Steve Jobs' Many Failures (That Led to Success!)

The obituaries of Steve Jobs, understandably, all talk about his huge successes: he became incredibly wealthy, was universally admired, and played a major role in creating life-changing devices.

What most of the accounts I've seen give short shrift to, however, is Jobs' enormous number of failures: the Apple III computer--the first PC built by Apple from the bottom up rather than as a hobbyist project--was so poorly designed that the company advised owners to pick it up and drop it a few inches whenever it stopped working. The Lisa, a personal computer that, if fully equipped, would have cost almost $20,000 in today's money, sold very poorly (no surprise) and lost a bundle for Apple.

Early Macintosh computers were slow, balky, lacked the color graphics that even the Commodore Vic-20 had, and broke far too often. (John Sculley, the CEO Jobs brought to Apple, pushed him out over the Mac's initially lackluster sales.)

Even a few products created after Jobs' triumphant return to Apple flopped: Apple TV hasn't caught on. The NeXT-like Apple G4 Cube (a beautiful piece of industrial design) also failed on the market. Apple, despite decades of trying, has never made much of a dent in the applications software market. (Does anyone, anywhere, use Apple's Pages word processor?) These are not just a few scattered failures: I'd estimate that roughly half of the major ventures Jobs engaged in simply didn't pan out.

Of course, Jobs was a huge success overall. But the magnitude of his failures--and his ability to recover from all of them--probably teaches at least as many lessons as the dizzying heights of his overall success.