We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s
Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO
Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes.
Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)
The first success (Apple) may have been in large part right-place/right-time (and by right place: friend of Wozniak).
But his second big success (Apple's rebirth) I kind of have to give Jobs all the credit. It looks as though none of the CEO's that came before Jobs could save the company the way Jobs seemed to single-handedly come back and do it.
To be sure though he had wandered the desert for years and learned a lot of hard truths. That no doubt made him the capable decision maker he turned out to ultimately be in the end.
If it didn't happen, our business mythology today would full of tales about Jobs, the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego.
The Steve from the Second Advent of Jobs was a dramatically improved version of him, seasoned in no small part by this "humilliation".
Easy to say in hindsight. Canion, who was worshipped by the GP, also got fired by Compaq but never bounced back. Or may be that’s a testament to Jobs’s ability to learn and adapt.
> the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego.
I doubt it. Apple was Jobs’s number one priority, even to the detriment of its employees, including himself. He literally worked until his death. He has been labeled many things. Apple destroyer wouldn’t be one.
Nobody wants to remember the boring business IBM compatible market but not only did Compaq make the first 386 (redefining what a PC was) they also got the other manufacturers to rally around things like the EISA bus which abruptly stopped IBM's dominance of the PC standard and made a truly open market that not only swallowed PCs, but took the minicomputer industry out at as well and everything you have on your desktop and server room is still rooted in those seminal Compaq products.
It was Eckhard Pfieffer who eventually screwed the pooch and put Compaq into HPs grasp. If Canion had been allowed to flesh out his strategy for lower cost PCs that might never have happened.
Apple was always a 10% of the market sideshow until they made the iPhone.
Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field.
Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire computer business.
next didn't fall to pieces. it birthed the world-wide web, then merged with apple, replacing apple's then ceo, and provided the software stack that currently powers the macintosh line, ipod, iphone, and ipad. i can understand why you would describe next as a failure if it was 01996 and we were having this conversation on compuserve or fidonet, but in retrospect it seems obvious that next was at least the second most important software firm of the 80s and early 90s
NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever.
NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.
it's hard to imagine what would have counted as a bigger success for steve jobs
rod canion redefined the entire computer business once: he made open platforms dominant for personal computers. steve jobs did it four times: in 01977 by converting personal computers from hobbyist machines to home appliances; in 01984 by making the wimp gui the dominant interaction paradigm; in 01998 by redefining personal computers from home appliances to fashion accessories; and in 02007 by replacing the open-platform wimp gui with non-end-user-programmable sealed prisons with multitouch and always-on mobile internet access
obviously none of these involved him inventing anything, and most of them are at best morally ambiguous, but certainly he set out to do each of those things and then successfully did them
Jobs was a very quick learner, though. For example, he soon realized he needed outside management help.
> We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s
Jobs saw opportunity where everybody else did not (including Woz). I worked at a company in the 70s that was far better positioned to develop an Apple-like computer, but utterly failed to see the opportunity. This was hardly unique.
Stephen King had his first book Carrie rejected 30 times.
The author of Dr Seuss had his first book rejected by 27 different publishers.
Walt Disney was fired from one of his first animation jobs.
Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up.
The flipside is that not everyone can afford to not give up.
It's very easy to dimiss successful people as lucky without acknowledging the perseverance that goes into pushing through all the failures until you get a success, but it's also easy to dismiss people who never hit that success as lacking that perseverance.
The important part to focus on is not giving up.
You'll see some cynical takes such that: well if an entrepreneur had a really great thing, they'd have no terminal money problem to begin with (just show it to a VC, insta check). That's pretty blatantly false however, as the capital equation is a whole 'nother skillset and luck/chance/network factor that goes to work for or against your efforts.
easily disproved by John Sculley, among others.
Or you could look at all the PC companies that launched in the early 80's (Eagle Computer, looking at you).
Or Digital Research. Or Lotus. Or WordPerfect.