Few dates in the industry fold back on themselves as neatly as this one. On 16 September 1985 Steve Jobs, thirty years old and the co-founder of Apple, resigned from it. On 16 September 1997, twelve years later to the day, he became its chief executive — interim, he insisted, for a while — and began the run of products that made Apple the most valuable company on earth.
1985: the exit
Jobs had recruited John Sculley from Pepsi in 1983 with the line about selling sugared water or changing the world. Two years later, with Macintosh sales below forecast and Jobs running the Macintosh division as a company within the company, the two fell out, the board sided with Sculley, and Jobs was stripped of operating responsibility in May 1985. In September he resigned, taking five Apple staff with him, and founded NeXT: a company to build powerful, beautiful workstations for universities and business. The NeXT Computer, a black magnesium cube, sold poorly and cost too much, but its operating system, NeXTSTEP, was a decade ahead — and in 1990 Tim Berners-Lee at CERN used a NeXT to write the first web browser and host the first website.
1997: the return
By 1996 Apple was losing money, market share and its operating-system project, and needed a new OS from outside. In December 1996 it bought NeXT for about $400 million, getting NeXTSTEP — which became Mac OS X — and Jobs as an adviser. Apple then reported the worst quarter in its history. Chief executive Gil Amelio was pushed out in July 1997, and on 16 September Jobs took the job. Within a year he had killed most of the product line, launched the iMac and made the “Think Different” campaign; within four he had the iPod, within ten the iPhone.
The other 16 September 1997
On the same day Microsoft, having paid $425 million for a Silicon Valley start-up called WebTV, relaunched its set-top box with Internet Explorer built in. The reasoning was that American homes had far more televisions than PCs, so the web should arrive through the TV, shopping included. WebTV did briefly grow the number of people online; it did not survive the broadband PC, and the idea waited fifteen years for the smart TV to make sense.
What the twelve years teach
The lesson usually drawn is about Jobs. The better one is about the company: Apple in 1985 could not contain a founder who was right about the future and impossible to work with, and Apple in 1997 could not survive without him. Bangladesh’s technology companies are now old enough to have founders of their own who are being eased out by boards and investors; the Apple story is the reminder that the person who is difficult and the person who is indispensable are sometimes the same person.
