Steve Jobs ... heard of him?

I recall clearly that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, the reaction was almost universally negative. I was working as a reporter for MacWeek at the time, and we carefully tracked every move and announcement.

Most pundits dismissed Jobs as a mere “marketer,” a slick, fast-talker who’d got lucky co-founding Apple but had failed spectacularly with his follow-up tech company, NeXT. So when Apple bought NeXT and brought Jobs back into the fold, I can’t remember any positive reactions.

Jobs had no technical chops, many observers said, and he would fail spectacularly to turn Apple around.

The prevailing sentiment was captured by Michael Dell, who famously said that if he were in Jobs' shoes, he’d shut Apple down and give the remaining money back to shareholders. It was a feeling shared by many.

Apple seemed unsalvageable, especially by someone whose career up to that point was pretty checkered. Pixar had a couple of hits, but NeXT had stumbled from one disappointment to another. And after shuttering its hardware division, NeXT, too, seemed headed for the chopping block.

But of course, we know that the pundits were wrong, and Jobs’ return marked the beginning of one of the biggest turnarounds in business history.

NeXT was far from a failure, actually. It developed fabulous technology, and Jobs had assembled a great team of seasoned technologists who went on to lead Apple’s turnaround with one hit product after another.

It’s all captured very well in a new book about Jobs’ “wilderness years,” the decade or so he spent away from Apple. The book features a ton of previously unreported stories. And it’s sometimes uncannily detailed about behind-the-scenes events at NeXT that helped turn Jobs into the kind of leader capable of saving the troubled company he’d co-founded.

Here’s our review of Steve Jobs in Exile.

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— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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