Would there be jobs without Jobs?

It is February 24 1955. AT&T has just created the first transistor, the Pentagon has just started developing the first nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, and in a hospital in San Francisco, Steve Jobs is born.

The story behind Jobs’ 1985 departure is, by now, well-known. After losing a boardroom battle with John Sculley, a CEO Jobs helped recruit from Pepsi a couple of years ago, Jobs decided to leave Apple, feeling forced out of the company he helped start.

That was the year of the famous BusinessWeek coverstory (February 5, 1996) announcing “The Fall of an American Icon”.

Now, the question is, was it as bad as the media said it was? It was worse. Apple was on life support. The company went through a huge layoff soon after that. Michael Spindler replaced Sculley as CEO, and turmoil followed. After several stumbles and layoffs, the board brought in Gil Amelio. In the 12 years of Apple that Steve Jobs was not a part of, Apple’s market share had dropped dramatically, from nearly 45% to 6.3%, which if happens today, will result in a loss of $63 billion.

After weeks of rumours that Jobs would quit and setup his own rival company, prompted by a flurry of sales of his AAPL stock holdings, totalling $21.43 million, he officially departed on September 16, 1985. He took with him a number of Apple employees, with whom he worked to start NeXT Inc.

The $400 million sale of NeXT to Apple on 26 December 1996 was in succession to the rumours about Apple looking to buy a new Unix-based Operating System to replace its aging MacOS. This brought Jobs back into the fold as an Informal Advisor. Apple was still being run by Gil Amelio, a CEO who oversaw Apple’s worst-ever financial quarter. That year, Apple had lost $1 billion on $7 billion in revenue. The company was worth about $4 billion. Rivals like HP and Dell were worth about $62 billion and $8 billion, respectively. It was not long before Jobs took over the company and when he did, he ensured that success followed the company right after. Steve Jobs has led Apple to metamorphose the way we look at computers, mobilephones, music, television, cloud computing, etc and the rest is history. Today Apple has staggering revenues of $229.234 billion and net income of $48.351 billion. The company is now worth far more than HP and Dell combined. The iMac, iTunes, iPhone, MacBook, iPod to name a few were the brainstorms of Apple in the Steve Jobs era. He has been the one to lead this histrionic growth of the company from nearly bankrupt to a legend.

But also, a decision is never made, justice never done, before viewing both sides of the coin. If someone asks me, could have Apple managed to survive as a company after Steve Jobs left, I will not say that it couldn’t. A downsized version of the company itself could have made it. Apple was circling the drain. The company had issued MacOS clone licenses to Motorola, PowerComputing and other manufacturers, and these third-party vendors were cannibalizing Macintosh sales.

I cannot deny that Apple did have chances of survival, but it would have never be come the Apple we know today without Jobs. Also the chances of Apple finding another guy like Jobs is negligibly slim. So, if anyone states that Apple wouldn’t have survived without Steve Jobs, I would call it true. Ultimately, Steve Jobs is the one who has made Apple, twice!