Steve jobs leaving apple

Steve jobs leaving apple

By Luke Dormehl • 10:30 am, September 16, 2021

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Two significant days in Jobs’ career took place on this day.
Photo: Fulvio Obregon

September 16, 1985 and 1997: Twice on this day, Steve Jobs makes significant moves with regard to his career at Apple. In 1985, he quits the company he co-founded. Then, a decade and a half later, he officially rejoins Apple as its new interim CEO.

In terms of the emotions associated with those historic occasions, it’s hard to think of two more polarizing days in Jobs’ life.

Steve Jobs leaves Apple in 1985

The story behind Jobs’ 1985 departure is, by now, well-known. After losing a boardroom battle with John Sculley — a CEO Jobs recruited from Pepsi a couple years earlier — Jobs decided to leave Apple, feeling forced out of the company he started.

After weeks of rumors that Jobs would quit and set up his own rival company — prompted by a flurry of sales of his AAPL stock holdings, totaling $21.43 million — he officially departed on September 16, 1985. He took with him a number of Apple employees to start NeXT Inc., his follow-up computer company.

NeXT never became the success Jobs hoped it would be. And in some ways, the company showcased the worst aspects of his perfectionist, “feature creep” tendencies. However, NeXT occupied an immensely important period in his life, letting him hone his abilities as a CEO.

Also during this period, he became a billionaire, thanks to a canny investment in Pixar Animation Studios. Jobs won big by buying into the struggling George Lucas startup (yes, that George Lucas), which had yet to release its first feature-length film.

Steve Jobs returns to Apple in 1997

The $400 million sale of NeXT to Apple in December 1996 brought Jobs back into Cupertino’s fold. Apple was being run by Gil Amelio, a CEO who oversaw Apple’s worst-ever financial quarter. When Amelio departed, Jobs offered to help Apple locate new leadership. He stepped into the role of CEO until someone suitable could be found.

The UNIX-based operating system Jobs developed at NeXT laid the groundwork for OS X, which Apple continues to build upon.

On September 16, 1997, Apple officially announced Jobs as its interim CEO. This quickly became shortened to iCEO, which makes Jobs’ role the first “i” release, predating even the iMac G3.

Do you remember Jobs’ return to (or departure from) Apple? Leave your comments below.

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Steve Jobs and the Apple Story

The legacy and lessons of Apple’s co-founder

On Aug. 2, 2018, Apple (AAPL) made history by becoming the world’s first publicly traded company to achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion. On April 30, 2019, Microsoft (MSFT) joined Apple’s exclusive club, also catapulting past the $1 trillion mark. On Jan. 16, 2020, Alphabet (GOOGL) became a $1 trillion company, followed by Amazon (AMZN) on Feb. 4.

Key Takeaways

• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1977, introducing first the Apple I and then the Apple II.
• Apple went public in 1980 with Jobs the blazing visionary and Wozniak the shy genius executing his vision.
• Executive John Scully was added in 1983; in 1985, Apple’s board of directors ousted the combative Jobs in favor of Scully.
• Away from Apple, Jobs invested in and developed animation producer Pixar and then founded NeXT to create high-end computers; NeXT eventually led him back to Apple.
• Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s and spent the years until his death in 2011 revamping the company, introducing the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming technology and communication in the process.

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Investopedia / Bailey Mariner

On Oct. 5, 2011, Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56. He had just left the CEO post at Apple, the company he co-founded, for the second time. Jobs was an entrepreneur through and through, and the story of his rise is the story of Apple as a company, along with some very interesting twists. In this article, we’ll look at the career of Steve Jobs and the company he founded, as well as some of the lessons Apple offers for potential entrepreneurs.

As to be expected, the market value for each of these companies has swung up and down as prices fluctuate, and maintaining the $1 trillion valuation can be elusive. However, the fact that Apple was the first company to surpass the $1 trillion mark is in no small part connected to the legacy and lessons learned from Steve Jobs.

