What Apple’s Steve Jobs learned in the wilderness

The saga of Steven P. Jobs is so well known that it has entered the nation’s mythology: He’s the prodigal who returned to Apple in 1997, righted a listing ship and built it into one of the most valuable companies in the world.


But the Jobs of the mid-1980s probably never could have made Apple what it is today if he hadn’t embarked on a torment-filled business odyssey.


Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief executive of , overlooks this. In August, after the ouster of Mark V. Hurd as the chief executive of , Ellison said in an e-mail to The New York Times that the HP board had made “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired many years ago.”


Actually, the Apple co-founder wasn’t fired. Jobs was relieved of operating responsibilities in a company reorganization in May 1985. But he was still the company’s chairman. Apple was ailing: Sales of the Macintosh, introduced the previous year, were falling well below expectations; inventory was piling up; and the company seemed headed for its first-ever loss. In September 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple to start a new computer company he called Next.


Suppose Jobs had not left in 1985. Suppose he had convinced the Apple board to oust his nemesis, John Sculley, then chief executive and president. Under Jobs’ uninterrupted direction, would Apple have arrived at the pinnacle it has reached today, but 12 years earlier?

It’s hard to see how anything like that would have transpired. The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader – precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company profitable.


“I am convinced that he would not have been as successful after his return at Apple if he hadn’t gone through his wilderness experience at Next,” said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a technology consulting company.


Jobs began Next – which the company itself spelled as NeXT – with the intention of building a high-powered computer expressly for customers in higher education, giving students and scholars what he called “a personal mainframe.”


Advisers from universities told him that he should keep the price under $2,000. (The Mac was selling to colleges at a discounted price of only $1,000.) But the price of the Next machine when finally unveiled in 1988 was $6,500. On top of that, it was underpowered and the accompanying printer was an additional $2,000. When colleges and universities, not surprisingly, demurred, Jobs tried to sell to corporate customers by enlisting Businessland, then a big computer retailer, but the new price of $9,995 fared no better in that market.


Jobs’ lieutenants tried to warn him away from certain disaster, but he was not receptive. In 1992-93, seven of nine Next vice presidents were shown the door or left on their own.
Keywords:Apple,Steve Paul Jobs,NeXT