Everyone today thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the
iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on. Yes, he
transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else
Jobs did.
Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and
Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and
were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient
RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product.
Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early
1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer —
which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail.
Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs
was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.
Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big
nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by
Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural
home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone,
iPad, and more.
For those who were paying attention to the computer industry
at the time, the unceremonious dismissal of Jobs from Apple (which was preceded
a few years earlier by the departure of his friend and co-founder Steve Wozniak
from day-to-day operations at the company) was something of a shock, and was
taken by some as the sign of a sea change in Silicon Valley. The days of the
geeks and the entrepenuers were over, it was said, and it was time for the
businessmen to take control. The Dot-com boom in the 90s, combined with the
fact that the new, more corporate leadership at Apple was largely letting the
company sit still while Microsoft, Intel, and Dell had the field virtually to
themselves, sort of put the lie to that. However, it wasn’t until Jobs returned
to Apple and, borrowing an idea from the guys at Napster, came up with a
revolutionary new way to sell and listen to music. And the rest was history.
Before that happened, though, Jobs had failed.
He didn’t seek a government bailout. He didn’t whine and complain, He just
moved on, and bided his time. The one thing that Schulz leaves out of his
history is Jobs’ role at Pixar, which started as a company that Jobs purchased
from George Lucas after he left Apple. That company revolutionized animation in
the movies, and on television, and it probably wouldn’t have existed but for
the failure of Lisa and Jobs’ departure from the company he founded.
