
Steve Jobs Talks About His Rise and Fall (1985) - jaybol
http://www.newsweek.com/1985/09/30/jobs-talks-about-his-rise-and-fall.html
======
smoody
I was in a small meeting at an investment bank with Jobs when he was at his
lowest point (1994? 1995?). There were probably three of us in the room with
him. He was _literally_ begging us to use the NeXT platform for even just a
small test project -- offering to do _whatever would be needed_ to get the
deal done. I swear, it nearly brought a tear to my eye -- seeing my industry
idol so desperate. Fast forward 15 year and Apple's market cap is higher than
that investment bank's market cap. And let's not forget about how Steve turned
$5mm into billions with his Pixar investment and nurturing.

Great people bounce back. Steve Jobs is like flubber -- he gains more momentum
with each bounce.

~~~
mikecane
Would that have been First Boston? Didn't they wind up buying over a thousand
of them at one time? Apparently it was great to create apps.

~~~
ams6110
_Apparently it was great to create apps._

It was Objective-C, Interface Builder, similar tools to what Cocoa is today.
All the cool app building tools for the Mac were born on NEXTSTEP.

~~~
rahoulb
Cocoa IS Nextstep - which is why the class names are prefixed NS

~~~
pavlov
Trivia: actually "NS" stands for "NeXT & Sun". Old NeXT classes had an NX*
prefix. (There are still a few of those lingering in Cocoa.)

The NS prefix was adopted as part of the NextStep -> OpenStep transition
around 1993, when Sun was planning to use OpenStep as their main desktop
environment. That never happened because soon Sun got Java religion and dumped
OpenStep.

~~~
Synaesthesia
I didn't know that. In fact everywhere I have read, it is assumed that NS
stands for NeXTStep. Thanks!

------
dangoldin
Great quotes here! My favorite so far:

"I helped shepherd Apple from a garage to a billion-and-a-half-dollar company.
I'm probably not the best person in the world to shepherd it to a five- or
ten-billion-dollar company, which I think is probably its destiny."

------
jarin
"It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't
compete with six people in blue jeans."

The best part is they couldn't. They ended up buying NeXT to use NeXTSTEP as
the basis for OS X (and later, iOS).

------
charlesju
Once you're lucky, twice you're great.

~~~
hugh3
Or else, just very very lucky.

------
stevejohnson
So many great quotes.

Q. Now that you're 30 and an estate owner, do you see a settled life for
yourself, a family, big Silicon Valley parties, furniture?

A. Actually, I bought a few Eames chairs so I have a place to sit down and
read a book, other than the floor.

------
JunkDNA
Wow, great reading that as a little historical piece. I was about 7 when that
article was written, so I'm pretty sure I missed it when it was first
published. The thing that strikes me is that I have always thought of Jobs as
a guy who exudes confidence. But in this interview he is pretty broken. He
seems happy with himself, but you can sense he is quite battered.

I think it's interesting that people from Steve's generation had Hewlett and
Packard as role models. I'd venture to guess many people from my generation
would have Steve and/or Bill Gates. Given what has happened to HP over the
years and the current state of Microsoft, I wonder if Apple can really
maintain the spirit of Steve after he is gone.

------
kevin_morrill
Ironic quote: "And in 10 years will I be faced with the same dilemma again?
Maybe, maybe I will." This turned out to be almost exactly right, as he
rejoined Apple just 11 years later.

