Sergei Brin doesn't look happy
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/EverySteveJobsVideo
Go to 3:20. The audience pan across and you see Sergei the sole person not amused.
You can't miss him. He's dressed as Tom Cruise from Risky Business.
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Absolutely. Probably one of the best salesmen of the century. It all came from NeXT. Truth be told, though NeXT computers did some things really well and the OS itself was really great (it's what OSX is based on), the computers were insanely expensive and didn't sell well at all. He was a salesman before, but he really honed those skills with NeXT as, overpriced and outdated as they may be, he HAD to sell them if he was going to continue his career. I sometimes wonder if part of Jobs great success in the end, was in trying new things, breaking all the rules, because he was confident that even if the product turned out to be a flop; he could sell it. As a long long long time Apple fan, I can certainly say that they have released some really crummy stuff that's way behind everyone else. They've also released some pretty great stuff! But the genius is, they sold about the same amount of each!
NeXT Computers weren't outdated. They were more advanced than the competition. Steve learned at NeXT to be less ahead of the competition if you want to win the markets.
People were dealing with Windows 3.11 and NeXTStep 3.3 was out. It was light-years ahead. The hardware on SPARC and HP Gecko were true workstation class hardware carrying on the expensive tradition of hardware for heavy work. The Intel port allowed PCs but only a few vendors paid the $5k certification fees to be on the list.
Then the User License: $795 and Developer: $4995. The University License for both: $299.
We were way ahead of everyone else. That was the problem. We were 5 years in many areas or more ahead. No one got it. Steve woke up and slowed down the tech to be either a bit behind, right at or a bit ahead of the competition which allowed people to grasp the future more easily.
People didn't get Display Postscript to Postscript Printing for WYSIWYG in 1992. They didn't get Fax Modems built-in handling all your paperless documentation. They didn't get a lot that people now still don't seem to get as FAX is still highly used but people still buy those crappy HP fax machines.
People truly didn't get Object-Oriented Programming outside the Enterprise until around OS X 10.4. People fought it.
Now people today laugh at those that don't get it.
Change too far ahead is what killed NeXT. That and Bill Gates and Adobe screwing us over, not to mention a certain group inside IBM who didn't like how fast NeXTSTEP ran on IBM hardware and made IBM UNIX look like a child next to it so they ran NeXTSTEP in emulation during demos to the top brass who canned the partnership.
Steve learned a lot about back stabbing from partners and getting the right people on-board in legal, design, manufacturing, channel distribution and more who had all the connections so when the iPod or iPhone arrived all i's were dotted and t's were crossed.