What are Steve Jobs' most notable failures?

Like The Architect would say, NeXT was quite naturally perfect. It was a work of art. Flawless. Sublime. A triumph only equaled by its monumental failure.

First, some context: back when NeXT was created Jobs went from being the guy from Apple to the guy who got his ass thrown from Apple, after trying to stage a coup BTW.

Now NeXT computers weren't that expensive considering prices of the time and how advanced it was. Problem is it happened right when the PC became a commodity, no longer an expensive tool for companies and white collar workers. Jobs couldn't adapt to that, he started back when a good computer was almost the prize of a car (if not more) and now he became the old guy that still takes the train and wonders why everybody travels by plane now.

Those were the days of outsourcing manufacturing, yet Jobs wasted a ton of money building a state-of-the-art factory. He wouldn't even buy the motherboards, it was all soldered and assembled right there. I guess that's why he became a big supporter of overseas factories, even saying the Segway was doomed to fail because it was made in the US (and he had a point, given his own experience).

Paul's note about the fancy NeXT boxes its funny considering that's the kind of attention to details that people love about Apple now. But packaging wasn't a big deal back in the '80s and 90's, nor was minimalism.?

In fact those were the times of quantity=quality, of "multimedia" devices, consoles with lots of addons, cars with green LCD displays all over the place, all-in-one PCs with TVs built-in, and big remotes full of buttons.?

Yeah, you need training to handle that.

People are used to Apple's compromises today, but back then compromise was the F word: feature bloat was the rule, not the exception and not by any means a mistake. A product was considered subpar if it didn't have at least 3 separate functions, even if it sucked at all 3. The microwave/toaster/coffeemaker? that's from the '90s...

And BTW, mind Jobs used almost all of his own money on NeXT, he paid $100,000 out of his pocket for the logo alone. There were other investors on board but he was the only one that was going to end up broke if NeXT failed.

And it did, at least the original idea: nobody bought a NeXT, not even the cheaper pizzabox model. However he avoided bankruptcy by doing a 180? and embracing one of the other big trends of the '90s: software. He downscaled NeXT to the NeXTSTEP OS, which is ironic considering the original idea for NeXT was a computer and the OS was added by Jobs along development, one of the first mistakes he made since it not only added several millions in costs but it also delayed the launch of the Cube, killing most of the momentum it had.

How it affected Jobs? well, to start nobody cared or knew who he was during the '90s. Gates was famous, nobody outside IT talked about Windows being a copy of the Mac, it was all ancient history. When Jobs came back to Apple in '97 for most of the people out there it was the last gasp of the Cupertino boys. Apple was doomed, and the dude from the square-thingy computer that was used to code DOOM but that nobody actually bought to play that insanely popular game* was not going to be able to save it.

There was no red carpet at Infinite Loop, no hero's return: the only reason why Jobs made it back to Apple its because they were desperate for a new OS after Copland failed. How bad was Jobs' image back then? well to put it into perspective some people were actually disappointed (and still are) that Apple didn't bought Be Inc, using BeOS instead and bringing back Gass? who was doing a good job before Sculley also fired him.

That he managed to climb out of that hole is nothing short of a miracle.

*On defense of gamers, the version for the NeXT cube and station had a sluggish framerate and no sound.

Source: http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/What-are-Steve-Jobs-most-notable-failures/answer/Juan-Videla

death clock cerebral palsy lenny dykstra top chef texas stanley tucci stanley tucci x factor voting