Steve Jobs is not an easy person towrite about, particularly at a time when journalists around the world are falling over themselves to laud the man, his vision, and his drive. From elevator anecdotes to his Stanford commencement address in 2005, virtually every aspect of his life and legacy are up for discussion. Jobs was successful enough that armchair historians and professional pundits will debate which of his creations was the most iconic/important/game-changing for years to come, but inventorying the Apple founder’s successes provides a relatively shallow mirror when it comes to examining his life. There’s more to be gleaned from Steve’s failures than his triumphs — and there are plenty to choose from.
By the early 1980s, the Apple II had made Jobs a multi-millionaire, but the founder’s fortunes quickly took a turn for the worse. His insistence on a fanless design for the Apple III (right) led to the system being labeled a lemon (Apple memorably advised users to drop the chassis from a height of several inches to reseat chips warped out of place by high internal temperatures).
He was kicked off the Lisa project and, in 1985, dismissed from Apple after repeatedly clashing with then-CEO, John Sculley.
In his 2005 Stanford address, Jobs said: “I really didn’t know what to do for a few months…. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.”
NeXTSTEP 1.0, circa 1989. Windows 3.0 is a year away (and pig-ugly by comparison)
Twenty years after the fact that may have been true, but Jobs struggled after leaving Apple. His second-company, NeXT, began life as a hardware developer, branched into software development, but ultimately failed to find a market for its own systems. Jobs was forced to shutter the hardware side of the business in 1993, laying off 300 of the company’s 540 employees. The company’s NeXTSTEP operating system was considered powerful and extremely capable. NeXT never succeeded commercially — the company struggled up to the Apple acquisition — but again, Jobs’ designs turned heads and won significant critical acclaim.
This beta screenshot from NeXTSTEP 4.0 is from 1996
Apple’s decision to bring Jobs back in 1996 and announce that his NeXTSTEP OS would serve as the basis for a future operating system was anything but a ringing endorsement. At the time, Apple’s market share had collapsed to single digits, and the company was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Within a year of his return, the first generation of attention-grabbing iMacs was born and the company’s decline began to slowly reverse itself.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Jobs’ designs survived to become legends because he cantankorously stuck to his guns, even when doing so blew up in his face (the Apple III) or resulted in systems that didn’t catch on with consumers (the G4 Cube). Other system vendors reali ed that while the Cube’s high price, limited expandibility, and design flaws limited its specific appeal, plenty of potential customers were interested in compact systems that used a cubic form factor. Within a few years, the Cube was posthumously recogni ed as the progenitor of Small Form Factor (SFF) systems, which became tremendously popular in the early 2000s and continue to be sold today.
The iPod’s clickwheel and form factor were based on a line of pocket transistor radios manufactured by Braun in the 1960s
The original MacBook Air debuted to middling reviews and a general consensus that anyone who didn’t absolutely need an ultra-thin, ultra-portable system would be better off with a MacBook or a MacBook Pro. It wasn’t a failure, but it traded a significant amount of performance and battery life in order to fulfill Jobs’ vision of what an elegant ultra thin-and-light system ought to be and relied on CPU throttling to keep itself from overheating.
Three years later, SSDs, lower-power processors, improved integrated graphics, and a drastically lower price have transformed the MacBook Air from an “only if you really need it” dubious purchase to the progenitor of what Intel hopes is an entirely new species — the ultrabook. Jobs didn’t invent the first thin-and-light notebook, but the Air’s design caught the eyes of OEMs and individuals alike.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
It’s impossible to discuss Jobs’ failures in the consumer electronics segment because there haven’t been any — but consider this. On October 22, 2001 — the day before the first iPod was announced — Steve Jobs was arguably a one-hit wonder two decades past his prime. His attempt to create a high-end workstation and software developer company had been rescued by the same company that threw him out the door. While he’d successfully restored Apple to profitability, the dot-com recession and scaling problems with the PowerPC-based G4 CPU had hit the company hard. The Cube — a system that showcased his own design preferences more than any other Apple system then built — had cratered.
When Jobs said he never did what he did for the money, he wasn’t kidding. Would we have thin-and-light notebooks, portable music players, and powerful smartphones if Jobs had given up? Unquestionably. Would they be as easy to use, intuitive, and simple? Probably not. Jobs’ relentless drive to create products that were beautiful on every level sometimes resulted in devices too expensive or esoteric to catch hold, but that same attention to detail kept eyes focused on the man’s work, whether it financially succeeded or not.
He could be tyrannical. He was fired from the company he founded. His insistence on form over function literally cost Apple hundreds of millions of dollars. If he’d given up, we’d remember him as a has-been visionary who was in the right place at the right time and made a few really good investments in digital animation. Instead, he’s remembered as a unique individual who, in his own words, “made a dent in the universe.”
“Click. Boom. Ama ing!” How Jobs’ failures changed computing
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