From Blue Boxes to Apple

Steve Jobs got his start in business with another Steve, Steve Wozniak, building the blue boxes phone phreakers used to make free calls across the nation. The two were members of the HomeBrew Computer Club, where they quickly became enamored with kit computers and left the blue boxes behind. The next product the two sold was the Apple I, which was a kit for building a PC. In order to do anything with it, the customer needed to add their own monitor and keyboard. 

With Wozniak doing most of the building and Jobs handling the sales, the two made enough money off the hobbyist market to invest in the Apple II. It was the Apple II that made the company. Jobs and Wozniak created enough interest in their new product to attract venture capital. This meant they were in the big leagues and their company, Apple, was officially incorporated in 1976.   Steve Jobs was a month shy of turning 22 and would be a millionaire before his next birthday.

The Roller Coaster Ride Begins

By 1978, Apple was making $2 million in profits solely on the strength of the Apple II. The Apple II wasn’t state of the art, but it did allow computer enthusiasts to create and sell their own programs. Among these user-generated programs was VisiCalc, a type of proto-Excel that represented the first software with business applications.

Although Apple did not profit directly from these programs, they did see more interest as the uses for the Apple II broadened. This model of allowing users to create their own programs and sell them would reappear in the app market of the future, but with a much tighter business strategy around it.

By the time Apple went public in 1980, the dynamic of the company was more or less set. Steve Jobs was the fiery visionary, with an intense and often combative management style, and Steve Wozniak was the quiet genius who made the vision work. Apple’s board of directors wasn’t too fond of such a power imbalance in the company, however. Jobs and the board agreed to add John Sculley to the executive team in 1983. In 1985, the board ousted Jobs in favor of Sculley.

The Gap Years

Steve Jobs was rich and unemployed. Although he wasn’t working at Apple, he was far from idle. During this time, from 1985 to 1996, Jobs was involved in two big deals; the first of which was an investment. In 1986, Jobs purchased a controlling stake in a company called Pixar from George Lucas. The company was struggling, but their eventual success in digital animation led to an initial public offering (IPO) that earned Jobs around $1 billion.

The second was a return to his old obsession with computers, founding NeXT to create high-end computers. These were expensive machines with an operating system representing the best attempt yet at making the power of UNIX fit into a graphical user interface. When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, he did so using a NeXT machine. 

Of these two deals, NeXT proved the most important, as it turned out Apple was looking to replace its operating system. Apple bought NeXT in 1996 for its operating system, bringing Steve Jobs back to the first company he founded.

The critical year in which Steve Jobs sold NeXT, the computer maker he had founded, to Apple, returning him to the company eleven years after he had been ousted.

Getting Apple Back on Track

When Jobs returned, the company wasn’t in a good place. Apple had begun to flounder as cheap PCs running Windows flooded the market. Jobs found himself in the driver’s seat again and took some drastic steps to turn around Apple’s decline. The company asked for and received a $150 million investment from Bill Gates.   Jobs used the money to ramp up advertising and highlight the products Apple already offered while choking off research and development (R&D) money in non-producing areas.

The NeXT operating system was used to create the iMac, Apple’s first hit PC in a long time. Jobs followed this up with a list of successes from the iPod in 2001 to the iPad in 2010. The years between saw Apple dominate the smartphone market with the iPhone, open up an e-commerce store with iTunes, and launch branded retail outlets called, what else, the Apple Store. When Jobs stepped down as CEO, Apple was scrapping with Exxon for the world’s largest market cap.

Starting with the iPod in 2001, and then continuing with the iPhone and iPad over the next decade, Jobs rejuvenated the ailing Apple, putting it at the forefront of technology and communications.

The Bottom Line

It’s impossible to sum up Jobs’ career in a single article, but a few lessons stick out. First, innovation counts for a lot, but innovative products fail without proper marketing. Second, there are no straight paths to success. Jobs did get wealthy very early on, but he would be a footnote today if he didn’t return to Apple in the 90s. At one point, Jobs was kicked out of the company he helped create for being hard to work with. Rather than change, he bided his time, then took over again, and this time his attitude was seen as part of his genius.

