Almost all of us know what Apple is the largest company in the world and responsible for one of the most desirable technologies on the planet; on the iPhone. The achievements of this firm are undoubtedly great, but what many do not know part of his essence arises from the othera much smaller company founded in the late 1980s by Steve Jobs.
The origin of Neighbors arose from a series of events, perhaps unexpected, that shocked Jobs. Since 1980, Apple has grown out of a company operating in Los Altos, California. true technology which was experiencing a spectacular average annual growth rate of 533%. At that time, Apple began looking for a new CEO.
A big change at Apple
At that time, Mike Markkula, who had been the company’s first major investor, He no longer liked the idea of being the president of Apple. Jobs, however strong-minded; I knew I wasn’t ready. to assume the position, both began to look for a replacement outside the orbit of the company. They needed someone who could generate sales, not someone who was a technologist.
So Jobs and Markkula turned to Gerry Roche, a well-known body of head hunters. Roche was quick to recommend John Sculley. He was the president of PepsiCo and responsible for the “Pepsi Challenge” campaign that resulted in real success in advertising against its strongest rival, Coca-Cola. However, after a series of meetings, Sculley was still not convinced to leave his company to join Apple.
It got to the point where Sculley was convinced that he could offer Jobs a plan to run the company from an outside location, as a friend. But Steve used to get what he wanted and played one last card to convince him. “You want to have the rest of your life sell sugar water Do you want a chance to change the world? With this move, he had no choice but to accept the proposal.
The case of society
At first, the relationship between Jobs and Sculley seemed to be great, but as time progressed, tensions and disagreements began to grow between them. In the mid-1980s, former Pepsi executives were unhappy with Jobs’ leadership and, with the support of the company’s board of directors, he had formed a plan sideline the man who co-founded Apple less than a decade ago.
Shortly before, at a meeting in Palo Alto organized by the president of Stanford University, Jobs had a conversation with the Nobel Prize winner in Biochemistry, Paul Berg. He told her about the advances in genetics and recombinant DNA. Jobs asked him why he wasn’t doing computer simulations and Berg told him he was the type of machines needed For that job they were too expensive.
ok ‘Steve Jobs’, an authentic biography written by Walter IsaacsonThe intrepid young entrepreneur remembered that conversation. He had previously tried to build a computer so powerful that it would be considered a factory and bear the name Big Mac, but the project had to go through with the loss of power at Apple and the loss of the Macintosh head. group This is the reason why Jobs considered the idea of founding a new computer company.
Neighbor’s Nativity
Wasting no time, in September 1985, Jobs told Apple’s board that he had found his company, NEXT, and would be taking some employees with him. He also promised that the fruits of the new project would not interfere with the plans of the ward society. That is, they would sell workstations intended for the educational field, and not for consumers in general.
These movements did not come for free. Not long after, Jobs resigned from Apple, the company he had taken control of. And, if that wasn’t enough, Apple’s crowd demanded that Proximus be “unscrupulous” in order to take advantage of the co-founders’ privileged information. “It’s hard to imagine that a $2 billion company with more than 4,300 people couldn’t compete with six men wearing jeans.” Jobs expressed in response to the case which were later decided upon.
Jobs had invested $12 million of his own money to create Next. He is strongly convinced of the design, so convinced that it is a different philosophy that Apple has implemented. There were only two salaries: all those who joined the company before 1986 received $75,000 per year, and all those who joined after $50,000 per year. Yes, some employees make more money than some managers. And, in fact, they were not members, but “members” of the group itself.
Then the Cube
It was the first work of Jobs’ new company Then Computerworkstation presented in 1988. It had a Motorola 68030 CPU capable of reaching a speed of 25 MHz and was offered as standard with 8 MB of RAM, with the possibility of expanding this element up to 64 MB, which was in those years. it was wild. At the storage level, a 256 MB magneto-optical drive and a 330 MB or 660 MB disk drive could be purchased as an option.
Curiously, the cabinet had no color. The monitor, the MegaPixel NeXT Display, was a 17-inch monochrome CRT panel. The most valuable thing about the computer was its system. This came up with an OS called NeXTSTEP that had multitasking capabilities and was based on the Mach kernel and Unix-BSD. It was worth something: $6,500., about 16,300 current dollarsan expense, how great a thing he could pay.
