pixar famous for their intensive, structured process for movie development?
      - JKCalhoun 3y ago
        Yeah, from what I've read Pixar's success seems to have had more to do with "management" getting completely out of the way.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    I'm not sure. The first success (Apple) may have been in large part right-place/right-time (and by right place: friend of Wozniak). But his second big success (Apple's rebirth) I kind of have to give Jobs all the credit. It looks as though none of the CEO's that came before Jobs could save the company the way Jobs seemed to single-handedly come back and do it. To be sure though he had wandered the desert for years and learned a lot of hard truths. That no doubt made him the capable decision maker he turned out to ultimately be in the end.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs. If it didn't happen, our business mythology today would full of tales about Jobs, the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego. The Steve from the Second Advent of Jobs was a dramatically improved version of him, seasoned in no small part by this "humilliation".
  - signatoremo 3y ago
    > Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs. Easy to say in hindsight. Canion, who was worshipped by the GP, also got fired by Compaq but never bounced back. Or may be that’s a testament to Jobs’s ability to learn and adapt. > the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego. I doubt it. Apple was Jobs’s number one priority, even to the detriment of its employees, including himself. He literally worked until his death. He has been labeled many things. Apple destroyer wouldn’t be one.
    - smackeyacky 3y ago
      It's true Canion got fired by the board of Compaq, but before that he ran the company such that it was the fastest to a billion in revenue in history. Nobody wants to remember the boring business IBM compatible market but not only did Compaq make the first 386 (redefining what a PC was) they also got the other manufacturers to rally around things like the EISA bus which abruptly stopped IBM's dominance of the PC standard and made a truly open market that not only swallowed PCs, but took the minicomputer industry out at as well and everything you have on your desktop and server room is still rooted in those seminal Compaq products. It was Eckhard Pfieffer who eventually screwed the pooch and put Compaq into HPs grasp. If Canion had been allowed to flesh out his strategy for lower cost PCs that might never have happened. Apple was always a 10% of the market sideshow until they made the iPhone.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  Getting Woz to design something for Atari he could take credit for was the first free pass.
kragen 3y ago
i am not a fan of jobs but i don't see how you can look at his career and see a string of failures. breakout, apple ii, lisa, macintosh, laserwriter, next, pixar, ipod, iphone, ipad. he was an asshole who cheated and abused other people to manipulate them into realizing his visions, but he manipulated them successfully. astoundingly successfully actually
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  In the 80s it was an astounding success with the Apple ][ then it all went to shit funded by that machine. He didn’t invent the LaserWriter. Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field. Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire computer business.
  - kragen 3y ago
    he didn't invent shit, he certainly didn't invent the apple ii, he didn't even invent the blue box he and woz sold! but he did force apple to do the adobe deal to ship the laserwriter even though it meant sinking a large chunk of cash into risky startup equity. i don't think apple's post-apple-2 jobs-driven trajectory in the 01980s (bringing guis, desktop publishing, vector graphics, and laser printers to the masses) can be fairly described as 'it all went to shit' in terms of jobs's goals. from the perspective of user freedom and empowerment, plausibly, and that improved dramatically when they kicked jobs out next didn't fall to pieces. it birthed the world-wide web, then merged with apple, replacing apple's then ceo, and provided the software stack that currently powers the macintosh line, ipod, iphone, and ipad. i can understand why you would describe next as a failure if it was 01996 and we were having this conversation on compuserve or fidonet, but in retrospect it seems obvious that next was at least the second most important software firm of the 80s and early 90s
    - xp84 3y ago
      I find this an interesting debate. I think both are true: NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever. NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.
duxup 3y ago
Failure is the best way to learn.
grecy 3y ago
> Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though Stephen King had his first book Carrie rejected 30 times. The author of Dr Seuss had his first book rejected by 27 different publishers. Walt Disney was fired from one of his first animation jobs. Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up.
- pdpi 3y ago
  > Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up. The flipside is that not everyone can afford to not give up. It's very easy to dimiss successful people as lucky without acknowledging the perseverance that goes into pushing through all the failures until you get a success, but it's also easy to dismiss people who never hit that success as lacking that perseverance.
  - grecy 3y ago
    Without a doubt people give up for a host of different reasons, but I don't actually think that is what we should focus on or is the key takeaway. The important part to focus on is not giving up.
  - adventured 3y ago
    It's an important point. In the broader context, most new businesses fail in relatively early stages due to running out of capital, ie time. Which is to say, most entrepreneurs fail due to running out of money. There is no doubt that there is a diminishing return factor that kicks in, but it would be interesting to see how many more success stories are produced if the runway is N longer (for each increment of capital, how many more successful outcomes are there). You'll see some cynical takes such that: well if an entrepreneur had a really great thing, they'd have no terminal money problem to begin with (just show it to a VC, insta check). That's pretty blatantly false however, as the capital equation is a whole 'nother skillset and luck/chance/network factor that goes to work for or against your efforts.
AlbertCory 3y ago
> We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s easily disproved by John Sculley, among others. Or you could look at all the PC companies that launched in the early 80's (Eagle Computer, looking at you). Or Digital Research. Or Lotus. Or WordPerfect.
WalterBright 3y ago
Apple in its early days nearly failed at every stage of its development. See "Return To The Little Kingdom" by Moritz. Jobs was a very quick learner, though. For example, he soon realized he needed outside management help. > We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Jobs saw opportunity where everybody else did not (including Woz). I worked at a company in the 70s that was far better positioned to develop an Apple-like computer, but utterly failed to see the opportunity. This was hardly unique.

signatoremo 3y ago

> but he got very, very lucky first. Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes. Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)

