International Mac Podcast

September 16th, 1985

Apple’s chairman and co-founder Steve Jobs leaves the company after a boardroom battle for control of his own company with then CEO John Sculley (that’s right, the Pepsi guy!).

Jobs went on to found NeXT, which despite his ambitious dreams never really launched the next generation of computing (although many regard NeXTStep to be an operating system that was ahead of it’s time) and certainly didn’t bring around the demise of Apple he so fondly dreamed of at the time.

Having said that, although the company did not go under, the years without Jobs were considered by many to be a dark time for Apple users, with a massively complicated line-up of products, an OS that was rapidly losing ground to Microsoft’s Windows platform and loses that would nearly lead to the end of Apple itself.

September 16th, 1997

After a long and hard battle with NeXT’s continual failure, which in the end led to an Apple buyout in 1996 for $400 million, yet at the same time enjoying roaring success with his other company, Pixar,  Jobs returns to Apple as it’s interim CEO (or iCEO, wow this guy has a real obsession with the letter ‘i’). Pixar will be a name instantly familiar to most as the creators of the box office smash ‘Toy Story’, which was the first feature length computer animated motion picture. Pixar was definitely the key to Jobs’ return to the public spotlight and of course has resulted in Steve being the single largest shareholder in Disney.

Jobs’ return brought with it the NeXTStep OS, which would be the building blocks for Mac OS X, which in most people’s opinion has made the Mac the amazing platform it is today. Jobs was also quick to rectify the mistakes of previous CEOs, the latest being Gil Amelio, by revising the product lines, killing the clones (funny how history repeats itself, *cough* Psystar *cough*) and repairing some much needed relationships, namely with Microsoft to bring their industry standard Microsoft Office back to the Mac platform.

It would seem that the Apple of today is shaped by Jobs in a very real way, his shake up of the company brought new life to the platform, gave us the iMac, the iPod and of course more recently the iPhone. He brought us, with the help of Jonathan Ive, beautiful products (OK, except the hockey puck mouse) and a great user experience. I can only wonder what Apple’s future will be like when Jobs does eventually move on?

If you’re interested in more of the story of Steve Jobs then I can highly recommend two books / audio books : ‘The Second Coming of Steve Jobs’ (book / audio book) and ‘iCon’ (book / audio book)

Thanks to Wired for some of the facts used in this article