stevenberlinjohnson.com: Is Steve Jobs Repeating His Past Mistakes?
I'm sure somewhere in Jobs' head he thinks that if he had been running Apple instead of John Sculley, the Mac could have out-innovated and out-marketed Microsoft through the late eighties and early nineties, and kept Windows from dominating the planet. In other words, it wasn't that Apple erred in following the closed platform strategy. They erred in that they had the wrong guy running the company. That may well be delusional, but the fact that AAPL now has a larger market cap than MSFT, twelve years after Jobs' return to Apple, has to give one pause. So in Jobs' mind, I suspect it's not that he's making the same mistake all over again. Instead, he's proving that his original decision wasn't a mistake in the first place.
I think it's not just somewhere in his head. I think that's his analysis of the situation. I remember him saying that it took 10 years for Microsoft to catch up to Apple and that's when Windows really took off.
Is there any doubt that if he was around in the early nineties, Apple in '95 would have been a very different company?
