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Steve Jobs coming back was not really a deciding factor. In retrospect Steve Jobs was essential to Apple’s success after taking over, but when the acquisition h
by philwelch 2y ago
Steve Jobs coming back was not really a deciding factor. In retrospect Steve Jobs was essential to Apple’s success after taking over, but when the acquisition happened, there was little reason to expect that. The conventional wisdom at the time was that Steve Jobs did a good job founding Apple and running the Macintosh project, but he wasn’t fit to run a company the size as Apple. NeXT, if anything, vindicated that impression with a string of high profile product flops. At the time of the acquisition, Apple was dying, and NeXT had spent over a decade and billions of dollars growing into a company that could, at best, hope to be acquired by a dying Apple.
The choice of NeXT over Be mostly came down to NeXTStep being a genuinely better operating system than BeOS in many ways as well as Gassee overestimating his own negotiating position. Steve Jobs managed to take over the company, but this was clearly not the intended outcome because almost all of the executives who were involved in the decision to acquire NeXT were fired in the process, and after Jobs took over he also forced almost the entire board to resign as well.
- lapcat 2y agoJobs also (in)famously sold all of the APPL stock that he received in the NeXT acquisition, saying that he had no faith in Apple leadership at the time. In retrospect, this sale cost Jobs a ton of money. Of course he ended up doing fine, mostly because of the Pixar acquisition by Disney.
- philwelch 2y agoYes, this was one of the moves in his coup against Amelio, and part of what led to Amelio being fired by the board, at which point Steve Jobs took over on an "interim" basis and promised to search for a new permanent CEO.
- SllX 2y agoNot quite. He sold his shares in 1985. I think technically it was all except one so he could still get investor reports, but that last part might be apocryphal. https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-in-apple-history-steve-jobs-prepares-to-take-on-apple https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-in-apple-history-steve-...
- lapcat 2y agoYou're looking at the wrong year. From 1997: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/steve-jobs-confirms-apple-stock-sale-2812791.php https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/steve-jobs-confirms-...
- SllX 2y agoOh, you know what? Good point. I forgot that the NeXT sale included a transfer of stock and wasn’t even thinking about it. I stand corrected!