Review: ‘Steve Jobs in Exile’ recounts Apple founder’s tough mid-career lessons

I recently got to read an advance copy of Geoffrey Cain’s new book, “Steve Jobs In Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary,” which was published this week. It’s a surprising and sometimes gruesome (in a businessy way) story that does not show off the famous man at the center of the story as much as depict all the ways he failed in what turned out to be preparation for his career-defining role as Apple CEO. (I also got to interview Cain about the book this week on Upgrade.)

Contrary to popular opinion, Jobs did not get fired from Apple—he got parked in a useless role until he quit out of frustration, as Cain recounts. Jobs was motivated to start NeXT Computer for two reasons: He saw a potential market for a high-end workstation in education and industry, and he knew that this was a market Apple wasn’t especially interested in, so he could avoid expensive and distracting lawsuits with the company he was being pushed out of. (That didn’t work.)

As depicted in the book, the same cycle seems to repeat again and again. Out of the gate, Jobs decides what his new company will focus on by cannily identifying a potential market—the demand for “3M” machines, workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and a processor capable of handling a million instructions per second. Scientists and researchers, Cain recounts, said they would buy them in large numbers—assuming they cost no more than about $10,000 each.

Then the second cycle happens: Jobs ends up getting focused on all sorts of little details that matter to him, but don’t necessarily serve the original product goal, from the design of the factory that would build the workstations to the expensive physical design of the workstations themselves, made unlike any other computer in existence.

The end result was pretty much what you’d expect: The computer that NeXT ended up building didn’t satisfy the requirements of those original higher-ed buyers who were the target market. Jobs had followed his bliss, and his good taste, in interesting directions. NeXT made an interesting product. But the product failed at being a successful product, just as NeXT kept failing at business.

And it just keeps happening, as the book details. Early investor and Jobs believer H. Ross Perot (yes, the former independent presidential candidate!) had ties in the government that would’ve allowed NeXT to sell computers to America’s intelligence agencies, primarily for spy-satellite image analysis. Jobs refused the lifeline, saying he didn’t want to do business with the government.

A deal with IBM had the potential for NeXT’s operating system to take the ecological niche of Microsoft Windows before it had been firmly established on the world’s PCs. Jobs decided he was uncomfortable working with IBM.

Time and again in “Steve Jobs in Exile,” you see Jobs act like his company’s own worst enemy. He makes decisions for perfectly understandable personal reasons, but they go against the entire premise of the company he had established. (How does a guy with a fundamentally anti-establishment worldview end up building a company designed for elite institutions, industry, and the government?) The situation at NeXT becomes increasingly untenable, and to Jobs’s credit, he does seem to have learned that his mistakes are what led the company to the cliff.

When Jobs discovered that a small piece of the overall NeXT software picture, WebObjects, had a potential market in revolutionizing early web commerce, he recognized it, and the company benefited. But you get the sense that Jobs was not comfortable changing the world of selling things on the Internet, when he really still wanted to change the world.

In the end, NeXT’s investment in a forward-looking Unix-based operating system underpinned by the Mach microkernel made it an acquisition target for Apple, which was desperately looking for a replacement for the classic Mac OS. The rest is history, though Cain points out just how dramatic and fraught the merger of the NeXT staff with Apple’s late-90s engineers really was.

If you think Jobs’s years at NeXT were some sort of graduate education in which he grew older and wiser so he could emerge, fully formed, as Apple CEO, you’ve got it wrong. As Cain expertly points out, the NeXT era was one in which Jobs was humbled again and again, until he started to realize that his instincts were not infallible, his distortion field did not reflect reality, and that he had to modify his behavior to have any hope of success. (In fact, Jobs’s greatest success during the period came with Pixar—where he had a much more hands-off relationship with the company’s executives.)

The Jobs who sold his company to Apple was not tanned, rested, and ready for action. He was beaten, battered, bruised, and humbled. But he had learned enough lessons that he was able to give Apple a better version of himself, the second time around.

[Steve Jobs In Exile (Portfolio), available at Amazon, Bookshop, and everywhere else.]