I am reading this biography, which carries the subtitle “The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business”.
The first half of the 300+ page book describes Steve Jobs in his years up to age 30 or so. While he built Apple Computer during this time, lots of his major failures happened as well. According to this excellently researched book by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, Steve Jobs was -to summarize it in a simple way- quite a jerk both personally as well as in business. His early success made him arrogant and his capability of sensing next wave technology developments was both a blessing and a problem. Convinced about himself, he thought he was able to rely on his instincts only and avoid market research entirely. Some infamous examples of his subsequent product management failures at that time were:

• The first Macintosh lacked software applications (only Mac Word, Mac Paint and MS Word were available); also the internal memory as well as hard disk drive capacity were too small, requiring users to constantly use the floppy disk drive. This was dubbed the “Disk Drive Olympics” within the Apple Mac team.

• Another major failure was the Apple internal project Lisa, which never managed to develop a product that had a market acceptable price.

• Infamous, too, was his first venture NEXT Computers, right after he left Apple. No clear customer target group in mind, endless product development, and again way too high product price, which ultimately lead to its failure.

• Most of us know of Pixar as being a success story in the animation movie. Have you ever heard of Pixar Image Computer? Steve Jobs had it in mind –in retrospect quite amusingly- to market the customized computer system that the Pixar group, which he bought from Star Wars Star Trek inventor George Lucas for a cheap 10 million USD, used to create their cutting edge animated films. Jobs tried to sell this computer system to hospitals because he thought that the image processing capabilities would be of great use in analysing X-ray or MRI pictures. Of course that environment cannot accept complicated-to-handle tools, which is what their system was. And the price was once again way too high. This is yet another example where Jobs did not analyse market needs prior to a product development launch.

While the above gives the impression that Steve jobs was by no means the genius so many think of, please note that this summary is only based on one half of the biography. I assume I will read about some more human side and also a more business savvy side of him in the other half, which I plan to write about as well.

Also, the above examples lead me to a book I intend to read next. It is called Why Smart Executives FAIL – and what you can learn from their mistakes.