There is much more to be learned from the life of Steve Jobs, as there is in the life of every successful entrepreneur. The sheer hubris of the entrepreneurial spirit, the idea you can do something bigger and better than it has ever been done before, always bears watching and studying, whether to imitate it or just to marvel at what that hubris can create.

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Steve Jobs left Apple on his own, wasn’t forced out, Wozniak says

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The popular narrative that Steve Jobs was removed from Apple by board fiat after losing a war for control with then-CEO John Sculley is not entirely accurate, according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

«Steve Jobs wasn’t pushed out of the company. He left,» Wozniak wrote on Facebook. «After the Macintosh failure it’s fair to assume that Jobs left out of his feeling of greatness, and embarrassment about not having achieved it.»

Wozniak’s comments came in the midst of a larger discussion centering on the new Aaron Sorkin-penned, Danny Boyle-led movie about Steve Jobs’ life that is set to hit theatres next month. Wozniak has praised that film — for which he consulted — as the best screen adaptation of Jobs and Apple since 1999’s Pirates of Silicon Valley.

The real story surrounding Jobs’s first departure from Apple may never be known, as several company insiders have given varying accounts over the years. In a 2005 commencement address to students at Stanford, Jobs himself offered a different point of view:

«We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired,» Jobs said. «How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out.»

Sculley has disputed Jobs’s version of events and offered his own take, which more closely aligns with Wozniak’s perspective.

«It was after making the pitches [regarding Macintosh Office] that the Apple board asked Steve to step down from the Macintosh division for being too disruptive in the organization,» Sculley said in an interview earlier this year.

«Steve was never fired. He took a sabbatical and was still chairman of the board. He was down, no one pushed him, but he was off the Mac, which was his deal — he never forgave me for that.»

Wozniak added that on balance, the latest attempt to chronicle Jobs’s life does well to straddle the line between entertainment and accuracy:

«This movie does a good job with accuracy of issues even if all the scenes with myself or Andy Hertzfeld talking to Jobs never happened at all. The issues were real and did happen, even if at different points in time. [. ] The acting is very good compared to other movies about Steve Jobs. The movie doesn’t try to be another one of the story we all know. It tries to make you feel what it was like emotionally, as Jobs and those around him.»

Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender in the titular role, will debut at the New York Film Festival Oct. 3 in advance of a wider release Oct. 9 in North America.

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Steve Jobs Remembered

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.

Steve Jobs made technology fun. The co-founder of Apple died last Wednesday at the age of fifty-six. He had fought for years against cancer. Mourners gathered outside his house in Palo Alto, California, and Apple stores around the world.

Tim Bajarin is president of Creative Strategies, a high-tech research and consulting company.

TIM BAJARIN: «If you actually look at a tech leader, they’re really happy if they have one hit in their life. Steve Jobs has the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and Pixar.”

Steve Jobs was a college dropout. He was adopted by a machinist and his wife, an accountant. They supported his early interest in electronics.

He and his friend Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer — now just called Apple — in nineteen seventy-six. They stayed at the company until nineteen eighty-five. That year, Steve Wozniak returned to college and Steve Jobs left in a dispute with the chief executive.

Mr. Jobs then formed his own company, called NeXT Computer. He rejoined Apple in nineteen ninety-seven after it bought NeXT. He helped remake Apple from a business that was in bad shape then to one of the most valuable companies in the world today.

Steve Wozniak, speaking on CNN, remembered his longtime friend as a «great visionary and leader» and a «marketing genius.»

President Obama said in a statement: «By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the Internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun.»

David Carroll is a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York City. He says Steve Jobs not only revolutionized technology, he also revolutionized American business.

DAVID CARROLL: “The fact that he was able to redesign American commerce top to bottom and across is really stunning. He probably will be considered an industrial giant on the scale of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, so one of the great of all time.”

Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple’s chief executive in August because of his health.

Apple’s new chief, Tim Cook, will also have to deal with the new Kindle Fire tablet computer from Amazon.com. It costs less than half as much as an iPad but also does less.

And that’s the VOA Special English Technology Report, written by June Simms and Avi Arditti. I’m Christopher Cruise.

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