FullyFunctional 3y ago
Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
- jen20 3y ago
  The quote could equally have been about Pixar, another wildly successful company of which he was the CEO.
  - bart_spoon 3y ago
    And yet isn’t Pixar famous for their intensive, structured process for movie development?
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Yeah, from what I've read Pixar's success seems to have had more to do with "management" getting completely out of the way.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I'm not sure. The first success (Apple) may have been in large part right-place/right-time (and by right place: friend of Wozniak). But his second big success (Apple's rebirth) I kind of have to give Jobs all the credit. It looks as though none of the CEO's that came before Jobs could save the company the way Jobs seemed to single-handedly come back and do it. To be sure though he had wandered the desert for years and learned a lot of hard truths. That no doubt made him the capable decision maker he turned out to ultimately be in the end.
elzbardico 3y ago
Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs. If it didn't happen, our business mythology today would full of tales about Jobs, the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego. The Steve from the Second Advent of Jobs was a dramatically improved version of him, seasoned in no small part by this "humilliation".
- signatoremo 3y ago
  > Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs. Easy to say in hindsight. Canion, who was worshipped by the GP, also got fired by Compaq but never bounced back. Or may be that’s a testament to Jobs’s ability to learn and adapt. > the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego. I doubt it. Apple was Jobs’s number one priority, even to the detriment of its employees, including himself. He literally worked until his death. He has been labeled many things. Apple destroyer wouldn’t be one.
  - smackeyacky 3y ago
    It's true Canion got fired by the board of Compaq, but before that he ran the company such that it was the fastest to a billion in revenue in history. Nobody wants to remember the boring business IBM compatible market but not only did Compaq make the first 386 (redefining what a PC was) they also got the other manufacturers to rally around things like the EISA bus which abruptly stopped IBM's dominance of the PC standard and made a truly open market that not only swallowed PCs, but took the minicomputer industry out at as well and everything you have on your desktop and server room is still rooted in those seminal Compaq products. It was Eckhard Pfieffer who eventually screwed the pooch and put Compaq into HPs grasp. If Canion had been allowed to flesh out his strategy for lower cost PCs that might never have happened. Apple was always a 10% of the market sideshow until they made the iPhone.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
Getting Woz to design something for Atari he could take credit for was the first free pass.

kragen 3y ago

i am not a fan of jobs but i don't see how you can look at his career and see a string of failures. breakout, apple ii, lisa, macintosh, laserwriter, next, pixar, ipod, iphone, ipad. he was an asshole who cheated and abused other people to manipulate them into realizing his visions, but he manipulated them successfully. astoundingly successfully actually

smackeyacky 3y ago
In the 80s it was an astounding success with the Apple ][ then it all went to shit funded by that machine. He didn’t invent the LaserWriter. Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field. Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire computer business.
- kragen 3y ago
  he didn't invent shit, he certainly didn't invent the apple ii, he didn't even invent the blue box he and woz sold! but he did force apple to do the adobe deal to ship the laserwriter even though it meant sinking a large chunk of cash into risky startup equity. i don't think apple's post-apple-2 jobs-driven trajectory in the 01980s (bringing guis, desktop publishing, vector graphics, and laser printers to the masses) can be fairly described as 'it all went to shit' in terms of jobs's goals. from the perspective of user freedom and empowerment, plausibly, and that improved dramatically when they kicked jobs out next didn't fall to pieces. it birthed the world-wide web, then merged with apple, replacing apple's then ceo, and provided the software stack that currently powers the macintosh line, ipod, iphone, and ipad. i can understand why you would describe next as a failure if it was 01996 and we were having this conversation on compuserve or fidonet, but in retrospect it seems obvious that next was at least the second most important software firm of the 80s and early 90s
  - xp84 3y ago
    I find this an interesting debate. I think both are true: NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever. NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.

duxup 3y ago

Failure is the best way to learn.

grecy 3y ago

> Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though Stephen King had his first book Carrie rejected 30 times. The author of Dr Seuss had his first book rejected by 27 different publishers. Walt Disney was fired from one of his first animation jobs. Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up.

pdpi 3y ago
> Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up. The flipside is that not everyone can afford to not give up. It's very easy to dimiss successful people as lucky without acknowledging the perseverance that goes into pushing through all the failures until you get a success, but it's also easy to dismiss people who never hit that success as lacking that perseverance.
- grecy 3y ago
  Without a doubt people give up for a host of different reasons, but I don't actually think that is what we should focus on or is the key takeaway. The important part to focus on is not giving up.
- adventured 3y ago
  It's an important point. In the broader context, most new businesses fail in relatively early stages due to running out of capital, ie time. Which is to say, most entrepreneurs fail due to running out of money. There is no doubt that there is a diminishing return factor that kicks in, but it would be interesting to see how many more success stories are produced if the runway is N longer (for each increment of capital, how many more successful outcomes are there). You'll see some cynical takes such that: well if an entrepreneur had a really great thing, they'd have no terminal money problem to begin with (just show it to a VC, insta check). That's pretty blatantly false however, as the capital equation is a whole 'nother skillset and luck/chance/network factor that goes to work for or against your efforts.

AlbertCory 3y ago

> We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s easily disproved by John Sculley, among others. Or you could look at all the PC companies that launched in the early 80's (Eagle Computer, looking at you). Or Digital Research. Or Lotus. Or WordPerfect.

WalterBright 3y ago

Apple in its early days nearly failed at every stage of its development. See "Return To The Little Kingdom" by Moritz. Jobs was a very quick learner, though. For example, he soon realized he needed outside management help. > We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Jobs saw opportunity where everybody else did not (including Woz). I worked at a company in the 70s that was far better positioned to develop an Apple-like computer, but utterly failed to see the opportunity. This was hardly unique.