Comment by mrandish
11 hours ago
I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical misperceptions.
It also says "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim. While the Mac wasn't the unit sales leader compared to [all PC brands combined], from 1984 to 1994 it beat PCs on revenue, margin and mind share.
Until the second coming of Steve Jobs, there were hardly any Apple gear on sale in Portugal.
There was a single importer, Interlog, that you had to physically travel to Lisbon, or order by phone from one magazine ad.
The market was all about C64, Spectrum, Atari, Amiga and PC.
The only place I saw Macs live was a single department on the campus as alternative to UNIX and Windows for Workgroups everywhere, and the secretary on the IT department.
> "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim
Macintosh was in fact not successful for many years, and Apple survived by chanting "Apple II Forever!" at their legacy edu market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50
Also the fail Apple III was Jobs' machine.
Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.
It's also just absurd that they assert NeXT is largely forgotten, while writing for an audience very likely to include people fully aware of NeXT.
My graduation thesis was porting a visualisation framework from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because my supervisor wanted a way out for his research.
His cube was collecting dust on the office corner.
This is how much hope people had on NeXT before the Apple deal came to be.