In Brief: Jobs' journey through the wilderness made Apple Inc. possible

I agree that Steve would not have been anywhere near as successful, if he hadn't been summarily ousted and had to lick his wounds and learn how to turn his asthetic sensibilities into a roaring success (Pixar!) before he came back to Apple.

My brother, Jonathan Seybold and Scott Jordan and I just had fun analyzing how and why Apple has become the most valuable company on the planet!
http://outsideinnovation.blogs.com/pseybold/2010/10/apples-amazing-comeback.html

I suppose that the best thing about leaving Apple when he did was that it brought his thinking closer to Unix as the solid basis for a next-generation OS, and the modularity of Objects. That's possibly the "major rethink of a lot of things" that he did, since he is still today the same work and quality-obsessed "control freak" he was in the run-up to his departure.

I also recall him saying that unknown to him and Woz, the real treasure that PARC Xerox concealed was Objects / OOP, not the GUI.

Now when you consider that of all the major OS variants that are thriving today, Windows (DEC/VMS) and Symbian (???) are the only OS's that are not UNIX-based, and they are starting to struggle in a modern market that favours modular approaches (OS X/iOS, Android/Chrome, Meego, QNX, Linux etc), SJ's return to Apple was a "stitch in time" that saved its hide, and prepared it for a future that appears quite rosy by today's estimations.

Tis definitely interesting...

But I think you mean Sunday's, not Saturdays.

Whatever the reason for his success, we have all benefitted from it.

Time is the greatest teacher. Unfortunately it kills all it's students.

In his commencement address at Stanford, Jobs said as much. He went on to explain that getting pushed out (canned) made him rethink many things. His work at NeXT was more of an internship for returning to Apple.

First this is all speculation. As to his leaving Apple and its quick slide afterward it is pretty obviois the people doing the booting didn't know how to run Apple. The way I look at it Steves leaving Apple is what put the company into the panicked state it was in when he came back.

More importantly when Steve came back he brought his Next team along with him and quickly hired some management professionals. His quickest move was getting the inventory and product lines under control which freed up a bunch of cash to start to turn the company around with. Killing Newton was one of those moves which sadly people take as Steve hating the device. It was in reality nothing more than another measure to get the company under control.

As to Next people look at the company as not being successful. I'd say that they where very successful considering they where players when everybody thought a MS only world was the way to go. Fortunately the industry learned a hard lesson here and is now more open to other platforms.

The problem today is that Apple is a vastly different company than it was only a couple of years ago. What was right back then for the company isn't likely to be successful moving forward. For one Apple will need a lot more products to justify its stock price which is over valued at the moment. It will be interesting to see how Apple moves forward in this new era.

Had Steve never left Apple there would be no Apple today. Period. He would have continued to dysfunctionally love it to death. Our experiences shape us and clearly some failure taught Steve how to succeed now.

I suppose it should be pointed out somewhere while sitting on Apple's board, Carly Fiorina currently running for California Senate wanted to dump Jobs and NeXT and go with Sun OS.

Just saying...

To sum up!

The three greatest things Steve Jobs did for Apple:

1 - Help found Apple
2 - Leave Apple
3 - Return to Apple