Jobs' strength was in how he saw the world. His intuition, ability to imagine the future, inspire others and execute on that vision. Marketing and communications skills then almost felt like a by-product of such rare personality traits. I suggest reading "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products" or any interviews with Jony where he talks about the interactions they had with Steve.
The level of product and design thinking Steve and Jony had is so outside of some measurable 'data' that engineers often tend to underestimate its importance.
Gee, why don’t their competitors try that?
I was actually trying to make the point that he was exactly positioned because of his personality to find some level of greatness. That that greatness would end up being AAPL is, I claim, the "smart friend".
Jobs, for one, knew better to have smart friends, knew also how to push smart friends to do big things.
I am in no way trying to take Jobs down a notch.
You can dislike the man, but saying that is not fair, he was far from a one hit wonder.
Apple, NeXT, Pixar? those are the ones I recall. Luck won't get you there.
But just to be pedantic with your list, NeXT's success is debatable and not likely to have happened at all if Apple had not happened first. And from what I've read, Pixar did its best when Jobs got out of the way and let them do what they wanted to do: make films, not hardware, not software as Jobs imagined.
he got out of the way and became disney's biggest shareholder in the same deal...
when talking about Job's nose for success that's a big detail skip around.
the deal with NeXT left him with control over the board of directors on Apple.
I don't like him and I don't like how Apple operates in the developer's landscape, but I HAVE to acknowledge that what Jobs touched turned into gold.
The lessons Steve learned at NeXT enabled the huge success of his second tenure at Apple.
You still need luck to discover opportunities with the correct growth slope in the market gradient landscape, funding landscape, etc. Some of this is intelligence, but it's also "right place, right time" and "who you know".
But you also need the skill and hard work to execute, grit when facing headwinds, and vision to see the gradient landscape as it ascends and unfolds into the stratosphere. You have to be adaptable. Future thinking, but realistically grounded in implementable plans with a pragmatism for building things the market will want, avoiding the traps your biases may set up for you.
Jobs had all of this.
I sense his manipulative personality (my words, for other's you can substitute "reality distortion field") was always there. I'm not disputing Wozniak of course, but I think Jobs growth was in learning how to channel that personality toward selling product.
Jobs got to where he was because he had a smart friend. But there were a lot of smart people in the Home-brew Computer Club and elsewhere around the U.S. and world — and a lot of friends of these smart people.
Maybe it was a happy accident of history, but I think Jobs was the right person with the smart friend, just looking desperately for "the next big thing".
The Next Big Thing was not, as he found out, "blue boxes". But I bring that up as an example of his entrepreneurism showing itself at an opportunity even before Apple.