Next Station
Sales were more modest, so in 1989, Jobs reached an agreement with Businessland, which until then had been Compaq’s distributor, to sell computers in international markets. In 1990 the second generation of workstations arrived. One was called the next Cube and the other the next Station. These computers introduced improvements such as a color screen, a processor that exceeded 30 MHz, CD-ROM drives and the ability to increase the RAM memory up to 128 MB.
Change in business model and purchase by Apple
Despite subsequent efforts to increase sales, they were still below expectations. They move unexpectedly; Jobs decided to get out of the hardware business and focus solely on software, also allowing other manufacturers to install the advanced NeXTSTEP operating system. One of them was Canon, which invested 100 million dollars in the company with the condition of installing the OS in its works.
NeXTSTEP
In this move, Next Computer was called NeXT Software and more than half of its work was put on hold. The company aims to develop OpenStep Enterprise’s object-oriented API and WebObjects application servers. While it provided an environment similar to NeXTSTEP OS for other systems, including Windows, it allowed web applications to run on all types of computers.
Lake, as Isaacson points out, did not go through with his moment, and Jobs still hoped to return to the company built together, but with dignity. While on vacation in Hawaii, his friend and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison approached him with a plan for help. $3 billion in financing to buy Apple. “I will buy a bad one, 25% of the company will immediately become its CEO, and we will be able to return it to the glory of the past,” he said, trying to convince him.
Steve Jobs had the opportunity to make a hostile takeover bid for Apple but refused to do so.
But Job decided to offer, who would say that he was not such a person as to accept an enemy. Also, Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter-. Apple’s market share reached 4% from the 16% it enjoyed in the late 1980s, and Gil Amelio, the company’s chief research engineer, became its CEO.
Lake had a big problem with his computer’s operating system: age quickly. Given this mission, the company began to deal with various options. The Continuous Copland (BeOS) program, although advanced, seemed not to be the solution to what the Cupertino company was looking for, since it was not ready for the launch of the next generation of products. We strongly need an OS with memory protection, network communication and application object oriented.
The company used the Solaris Solaris operating system and also considered Microsoft’s Windows NT. Bill Gates, very interested in the idea, began to deal personally with Amelios Microsoft’s own co-founder suggested at the All Things Digital conference in 2007. The best possibility for an agreement with Next was to use the operating system, but Amelio had argued with Steve for some time and did not dare to call him.
Despite the bad results of the past, Apple would begin to receive indications that it would then like to reach an agreement. Businesses began in middle management and continued until Jobs returned to Cupertino eleven years later. Finally, Lake bought Next in 1997 for $429 million and 1.5 million shares in a deal that saw part of the NeXT operating system being used to develop a new version of the Mac OS called Mac OS X.
As part of the deal, Jobs returned to Apple. First as an external consultant, then as interim CEO and, in 2000, as permanent CEO. He remained in this position until his resignation on August 24, 2011.the time before these on the 5th of October of the same year. During this time, Jobs promoted some of the most important changes in the company, such as reorganizing the product line and investing in the development of a new version of the OS.
Next, it could be seen as a failure in some way. In total, he sold 50,000 works, but the essence, including talent, were the elements that helped maintain Apple. NeXTSTEP technology has become the core of Mac OSeven some elements of the graphical interface were born in this OS, such as the Dock, the service menu and the “Columns” view of the Finder.
But above all, since NeXT had not yet been bought by Apple Tim Berners-Lee, who has been called “the father of the World Wide Web”; Then use the workstation to develop the first browser and server. id Software used these devices to develop the iconic “Doom” video game series. Many machines were also made by CIA and NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) factories.
Images | Wikimedia Commons | Paul Rand (NeXT) | Bernard Gotfryd Marcus Wichary
In Xataka | Tim Cook learned from Steve Jobs something that very few leaders do: to change your mind without fear
* A previous version of this article was published in December 2022
* Due to a technical error, the author of this article appears to be Andrés P. Mohorte. Its author is Javier Márquez
