I can't argue with this, I guess, except to say that if this counts as a terrible failure we need a bunch of new words to describe all the much, much bigger failures that we've seen over the last twenty years.
After living through all these massive bubbles and frauds, I guess I have a pretty high standard for failure. "Failure to make more profit than an index fund" is not a success, I'll admit, but Canon could have done worse, oh so much worse. They didn't win, but emerging from all that risk without a total loss? Can we score it as a mulligan?
And I'll definitely push back on this whole "pity sale" concept. Just because Steve Jobs found the one and only way in the world to turn his looming total loss into a mulligan plus the seeds of future empire doesn't mean he lost. This isn't chess. Companies aren't competing on some kind of infinite, uniform ideal grid, they compete in the real world, and money is money, even if they have to call in every favor and exploit every advantage.
You can score it however you like, and I grant it wasn't a total disaster, but by the standards of high-tech investments, it was definitely a failure, albeit a gracefully executed one.
I will stand by the notion that it was a pity sale. The CEO is not a salable company asset. That Apple bought NeXT for so much as a way to make Jobs happy doesn't mean that NeXT did well; it just means that Apple really wanted Jobs. (Correctly, as it turns out.) Props to Jobs for cashing out his investors rather than just pocketing the money, though.
Apple did really want Jobs. But they also really wanted NeXT's operating system. The month before they bought NeXT, every pundit was predicting they'd buy the BeOS instead, because they all knew that Mac OS 9 wasn't going to cut it.
And now here I am, working on a system all of whose libraries have entry points prefixed with "NS".
Well, whatever. History rarely politely conforms to our categories. I suppose we could declare NeXT to be a "disaster" relative to every other company founded by Steve Jobs.
After living through all these massive bubbles and frauds, I guess I have a pretty high standard for failure. "Failure to make more profit than an index fund" is not a success, I'll admit, but Canon could have done worse, oh so much worse. They didn't win, but emerging from all that risk without a total loss? Can we score it as a mulligan?
And I'll definitely push back on this whole "pity sale" concept. Just because Steve Jobs found the one and only way in the world to turn his looming total loss into a mulligan plus the seeds of future empire doesn't mean he lost. This isn't chess. Companies aren't competing on some kind of infinite, uniform ideal grid, they compete in the real world, and money is money, even if they have to call in every favor and exploit every advantage.