No I don't remember them being "90 days from bankruptcy". They had a cash hoard the envy of many U.S. states, a small but loyal group of paying customers, and a number of sources of actual non-hardware revenue from key inventions and licenses. And they didn't have a bunch of employees from legacy business deals to find homes for.

What Apple lacked was a clear focus on what their business needed to be, which was selling hardware, not licensing the OS or making business software, or any of the other bad ideas they had from trying to compete with Microsoft directly.

What no one here or anywhere else seems to have an answer for is "What is Yahoo's core business". It used to be the Yellow Pages for the Internet, and now it's basically a Media company with some legacy stuff like web email.

"Apple Was 90 Days From Going Bankrupt"

  -- http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/06/02/steve-jobs-90-days/#gref

"At an executive Session of the board in June, with Amelio out of the room, Woolard described to current directors how he calculated their odds. "If we stay with Gil as CEO, think there's only 10% chance we will avoid bankruptcy," he said. "If we fire him and convince Steve to come take over, we have 60% chance of surviving. If we fire Gil, don't get Steve back, and have to search for new CEO, then we have a 40% chance of surviving. "The board gave him authority to ask Jobs to return."

  -- "Steve Jobs", Isaacson, pg 314

> What no one here or anywhere else seems to have an answer for is "What is Yahoo's core business".

That's probably indicative that we are not CEO material :-)

He was being a little hyperbolic there. Which is one of Steve Jobs' tendencies. They had "90 days of working capital" left, but it was still $1.2B and they had annual revenues of $7B in 1997 and pretty much no debt. They had to replace the CEO to restore investor confidence, and Jobs was clearly the best choice, but they could have found a different CEO and muddled through.

It was the worst state the company had been in, but the losses had stopped even before Jobs took over. Not to understate Jobs accomplishments. Just saying a competent CEO could turn Apple from a doghouse company to a profitable company. It took a genius CEO takes a company from the the doghouse to the most valuable in the world.

Outliers shouldn't be presented as typical data.

Outliers are perfectly valid responses to claims of "impossible".