What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

TechCrunch carried this inspiring article on Thanksgiving, titled “What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?“. Steve Jobs (wiki) was thrown out of Apple, the company he co-founded in 1976 in 1985 by the then Apple CEO John Sculley. And in 1997, Steve sold his company NeXT back to Apple and officially joined the company.

What if Steve wouldnt have joined Apple? TechCrunch has few of those answers:

• In 1997 Apple had just completed a fiscal year where they lost about $1 billion on $7 billion in revenue. The company was worth about $4 billion. Today Apple is worth a staggering $184 billion on revenues of $36.5 billion and net income of $8 billion.
• In 1997 Apple had a snoozy product line that included the ill-fated Newton, the Performa, the Power Macintosh, the PowerBook a bunch of printers and a few servers. Today Apple has the sexiest products in the business: iMacs, Macbooks, iPhones, iPods and more. Even the Mac Mini has a place in my home, powering my television.

Forget all that, what would our world look like without Steve Jobs?

We’d likely still be in mobile phone hell. Chances are we still wouldn’t have a decent browsing experience on the phone, and we certainly wouldn’t be enjoying third party apps like Pandora or Skype on whatever clunker the carriers handed us. Even if you use an Android, Palm Pre or newer Blackberry today, you must thank Apple for pushing open the doors to mobile freedom. Think back to the phone you had in 2006, and then tell me you don’t love Apple for the iPhone alone (yes, I’ve moved on, but the iPhone was the genesis).

{Via TechCrunch}