7 Biggest Mistakes Of Steve Jobs

Bangalore: Steve Jobs, regarded as father of consumer electronic revolution, a tech legend and a man who steered Apple towards becoming world’s most valuable company, may seem like someone who’s got it right all the time. But the fact is that, the legendary Jobs did his share of mistakes before he got things right, which includes him being fired by the company he co-founded to launching many products that failed like— Macintosh TV, Apple III, and others.

Read on to know 7 such mistakes by Steve Jobs as compiled by Huffington Post.

☼7 Launching numerous product failures

Steve Jobs, though knew how the technology vectors are evolving, brought out the very unsuccessful products like Apple Lisa, Macintosh TV, Apple III, Powermac g4 cube and others. “The lesson that I take from these defunct products is that people will soon forget that you were wrong on a lot of smaller bets, so long as you nail big bets in a major way” said Steve Jobs.

 

☼6 Recruiting John Sculley as CEO of Apple

John Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of PepsiCo (1977–1983), until he became CEO of Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993.

Steve Jobs lured Sculley away from Pepsi because Apple wanted Sculley to apply his marketing skills to the personal computer market. Steve Jobs successfully sealed the deal after he made his legendary pitch to John: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

Sales at Apple increased from $800 million to $8 billion under Sculley's management, although many attribute this success to Sculley merely joining at an opportune time when Steve Jobs' vision and creations had begun to skyrocket.

At this point, a power struggle between Jobs and Sculley was becoming readily apparent. The Apple board of directors instructed Sculley to "contain" Jobs and limit his ability to launch expensive forays into untested products. Rather than submit to Sculley's direction, Jobs attempted to oust him from his leadership role at Apple. Sculley found out that Jobs had been attempting to organize a putsch and called a board meeting at which Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley and removed Jobs from his managerial duties. Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc. the same year.

But Sculley ultimately was forced to step down as Apple CEO because he was opposed to licensing Macintosh software and was talking to Goldman-Sachs about splitting Apple into two companies. When Sculley left in May, 1993, Apple had $2 billion in cash and $200 million in debt.

 

☼ 5 Believing that pixar would be a great hardware company

Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the computer division of Lucasfilm before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986 with funding by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. George Lucas, the founder of Lucasfilm had to sell off the Pixar graphics arm of LucasFilms (for $10 million), he never expected the company to ever make money on animated films.

Jobs, after holding majority stock in the animation company, believed that Pixar was going to be the next great hardware company which never turned into a reality. However Jobs supported cofounders Ed Catmull and John Lasseter as they pursued their dream of producing a full-length digitally animated film from day one. He protected their ability to make small bets on short films in order to learn how to eventually make a full-length feature film like Toy Story.

☼4 Not knowing the right market for NeXT computer

The NeXT Computer was a workstation computer developed, manufactured, and sold by NeXT Inc., a company founded by Steve Jobs and several other veterans of the Macintosh and Lisa teams, from 1988 until 1990.

The NeXT Computer was not a great commercial success at the level of high volume personal computers such as the Apple II, the Macintosh, or Wintel PCs; some of the workstations were sold to universities, financial institutions, and government agencies however. Some may still be used around the world as servers and hobbyist desktops.

Although Jobs tried to spin NeXT computer as an ultimate success when the assets were sold to Apple in 1996 for $429 million, few in Silicon Valley agreed. The company struggled from the start to find the right markets and customers, and Jobs himself described the fact in a video  as, "We've had, historically, a very hard time figuring out exactly who our customer was, and I'd like to show you why."

☼3 Trying to sell Pixar numerous times

Jobs who owned majority of stock in the animation company Pixar, after being with the company for 5 years, in 1980 he tried on multiple occasions to sell the company, just to break even on his investment, which was roughly $50 million. He approached Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and numerous strategic partners and companies with an offer for Pixar, but nobody turned out to be potential buy. Which eventually turned out to be a good thing for Jobs, who engineered the sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion in 2006. He got far a lot of money by the sale than his initial offers to Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.

☼2 Letting Eric Schmidt see what was in Apple

Steve Jobs, about seven years ago, invited Eric Schmidt to sit on his board. At the time Apple was on to a secrete project, building iPhone for 2 years. Three months after Schmidt joined the Apple board, Google put its weight behind the Android and was mimicking BlackBerries. But Schmidt who was part of meetings discussing the launch of the iPhone and how significant the post-PC era was going to be got the whiff of how big the Apple handset is going to be. He went back to the Google, and asked Android folks to reorient around an iPhone vision of the world. Steve Jobs thought Google was a friend and invited them into the Apple. Instead, they became the biggest competitor. (Courtesy: Forbes)

☼1 Helping Google build a beachhead in mobile

Steve Jobs, not only let Schmidt on the Apple board and revealed Apple’s secrete project, the iPhone, he also chose to align with Google services for the initial launch of iPhone.  Google search, maps, and YouTube all were helped enormously by the beachfront property Jobs allocated to them. This magnanimity by Jobs helped Google to grow strong in their respective verticals.

As the twist of fate, Google became the major competitor to Apple, thanks to the huge success of Android mobile platform. Apple, with the release of iOS 6, banned Google maps and YouTube from its default settings. However, due to Apple’s own faulty mapping service and pressure from consumers, Apple has now incorporated Google services again. (Courtesy: Forbes)