The Wilderness Years

The decade that Steve Jobs spent away from Apple is often seen as his “wilderness” years, a time when he came close to fading forever from public life. He was forced out of the company he founded. His new company, NeXT, was struggling to say afloat. His other company, Pixar, lurched from business plan to business plan. Yet that decade would become one of the most productive periods of Jobs’s amazing life, laying the foundation for the personal, technological, and financial success that would follow. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything,” he said at a famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005. “It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

In 1985, Steve Jobs wasn’t so much fired from Apple as he was chased out. He lost a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs had recruited from Pepsi. Sculley was brought into Apple as the grown-up, the “adult supervision.” Jobs, just 29, wanted Sculley to run the fast-growing and often chaotic company while Jobs obsessed about new products. He hoped that Sculley would teach him how to eventually take the reins.

Things went swimmingly at first, but Jobs’s penchant for meddling put him at odds with Sculley and many others. The crunch came when Jobs’s Macintosh division failed to upgrade the original Mac, leading to a deep slide in sales. Consumers viewed it as an expensive toy. There was no killer app to drive sales (desktop publishing wouldn’t take off until after Jobs left).

Sculley removed Jobs as head of the Mac division, leading Jobs to retaliate by trying to have him kicked out. Jobs lost.

He quickly set up a rival company in hopes of driving Apple out of business.