Steve Jobs' Most Important Power Moves While at NeXT

We’re all familiar with the dramatized backstory of Steve Jobs. The college dropout who went on to found one of the world’s biggest computer companies in Apple Inc., only to be fired by the machine he built and brought back a decade later to dominate the world. His life would become the stuff that legends are made of. But in reflecting on the tech visionary's acclaimed career, we must acknowledge some of the other landmark achievements he pulled off during his firing from Apple, that being his second start-up: NeXT. Despite limited commercial success, the company proved to be an instrumental figure for the computer industry thanks in part to the critical decisions made by Jobs. From unqiue business practices to revolutionary software, here's a look at Steve Jobs' Most Important Power Moves While at NeXT.

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Date: Sept. 1985

Jobs planted the organizational seed for NeXT by bringing over several key Apple members, while still working for the company. After informing (and impressing) Apple's board of directors of his new business venture, he then announced that several “low-level” people who would join the NeXT team: the first Mac programmer, George Crowsl; Mac hardware engineer, Rich Page; Apple University Consortium creator, Dan’l Lewinl; MBA fiancé genius, Susan Barnes; and VP of Software Technology, Bud Tribble. The board wasn’t too thrilled with the news. Jobs then invited a number of journalists to join him at his mansion in Woodside and announced his resignation from Apple. That’s a G move!

Date: 1986

Known for his fanatical approach towards hardware design, Stevie was poised to make the company’s first-ever computer a machine that embodied power and strength. Repulsed with the results of the several design houses he hired to create protoypes, including one that resembled a human head, he brought in the designer of the Snow White design language, Hartmut Esslinger, to create the final product. Jobs immediately labeled it the NeXTcube when shown the end result. Even though the machine stoodout as a complete failure, it was the NeXTcube's groundbreaking form factor that established the radical design identity of Apple’s future desktop machines.

Date: January 1986

A computer is only as good as its operating system. Considering Apple’s attempts to enhance its user interface and Microsoft’s early struggles to capture the casual PC consumer market, Jobs made his company focus excessively on the NeXT’s OS. Running the dynamic software on a microkernel meant it could be split into several different servers instead of running freely on each one. This allowed developers more leverage to create dynamic programs. Not to mention, it was the first UNIX-operated OS to ever sport a graphics user interface. Fun facts: The first web browser and Doom were developed using NeXTSTEP.

Date: Jan 30, 1986

What was once considered a hobby quickly transformed into one of the biggest filmmaking studios ever created. Jobs went on to purchase the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm from the man himself, George Lucas, with the money he collected from selling his shares in Apple and incorporated it as Pixar. Envisioning the future of computer animation, Jobs utilized the company as a platform to launch its 3D-heavy API with the NeXT OS called RenderMan. The program made it possible to run 3D graphics smoothly with the assistance of the NeXT computer’s powerful hardware. Talk about utilizing resources.

Date: Spring 1986

Looking to establish brand identity, Jobs recruited popular graphic designer Paul Randto put together a 100-page brochure detailing the company, along with the name, logo, and the precise angle of the logo: 28-degrees. It ran them a good $100,000, but proved to be money well spent.

Date: February 1987

With the company burning money faster than it was making, the need for an investor became extremely crucial. Keep in mind this was before NeXT even launched its first-ever machine. As luck would have it, millionaire and future Independent Party Presidential Candidate, Ross Perot, phoned Jobs after seeing the company featured as part of a CBS documentary called The Entrepreneurs. His words: “If you ever need an investor, call me.”

Perot invested $20 million dollars and joined the board of directors, helping push the company forward.

Date: Sept. 1988

Considering how the majority of IBM mainframes were utilizing UNIX, the PC hardware staple saw great potential in working with the NeXT operating system. Unhappy with the progress of Microsoft’s OS, Big Blue struck a partnership with Jobs and Co., optioning $60 million to put NeXTSTEP on all IBM machines. Needless to say, it was a huge win for NeXT at that time.

Date: June 1989

It’s been well documented that Jobs hated floppy disks. So, in an attempt to make his computers superior to the competition, he signed a massive deal with Canon that included the integration of its magneto-optical drives into future machines, along with the exclusive rights to sell NeXT computers in Asia and an investment of $100 million for 15-percent of the company. Cha-ching!

Date: Jan. 1992

Many experts felt the move came a little too late, and even Jobs considered it the first sign of failure. After years of restricting the company’s OS to NeXT machines only, Jobs finally caved in and licensed the software to run on x86 computers. The move not only sparked the interest of numerous PC users and developers, but a familiar name from Jobs' past was starting to imagine a change to its own OS, with NeXTSTEP serving as the foundation.

Date: December 1996

The early 90s was by far the roughest stretch in Jobs’ career. Ironically, the company that originally fired him was doing just as bad. So, with a number of computer manufacturers looking to acquire the NeXTSTEP OS platform, Apple made Jobs an offer he couldn't refuse. The company acquired NeXT for $429 million, offered 1.5 million Apple shares to Jobs, and after three years of consulting, made him CEO once again.

Circle complete.