I saw a lot of "what I am thankful for" posts last week in connection with Thanksgiving, but this one by Michael Arrington was particularly interesting. Arrington is now known as the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley based blog, and I frequently link to iPhone-related posts on TechCrunch and its mobile-specific sibling, MobileCrunch. But back in the 1990s, Arrington was just a Stanford Law grad and an associate at Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. That firm represented NeXT, the computer company started by Steve Jobs after he was kicked out of Apple, and Arrington's post provides a little insider insight on working on the deal in which Apple acquired NeXT and brought Steve Jobs back to the company.
That deal forever changed not just Apple, but thanks to the renaissance at Apple since Jobs returned, also had a huge impact on the computer industry, the consumer electronics industry, the music industry and the cell phone industry. And it certainly had a huge effect on me; if it wasn't for that deal, Apple may not have ever produced the iPhone, I'd probably be using a Blackberry (yawn) and I can't imagine that I would be blogging about it.
Yesterday, John Gruber at Daring Fireball recently posted a link to an old Fortune article by Stewert Alsop in which Alsop predicted at the time that Apple was making a mistake acquiring NeXT. Alsop wrote: "It is very, very difficult to see how Apple will translate the value of
Next's software into something meaningful to its own customers." Obviously, Apple did quite well translating the NeXT software into the Mac OS X that runs Macs, not to mention the operating system that runs the iPhone. To be fair, at the time, Alsop was concerned that Apple had acquired NeXT but not Steve Jobs, writing: "Jobs has spent most of the time since December 20 making it clear that
he will not actually do anything for Apple once Apple's purchase of
Next is complete. In other words, he's going to take his money and run." Fortunately, Steve Jobs did return to Apple and now it is impossible to think of Apple without thinking of Jobs.
I join Arrington in being thankful for Steve Jobs, and I think you will enjoy reading Arrington's good post.
