"The market pulls the product out of the startup." -- Marc Andreesen [1]
Steve Jobs was remarkably good at finding new markets. And once you've found one, you can screw up a lot and still succeed. Because at the end of the day, people want to work on a successful product, and they'll put up with a lot of shit to do so.
Steve Jobs probably would've been even more successful had he not been so abrasive; who knows, maybe he wouldn't have gotten thrown out of Apple the first time and we would've gotten the iPhone 15 years earlier rather than the Newton. But he got the thing that matters most right, and then pretty much everything else fell into place despite his flaws.
Honestly, I don't think he could have been more successful no matter what he did. Apple's comeback is easily the most dramatic in the history of business.
True, but he's also responsible for Pixar and NeXT. NeXT had many of the ideas of the current Mac a decade earlier, but failed to take off. Whether that's because the market wasn't ready yet or because Steve failed to manage the company can't really be answered.
(Also: "most dramatic in the history of business"? IBM was about 3 months away from bankruptcy when Lou Gerstner took over - it's not a household name now because their comeback involved pivoting to big-business services, but they're solidly profitable. Intuit nearly died and all the employees went several months without salary in its early days, and now they basically own the accounting-software market.)
Jobs' first ouster is often credited as the reason for his vision and success when he got back. Believe it or not he was a much worse CEO the first time around
Steve Jobs was remarkably good at finding new markets. And once you've found one, you can screw up a lot and still succeed. Because at the end of the day, people want to work on a successful product, and they'll put up with a lot of shit to do so.
Steve Jobs probably would've been even more successful had he not been so abrasive; who knows, maybe he wouldn't have gotten thrown out of Apple the first time and we would've gotten the iPhone 15 years earlier rather than the Newton. But he got the thing that matters most right, and then pretty much everything else fell into place despite his flaws.
[1] http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups/4104...