I'm not so sure. Last time he was ousted from the company it dodn't go well at all...
Not well for him or for Apple?
Jobs will go to extremes for his sense of justice. He could have stayed at Apple the first time, but he quit instead to make a new company that did what he felt he ought to do.
Re:Steve Jobs speaks out about his health
by chollida1 on Monday January 05, 2009 @02:34PM
(#420937)
> He could have stayed at Apple the first time
Really?
In John Scully's biography he made it clear that Steve was told he would have to leave in no uncertain terms, by both the board and John Scully.
They wouldn't even allow him to stay as the janitor because John couldn't trust that Steve wouldn't go around undermining him.
For an Apple fanboy you're not very well-versed in Apple history.
No, I'm not. I got a Mac about 6 months ago, and while I read things I find interesting about the company, I don't go out of my way to read biographies and the like. So from what I'd read, Jobs was demoted and he chose to quit rather than stay at his position.
You don't have to go out of your way to read biographies. In Jobs' Stanford commencement speech, discussed and linked many times here on HN, he talks about being "fired" from Apple. He also discusses it in Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary. Given that Jobs himself publicly acknowledges that he was fired, I'd be interested to know what it is you read that claims otherwise.
But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
That I always assumed meant he left for something else, but rereading I can see that he does specifically say fired. Huh! I don't know where I got the impression that he left voluntarily, though it's one that I've had for a while now.
This wasn't about sacrifice for the company. This isn't Jobs working a week without sleeping to get a product launched, or his leaving his own company because he thought it was going downhill. This was rumormongering. Jobs had a history of cancer, so people thought the worst; while that's partly understandable, the people who accused him needed to assume that Jobs was enough of a dick to just not tell people about a life-threatening disease for short-term growth. This continued after Jobs called that one reporter, insulted him, and then promised to tell him about his health condition off the book.
As such, it's pretty shameful that Jobs had to come out and tell everybody about the state of his health. Media types, even tech media types, care more about a dramatic narrative than they do about accurate reporting, and that showed itself here.