The Press Reacts To Steve Jobs' Departure — in 1985

harrymcc writes "After reading a ton of stories about Steve Jobs' decision to step down as Apple's CEO, I turned the clock back and read a bunch about the first time he did so — unwillingly — in 1985. Some observers thought his departure would have little impact on Apple; others seemed to believe it was a great idea. And the Washington Post's T.R. Reid figured out that an Apple that chose to eject Jobs would be a profoundly lesser place."

Comments

R.I.P.

[Lisias]

Apple, not Jobs.

(I really hope for the best for this guy.)

Let's not forget ...

[MacTO]

The Steve Jobs who was forced to leave Apple in the 1980s is not the same Jobs who returned to Apple in the 1990s. By the time of his return he was a much more experienced businessman, having not just Apple under his belt but NeXT and Pixar.

We should also remember that the 1990s were a very tough time for Apple, even with Jobs as the CEO. He undoubtedly had acquired a lot more experience during that phase. He also had a fair bit of luck on his side. (IIRC, the iMac was basically handed to him from the previous guard and no one saw the iPod for what it would become when it was introduced.)

The tone of the article seems to be that the departure of Jobs was the downfall of Apple, but it may have been the saviour of Apple. And even though we can probably agree that Jobs brought Apple back from the dead, he certainly had some helping hands.

Re:Let's not forget ...

[dgatwood]

Would Copland have saved the day if it was released?

Definitely not. Copland was an interesting piece of software, and certainly much more modern than the 8 nanokernel (and it might even have been more modern than parts of Mac OS X, even—I'm not really sure), but the OS itself is not the whole story. In fact, it's arguably the least important part of the story.

Mac OS X wasn't just a replacement for Mac OS. It was also a usable UNIX. Copland certainly wouldn't have drawn the Linux/UNIX crowd the way NeXT did, and I think that had a real impact on the perception of Apple in the enterprise.

This, in turn, drove the intense popularity of Apple's laptops among the geek crowd (when other manufacturers' laptops weren't doing nearly as well). In an era when Apple was only three or four percent of the market, you could walk into a UNIX/Linux conference and half of the laptops would be Macs. Why? Because geeks wanted a usable laptop running some sort of UNIX variant, and running a laptop in Linux generally sucked at the time.

That popularity, in turn, caused all those geeks to recommend these things to their friends and families, which played a significant part in the rapid decline of desktop computing in favor of mobile computing in the first part of the last decade. The rapid shift towards laptops, in turn, was the reason Apple gave up on PowerPC and transitioned to Intel hardware—a transition that made Apple's computers immensely more popular almost overnight. How much of this was actually driven by Mac OS X being UNIX, I couldn't begin to guess, but I'm certain it was nonzero.

Also, NeXT brought with it functioning code for i386, and a functional set of developer tools (the GNU toolchain). The Intel transition would have been a lot harder with Copland, not to mention the whole ARM thing on iOS. Can you imagine if Apple were building iOS using CodeWarrior?

Finally, NeXT brought with it a lot of new blood. Apple doesn't usually acquire companies for technology. It acquires companies because it wants their employees. From what I hear from people who worked at Apple in that era, the NeXT merger created all sorts of culture clash initially, but in the end, it resulted in a much stronger company than either company could have become on its own.

And, of course, the merger brought back Steve Jobs. You can argue all you want about whether Steve actually made decisions that no one else could have or would have made, but ultimately that's not what matters. What matters is that one of the guys who founded the company was back at the helm. Psychologically speaking, I think that did more to get Apple back on its feet than anything else, including the NeXT merger, including any single decision that Steve made, including even the advent of the iPhone.

Jobs' less publicized skill ...

[perpenso]

R.I.P. Apple, not Jobs. (I really hope for the best for this guy.)

Most people are familiar with Jobs' skill with respect to product design and marketing. However he possess a less publicized skill that is at least as important than the preceding, probably more important. He assembles teams of really exceptional people to implement his ideas. Once upon a time that would have been the Mac design team. Today that would be Apple's executive leadership. He is handing things off to an extremely capable senior management team.

He is not handing Apple over to a sugar water salesman brought on board to provide adult supervision, he is handing Apple over to his hand pick proteges.

Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

He is not handing Apple over to a sugar water salesman brought on board to provide adult supervision

LOL. Too right. And that's what their (retarded) board thought they needed, circa (IIRC) 1985ish. I remember reading the preface to a Playboy interview of him from that era, where the author was warned, "Be prepared, you're about to be hyped by the best". And he was/is. Karl fucking Rove wakes up in the middle of the night sobbing, wishing he could spin a story the way Steve Jobs can.

He assembles teams of really exceptional people to implement his ideas

He assembles teams of really exceptional people to brutalize into doing exactly what he wants; luckily, he's usually 98% correct.
FTFY

Fact is, Steve must be dying (and KNOWS it) or he wouldn't be letting go of the reins, because he's THAT much of a control freak. Apple without him is going to become Ford without Henry, IBM without a Watson. NOT, not, not, a Microsoft without a Gates; Bill has never been a visionary, just a sharky cutthroat businessman. Steve, much as people can hate on him, is the real deal, he can look into the future, like an Edwin Land, (if you don't know who he is, shame on you, turn in your geek card) and CREATE a market around a new idea of his of a product/market that never existed before he dreamed it up. Sure, the haters will claim the Lisa was really the Xerox Star, but can they hand-wave away the iPod, the iPhone? No, I didn't think so. Much as the whole industry wants to hate on him, Steve has done more than Woz, Gates, Bushnell and Kay together to make the world we live in happen.

Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ...

[adamofgreyskull]

Fact check. Sorry if this makes me a "hater" or a "hand-waver" but there *was* a market, however small, for portable mp3 players before the iPod. The Diamond Rio and the Creative NOMAD are the most memorable fore-runners. Similarly, there was already an almost 10 year-old market for "smart" phones before the iPhone came along, satisfied by offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Or didn't you know that? Maybe you need to turn in your geek card? ;)

Jobs steered Apple in the right direction; he recognised areas where they could excel and perhaps because of that you can claim he's a visionary, but he didn't invent (or even "dream up" the concept of) portable mp3 players or smart-phones, just directed his employees to produce marketably "better" ones.

Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Yup. And there was a market for "horseless carriages" before Henry Ford standardized them and started mass-producing them. And Maxwell had a pretty good handle on electromagnetic propagation before Marconi got involved. If you can't accept the notion that Jobs had a revolutionary, not (just) evolutionary, effect on mp3 players and cell phones, then you simply haven't been paying attention. I'm hardly one to be worshiping at the "Steve Jobs is our god, lead us where thou wilt" altar, I, at least, am willing to give credit where it's due. I'm not necessarily a fan of his, but I have to admit, "Steve, he's a visionary; Woz, he's an engineer".

Re:Jobs' less publicized skill ...

[Grygus]

I was an early adopter in the mp3 player scene and I don't think it's at all an exaggeration to say that iPod revolutionized the market. I owned a Rio PMP 300 and later upgraded to a Creative Nomad Jukebox, but it wasn't until I got one of the earlier iPod models that I thought mp3 players had really arrived. The others were first, yes, and they did work, but very few people were all that interested until the iPod combined a small form factor and a large capacity. The interface was pretty cool at the time, too. Shame they were so expensive, but it didn't keep them from changing the way most people (and some manufacturers) thought about portable music.

Again, you're right that smartphones do not owe their existence to the iPhone, but when the iPhone released there was nothing else quite like it; now virtually the entire market resembles the Apple product. You need a special sort of denial to say that the device wasn't highly influential. Smartphones as they exist today very obviously owe a great deal to the iPhone. Android in particular seems unlikely ever to have been designed had the iPhone not been released and been such a market success.

Re:Brilliant idea!

[icebike]

Under Tim Cook, pinch hitting for Jobs, Apple did very very well.

Look people, this is not 1985 any more. The bean counters that had control of the company back then are no longer in control, (one has to ask who put them in control in the first place back then...).

This a different Apple, and one that does not rely on Jobs.

Its time for him to move out of the day to day control.

In spite of the rampant fanboyism Jobs is hurting Apple more than he is helping it these days. The ever tightening lock down, the clutching greed to get 30% of everything that comes on to the device, the total restructuring of the Ebook industry to serve Apple's interest and kill off the First Sale Doctrine, and the total paranoia about petty patent claims is seriously damaging Apple's brand. They have become what they sought to destroy in their Iconic Superbowl Commercial. All of that was Jobs.

Under Cook significant new features were added to IOS, long blocked by Jobs until he had to have his "hormonal imbalance" operated upon. New application models (like in-app purchases) were allowed into the App store, since shut down by Jobs.

Frankly this all things to Chairman Mao nonsense is getting a little tiresome. Cult figures are so over done. All we are missing here is the Che Guevara tee shirt of Steve. Oh, wait, too late.

Re:American can be said

[Billly Gates]

Do you even remember how Apple was viewed before 1997?

I brought a Mac magazine to school and was teased and laughed at. I was excited about the PowerPC processor and mentioned it was twice as fast. Basically the view was Apple sucked PCS RULE Apple was DYING bla bla. Only losers used macs. Cool kids used Windows and Compaqs etc. Here on slashdot I clearly remember Apple being made fun of as a DYING company using a DYing FreeBSD OS with the BSD is dying trolls reposted being modded up.

Steve Jobs created the iMac and changed that. He was very ballsy in creating MacOSX when it was so hurt on cash. He created the IPOD and almost created an mp3 player and music store monopoly overnight!

Today cool kids in highschool and college use Macs and the poor ones use wintels. Seriously Apple was a bad name for all but art majors in the 1990s. It was so opposite of today and no one could fix this.

Sure most CEO's are useless and stroke their egos and play golf and read email all day for waaaayyyy too much money. Steve Jobs is the only one I can think of who is well worth his salary. Apple went through 5 CEO's as it died slowly to all unstoppable Microsoft. Steve Jobs is a great CEO and is one of a kind.

look at people buying kaspersky at best buy

[decora]

i dont know if its 'stupidity', but i would call it 'ignorance' and 'lack of education'.

thats what allows best buy to scam so many and defraud so many. and it is wrong.

the objection to the iPod is somewhere along those lines. the main thing it did was integrate with iTunes ---- well, we had this site called mp3.com way, way before itunes,, and it got shut down by legal and corporate assholes for no good reason, based on the fraudulent legal system that doesn't allow you to claim that you own the music that you rightly bought and payed for (but somehow allows record industry executives to claim the own music that they stole and robbed from the artists who created it).

Jobs was somehow able to convince the corrupt music industry executives to let him send content over the internet. That's what the Ipod was about. Great for him... but many geeks view that as a consequence of his ability to schmooze and do smoke-filled-room negotiations... not as any kind of product innovation.