Steve Jobs’ ego nearly wrecked Apple in the 1980s

Exiled to a building he and his team called “Siberia,” Steve Jobs didn’t just lose a boardroom fight—he helped push Apple into a leadership spiral that culminated in layoffs, a first quarterly loss, and talks to sell the company. Before his 1997 return, a stri

In May 1985, Steve Jobs was no longer welcome in the Apple boardroom. After losing a power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley, he was pushed out to a small building across the street from Apple’s headquarters. Jobs and his colleagues reportedly called his new office “Siberia.”

It wasn’t just a change of address.. Corporate reports stopped flowing to his desk, and executives stopped calling.. The result was a kind of stagnation that hurt to watch—and. in Susan Barnes’s words. it was “really cruel.” Barnes. a Macintosh financial controller who had previously reported to Jobs. recalled seeing how “ostracized he was in the Valley.”

Jobs is now remembered for returning to Apple in 1997 and saving it from near-bankruptcy.. But before the comeback, Apple was set drifting toward catastrophe.. The striking part is that the qualities that later helped him build iPod. iPhone. and iPad momentum also fueled the breakdown that nearly killed the company.

Five moments from that era show how Jobs could be wrong—how his instincts could destabilize Apple when the company most needed steady, shared leadership.

By early 1985, Apple had splintered into warring factions.. Jobs undermined Sculley to colleagues and challenged his every decision.. In one telling remark. Jobs—described as Apple’s chairman—told an executive. “I am the board.” Sculley’s supporters. meanwhile. stormed the human resources department to complain. and executives were left with the same uneasy uncertainty: no one knew who was really running the company.

The damage landed at the worst time.. Macintosh sales were declining, and IBM and its clones were eating market share.. Apple responded by laying off more than 1,200 employees and announcing its first-ever quarterly loss.. The company also secretly entered talks to sell itself to General Electric.. By the time the board sided with Sculley and stripped Jobs of his authority. the internal war had already cost Apple months of progress.

That autumn, Jobs left Apple and started a new computer company, NeXT.. The pattern followed him.. Jobs rushed out the first NeXT computer, called the Cube, in October 1988 with an unfinished operating system.. The Cube was priced more than double what its target customers said they could pay.. NeXT sold only a few dozen computers a month.. The company eventually laid off half its workforce and abandoned hardware entirely.

Then there was the launch that became mythology: the Macintosh.. The Macintosh launch in January 1984—supported by the Super Bowl commercial. a famous keynote. and the promise of a “computer for the rest of us”—generated strong early shipments in its first hundred days.. The problem came after that initial wave.

The Macintosh had no hard drive, and its functionality was extremely limited.. Its price was $2,495—almost $8,000 in today’s dollars.. The first wave of buyers loved it, but at that price, there was no second wave.. The Mac was a beautiful machine that regular customers simply couldn’t justify buying.. The disappointment helped ignite the power struggle with Sculley. Jobs’s ouster. and ultimately the twelve years of strategic drift that nearly killed Apple.

The story repeats again and again: ship the thing early, commit to the creator’s vision, and then blame the people when reality doesn’t cooperate.

In early 1985, Jobs pushed Apple to release the Macintosh Office, a version of the Mac aimed at corporate buyers.. Its technical heart—a device for sharing files across office computers—was severely delayed and not ready to ship.. The product landed to weak sales, accelerating the internal crisis that would end with Jobs’s removal months later.

At NeXT, the same logic returned.. After the Cube was released, NeXT cofounder Dan’l Lewin presented Jobs with a list of problems piling up.. Rather than fix them, Jobs blamed the sales team.. Lewin pushed back. saying. “We’re so far away from selling anybody anything right now. ” and adding. “You don’t want to hear it. but this is not a problem in sales.” Jobs demoted Lewin and announced the move in an email to the entire company.

By 1996, Apple was already scattered. When Gil Amelio became Apple’s CEO, engineers kept repeating one phrase to him: “Steve Jobs can get away with whatever he wants, so I’m going to do whatever I want.”

The company had lost focus.. Apple released more than seventy products in a single year. including a $6. 500 laptop that caught fire and had to be recalled.. Apple also poured $500 million into a new operating system called Copland that never shipped.. At that point, no one could decide when to cut their losses.

Jobs had spent a decade at NeXT making a similar mistake—refusing to abandon his hardware business long after advisors told him it was finished.. When he returned to Apple in 1997, he finally killed 70 percent of the product portfolio.. The earlier refusal to let go of what he loved became part of the education he paid for: survival sometimes means abandoning even the beautiful things.

The final lesson came through how Jobs treated the people around him.

On Super Bowl Sunday in January 1985, Apple aired a follow-up to its iconic “1984” commercial. Called “Lemmings,” the ad depicted blindfolded businesspeople marching off a cliff—an explicit message to corporate customers that they were “idiots” if they didn’t buy the product.

At NeXT, Jobs went after partners and investors.. He called his distribution partner’s stores “ugly.” He also blew off lucrative meetings arranged by the biggest investor: Ross Perot.. Perot—described as the Texas billionaire and soon-to-be presidential candidate—delivered the lesson himself.. At a dinner with NeXT executives and corporate customers in San Francisco, Perot asked all the customers to stand.. Then he turned to everyone still sitting. Jobs included. and instructed: “Now. everybody who’s sitting down. applaud these people who are standing up. because that’s why we’re here.”

It took twelve years for Jobs to absorb the lessons.. By 1997, he had learned to step back, delegate, and let go.. He chose his battles instead of fighting every one.. The tantrums that had defined his management style ebbed. and instead he listened to his lieutenants in Monday morning staff meetings—implementing their advice and building an executive team at Apple that held together for eight years.

Jobs later admitted, “Sometimes I go for ‘best’ when I should go for ‘better,’” and that he could “end up going nowhere or backwards.” It was a confession the younger Jobs—still fighting the company as if it were an opponent—could never have made.

In hindsight, Apple’s brush with destruction didn’t come from lack of genius. It came from genius running the show without enough restraint, too often treating dissent as defiance and pushing products, teams, and markets to conform to his will.

Steve Jobs Apple John Sculley Macintosh NeXT Cube Gil Amelio Copland Ross Perot iPod iPhone iPad corporate strategy layoffs product launches