I got this book from Netgalley so I can read and review it before it’s published. About a month ago, I read Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue, but it didn’t go into detail like this book did about NeXT from 1985 to 1997.
This book detailed what happened to Steve that got him ousted from Apple in 1985 and his triumphant return to the head job at Apple in 1997 from a lot of the players (including Jobs) involved with NeXT.
Of course, when Jobs left Apple and became the CEO of NeXT, Apple sued because they didn’t want him building something similar to the current Apple products. A lot of former Apple employees went with Jobs, well, because he was Steve Jobs. He may not have been the best boss, but they didn’t care. He had a vision for perfection, he was smart, and a knack for design.
Even though, the computer’s NeXT made weren’t mainstream, and never got accepted, NeXT had it’s ups and downs (money wise), and wasn’t as successful as it should’ve been. Cain explains a lot of what was happening with the company. What did set NeXT up for success was their exquisite software, and one of those was called WebObjects. When Jobs demonstrated to the public, he enlisted the founders of a company called CyberSlice (they were inspired by a scene from the 1995 movie starring Sandra Bullock called The Net as she ordered a pizza online). Jobs placed an order for a pizza, and lo and behold, it worked and a few minutes later, a delivery person walked into where Jobs was and delivered a pizza.
In 1986, Jobs purchased the Pixar Animation from George Lucas. Lucas basically gave it away for $5 million dollars! As CEO, Jobs let the animators run the company and do the work, and that was a huge payoff for Jobs.
In 1997, Apple was looking for an operating system to compete with Windows, and the operating system NeXT had was perfect. So, Apple brought the company and reluctantly Steve Jobs came back. In 2000, Jobs was named CEO of Apple, and we all know the story from there.
Had Apple not come knocking, what would’ve happened to NeXT and Pixar?
