I wonder what kind of people are these Steve Jobs cultists...
Most of the "wisdom" of all "Steve Jobs said..." is just subjective interpretation of vague and ambiguous statements.
Truth, the guy had a lot of successes. But if you look at them most were just accidental and he only recognized them as success when they hit him in the face.
* Apple didn't "invent" the Mac, all of it's technologies were copied straight out of Xerox's Palo Alto research center. He found them in a demo.
* Jobs didn't "invent" Pixar. George Lucas and Ed Catmull did it. His project was to create an hardware company (the only thing he knew to do) and to sell it. But Pixar "accidentally" found success creating animated intros for commercials and television shows and Jobs did nothing to discover this early market.
* Jobs didn't invent the iPhone. He was scared of dealing in an area where Apple didn't have expertise and tought it would be dangerous (a call to 911 failing because the phone could be stuck in a processing task). It took years of internal pressure by Apple engineers and management and a personal fiasco on a Nokia phone with iTunes for him to accept the iPhone.
* Jobs didn't invent the AppStore. For the first 6 months the iPhone didn't had an AppStore because he tought it would relinquish control of the platform to others. He only accepted it because in these first 6 months the iPhone sales were a disaster. He accepted the AppStore because the customers were screamming for it. It was the AppStore that saved the iPhone.
* Jobs didn't invent the Apple I, Wozniak did it. And the idea to turn the kit into a functional computer was not Jobs'. It was a precondition imposed by a RadioShack manager.
* NEXT wasn't a commercial success. An expensive computer for college students with a black and white monitor was not selling enough to sustain the company. He was basically lucky that at the same time, Apple under Sculley, was a much bigger failure and the management board called him back.
"Reality distortion field" and "stealing" other people's ideas were Jobs' greatest talents. But then, these are the talents of most cult founders from Jim Jones to Donald Trump.
I'm predisposed to dislike Steve Jobs (I'm predisposed to dislike anyone who exploits other people tbh, so virtually all high-profile CEO).
But there's already 5 pretty big successes in your list. At which point it stops being statically improbable he isn't exceptionally talented by some kind of metric?
The Newton, Pippin and Copland were done before and without Jobs. And Lisa wasn't his thing (the Mac was, he was remove from being involved with Lisa).
As for the G4 cube, it is just a failed model, not some huge company bet - every company has some models that don't sell well. Apple's laptops and iMacs still sold greatly from Jobs new iMac to this day - if a particular model didn't do well that's not exactly a big deal. In fact it's an expected part of doing business. Apple had several other such products on its way to becoming the #1 valued company on earth.
Also, what Nokia-iTunes fiasco? Nokia folded, and iTunes became the biggest music store, and then an app store and a streaming service.
The point being that this is irrelevant. Do you think Bezos invented Cloud services or coded AWS himself? Did Musk invent the electric car? Did Ford invent the regular car?
It's about leading and putting things to market and succeding there, not about inventing stuff. They're not in the inventing or research business, they are in the selling commercial products business.
He didn't have the ideas, but he was a core part building the organizations. So you shouldn't listen to him when it comes to computer engineering, but you probably should listen to his thoughts on leadership and organizations.
That's a distorted view of what business is. You don't need to invent anything to be a great business or a great business leader: just to do it in a form that the market appreciates.
In fact the invention is mostly irrelevant to the business part. Ford didn't invent the car either, IKEA didn't invent the furniture (not even the self-assembly furniture), and Walmart etc. didn't invent the supermarket.
Most of the "wisdom" of all "Steve Jobs said..." is just subjective interpretation of vague and ambiguous statements.
Truth, the guy had a lot of successes. But if you look at them most were just accidental and he only recognized them as success when they hit him in the face.
* Apple didn't "invent" the Mac, all of it's technologies were copied straight out of Xerox's Palo Alto research center. He found them in a demo.
* Jobs didn't "invent" Pixar. George Lucas and Ed Catmull did it. His project was to create an hardware company (the only thing he knew to do) and to sell it. But Pixar "accidentally" found success creating animated intros for commercials and television shows and Jobs did nothing to discover this early market.
* Jobs didn't invent the iPhone. He was scared of dealing in an area where Apple didn't have expertise and tought it would be dangerous (a call to 911 failing because the phone could be stuck in a processing task). It took years of internal pressure by Apple engineers and management and a personal fiasco on a Nokia phone with iTunes for him to accept the iPhone.
* Jobs didn't invent the AppStore. For the first 6 months the iPhone didn't had an AppStore because he tought it would relinquish control of the platform to others. He only accepted it because in these first 6 months the iPhone sales were a disaster. He accepted the AppStore because the customers were screamming for it. It was the AppStore that saved the iPhone.
* Jobs didn't invent the Apple I, Wozniak did it. And the idea to turn the kit into a functional computer was not Jobs'. It was a precondition imposed by a RadioShack manager.
* NEXT wasn't a commercial success. An expensive computer for college students with a black and white monitor was not selling enough to sustain the company. He was basically lucky that at the same time, Apple under Sculley, was a much bigger failure and the management board called him back.
"Reality distortion field" and "stealing" other people's ideas were Jobs' greatest talents. But then, these are the talents of most cult founders from Jim Jones to Donald Trump.