Steve Jobs in Exile
Drawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews with the key players, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs’s “lost decade”—the formative years that shaped the icon we thought we knew.
With unprecedented access to unbroadcast footage of Jobs in NeXT meetings, private company documents, and interviews with his closest colleagues, Cain offers the definitive account of how failure transformed a brash wunderkind into a true business genius.
And via Cain’s post on LinkedIn announcing the book, the foreword is by NeXT cofounder Dan’l Lewin.
Back in 2013, I suggested the story of Steve Jobs would best be told as a 5-act opera, with the most crucial part of the story being Act III.
Jobs left Apple in 1985, founded NeXT, hired me, bought Pixar, and came back to Apple in 1996 at its historic low point, when Apple was near-death, and orchestrated the turnaround we’ve all heard about.
I’ve bought most of the Steve Jobs books, and seen the movies, but they all seem to treat the NeXT years as an afterthought rather than a transformational time. Sure, the NeXT hardware didn’t sell well but the software set the stage for everything Apple makes today.
Today is launch day for Steve Jobs in Exile. I spent almost four years digging into Steve’s stretch in the wilderness -- 1985 to 1997, after Apple pushed him out and before it brought him back.
I expected the record to be complete. What more could there be on the most written-about entrepreneur alive? I was wrong. An archivist at Carnegie Mellon told me I was the first person in about fifteen years to open the NeXT archive. People had been holding letters, tapes, memos, recordings in their closets for decades, waiting to show someone. More than a hundred of them sat down with me.
He did a Reddit AMA.
It’s a surprising and sometimes gruesome (in a businessy way) story that does not show off the famous man at the center of the story as much as depict all the ways he failed in what turned out to be preparation for his career-defining role as Apple CEO. (I also got to interview Cain about the book this week on Upgrade.)
[…]
The computer that NeXT ended up building didn’t satisfy the requirements of those original higher-ed buyers who were the target market. Jobs had followed his bliss, and his good taste, in interesting directions. NeXT made an interesting product. But the product failed at being a successful product, just as NeXT kept failing at business.
And it just keeps happening, as the book details. Early investor and Jobs believer H. Ross Perot (yes, the former independent presidential candidate!) had ties in the government that would’ve allowed NeXT to sell computers to America’s intelligence agencies, primarily for spy-satellite image analysis. Jobs refused the lifeline, saying he didn’t want to do business with the government.
A deal with IBM had the potential for NeXT’s operating system to take the ecological niche of Microsoft Windows before it had been firmly established on the world’s PCs. Jobs decided he was uncomfortable working with IBM.
See also: Becoming Steve Jobs.
Previously:
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"had ties in the government that would’ve allowed NeXT to sell computers to America’s intelligence agencies, primarily for spy-satellite image analysis. Jobs refused the lifeline, saying he didn’t want to do business with the government."
The government WAS a big customer. Especially the intelligence agencies. When NeXT shut down their hardware division, the intel agencies got Jobs to keep the factory open a bit longer to produce spares for them.
Perot and IBM were very early, in the early Cube days. Before the 68040 NeXTStations and the big sales to investment banks.
If Cain makes such a big deal of Perot and IBM, he blew it.
> Sure, the NeXT hardware didn’t sell well but the software set the stage for everything Apple makes today.
The NeXT "stack" is still the best thing Apple has today.
AppKit for all its faults (I fight it daily), is still better designed than most frameworks I've used. It's a shame that it's been consistently under-resourced (years with hardly any updates), undermined (team poached to make UIKit, a far lesser framework), and had almost no marketing or branding (while the most incapable Swift-stuff gets endless hype).
It's hard to understate how good the NeXT aquihire really was. What those guys built back then still empowers a lot of what we do today.
I guess I'm less interested in Steve Jobs at NeXT and more interested in how AppKit and the NeXT tech came to be. Apple doesn't have another OS to buy if they keep neglecting what makes this one great.
