When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple

He liked to say that he wanted to leave his mark on the universe. We don't know if he was capable of going that far, but he certainly found the way to impact our way of life and our daily habits. We're talking about Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer Inc. (Apple Inc. since 2007) in 1976, along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. In short, one of the best-known men of our time and one of the most influential, despite passing away at just 56 in 2011. Acrobatic entrepreneur and visionary genius are the definitions most often associated with the figure of the founder of Apple, capable of creating, with his collaborators, a world-leading company in the production of hardware and software, revolutionizing the relationship between man and computer. From the first operating systems to Macintosh personal computers (the first with a mouse and icons, born in 1984), to the recent iPod and iPad digital music players, up to the entry into the world of telephony with the iPhone, Jobs sought to combine design and functionality, bringing unique and innovative products to market.

As Piero Angela wrote: "To unite the worlds of research and industry, you need [...] people capable of creating ingenious connections, as Steve Jobs did [...]. Jobs had an extraordinary ability to understand how to combine different technological solutions to create incredibly attractive and well-functioning products. He was an extraordinary innovator, equipped with technical skills and great entrepreneurial instinct."

What few people emphasize, however, is how Steve Jobs became all this at the end of a tortuous and uncertain path, a path made of dreams, chimeras, failures, and even humiliations. A path that is reconstructed in the book The Exile (Egea, 2026, pp. 376. Also available as an ebook), in which American journalist Geoffrey Cain recounts the years in which Jobs was forced to stay away from his creation, Apple . It all began in April 1985, when the brilliant computer scientist was kicked out by the management of the company he had created nearly ten years earlier. The accusation that led to his dismissal was that he was unable to combine genius and practicality, vision and common sense. In short, Jobs created beautiful objects ahead of their time, but they didn't sell as well as hoped. For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs and his new company NeXT wandered in entrepreneurial limbo. A period of spectacular failures, impending bankruptcy, and brutal humiliations: the ultimate tests from which would emerge the visionary leader who, by creating the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, would transform Apple into the most valuable company on the planet. Drawing on previously unseen footage and interviewing key figures and collaborators, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs's "lost decade," the formative years that shaped the icon we thought we knew. Uncovering never-before-seen videos of Jobs's NeXT meetings and confidential company documents, Cain offers the definitive account of how failure transformed a bold young prodigy into the genius who would revolutionize our relationship with technology—and our daily lives. Cain thus gives us the missing piece in the legend of Steve Jobs, the one in which Steve learned to be a leader by discovering the power of discipline, and in which a resounding failure became the cornerstone of one of the greatest renaissances in the history of entrepreneurship.

As Diego Piacentini, a longtime Apple executive, writes in the preface to the Italian edition of the book: "The Jobs who returned to Apple in 1997 was neither the visionary and chaotic Jobs of his early years nor the idealistic and rigid one who, during the NeXT days, pursued formal perfection at the expense of survival. He was a man who had experienced real failure and had learned to distinguish the essential from the noise. Still a visionary, but with his feet firmly on the ground."