6 of Apple’s Greatest Mistakes

I finally met Steve Wozniak in person at a computer conference some years after Steve Jobs’ death. He told attendees he rather liked Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, calling it a brilliant work of science fiction. One key difference between that alternate universe and reality, Wozniak pointed out, was that the early days of Apple were all about working through failure. Some years prior, I had published this piece on ReadWriteWeb (there used to be a “-Web” in its name), and I learned from Woz that he was a reader of mine, taking note of my byline. I wished I had a time machine, to go back a quarter-century and tell my younger self with the big hair and the velour sweaters, how it would all be worth it.

“Completely new devices that successfully revolutionize a market cannot be half-baked, like the Edsel or New Coke. They must do everything that a customer can reasonably imagine can be done with it, and not halfway. Not in the future, not ‘coming soon.’ The iPhone is the permanent, lasting record of Steve Jobs having learned the lesson of Macintosh #1.”