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)
Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
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.
Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs.
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".
> Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs.
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.
It's true Canion got fired by the board of Compaq, but before that he ran the company such that it was the fastest to a billion in revenue in history.
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.
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)