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The End of Innocence at Apple: What Happened After Steve Jobs Was Fired

3 points by naish 18y ago

philwelch 18y ago
There's this huge, huge myth about Apple history. It's part of the myth of Steve Jobs, but it's more than that. It's the myth that Apple floundered because they lost Steve Jobs, and only succeeded because Jobs came back. There's an associated myth that every other Apple chief was incompetent and almost ran the company into the ground. That, too, is a myth. Between 1976 and 1985, Jobs was co-founder, and it's undeniable that gave him clout, but he wasn't the head of the company by any means. In the 80's his main job was running the Macintosh project (after being kicked off the Lisa project), not running the company. If Jobs wasn't fired from the Mac division, it's highly questionable whether or not Macs would ever have hard drives, fans, or expandable slots--in other words, whether they would have been a tenable computing platform at all in the mid-to-late 80's. Likewise, Jobs wasted a lot of money at NeXT on even more idiosyncratic hardware designs (the NeXT cube famously had a magneto-optical drive instead of a hard drive) and did, in fact, almost run NeXT into the ground before it recovered by making exactly the same mistakes he was fired from Apple for making. In the meantime, Sculley presided over Apple's most successful and profitable years. It's Sculley that positioned Apple as a high-margin niche provider, rather than taking the low-cost approach Jobs wanted. Apple stays in this position today, though largely because desktop OS market share is less fluid than it was in 1985. And it was even less fluid in 1997 when Jobs returned. Spindler presided over the PPC transition. Amelio, likewise, saved Apple. He managed to cut a lot of costs, did most of the negotiation on the famous Microsoft deal, hired Fred Anderson (who ran Apple's finances admirably for years even under Jobs), and managed to put together an emergency loan package that ended up saving Apple's cash crunch. Yes, he lost a billion dollars. But most of that billion was in one-time costs that, in the long run, saved money. (Some $400 billion of that was to buy out NeXT.) Jobs, since 1997, has been the CEO Apple needs. In 1985? Maybe if he was managed carefully enough he would have kept the soul of the company alive. But I think NeXT was an experience that gave Apple a better Steve Jobs, and his absence was far from the cause of Apple's troubles in the 90's.

3 points by naish 18y ago

There's this huge, huge myth about Apple history. It's part of the myth of Steve Jobs, but it's more than that. It's the myth that Apple floundered because they lost Steve Jobs, and only succeeded because Jobs came back. There's an associated myth that every other Apple chief was incompetent and almost ran the company into the ground. That, too, is a myth. Between 1976 and 1985, Jobs was co-founder, and it's undeniable that gave him clout, but he wasn't the head of the company by any means. In the 80's his main job was running the Macintosh project (after being kicked off the Lisa project), not running the company. If Jobs wasn't fired from the Mac division, it's highly questionable whether or not Macs would ever have hard drives, fans, or expandable slots--in other words, whether they would have been a tenable computing platform at all in the mid-to-late 80's. Likewise, Jobs wasted a lot of money at NeXT on even more idiosyncratic hardware designs (the NeXT cube famously had a magneto-optical drive instead of a hard drive) and did, in fact, almost run NeXT into the ground before it recovered by making exactly the same mistakes he was fired from Apple for making. In the meantime, Sculley presided over Apple's most successful and profitable years. It's Sculley that positioned Apple as a high-margin niche provider, rather than taking the low-cost approach Jobs wanted. Apple stays in this position today, though largely because desktop OS market share is less fluid than it was in 1985. And it was even less fluid in 1997 when Jobs returned. Spindler presided over the PPC transition. Amelio, likewise, saved Apple. He managed to cut a lot of costs, did most of the negotiation on the famous Microsoft deal, hired Fred Anderson (who ran Apple's finances admirably for years even under Jobs), and managed to put together an emergency loan package that ended up saving Apple's cash crunch. Yes, he lost a billion dollars. But most of that billion was in one-time costs that, in the long run, saved money. (Some $400 billion of that was to buy out NeXT.) Jobs, since 1997, has been the CEO Apple needs. In 1985? Maybe if he was managed carefully enough he would have kept the soul of the company alive. But I think NeXT was an experience that gave Apple a better Steve Jobs, and his absence was far from the cause of Apple's troubles in the 90's.