Michal Marek The popular story about how Steve Jobs was fired from Apple is said to be not entirely true. At least that's what Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple with Jobs, claims. The entire picture of how the co-founder of the Californian company was forced out of the company by the board of directors due to a losing battle for supremacy in the company with future CEO John Sculley is said to be wrong. Jobs is said to have left Apple by himself and of his own free will.
"Steve Jobs was not fired from the company. He left her,” he wrote Wozniak on Facebook. "It's fair to say that after the failure of the Macintosh, Jobs left Apple because he felt ashamed that he had failed and failed to prove his genius."
Wozniak's comment is part of a wider discussion about the new movie about Jobs, which was written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle. Wozniak generally praises the film a lot and considers it to be the best film adaptation of Jobs' life since Pirates of Silicon Valley, who arrived on the movie screens already in 1999.
However, we may never know the true story of how Jobs left Apple at the time. Different employees of the company at the time describe the event differently. In 2005, Jobs himself revealed his view on the matter. This happened as part of the commencement speech to students at Stanford, and as you can see, Jobs' version is quite different from Wozniak's.
"The year before, we had introduced our best creation—the Macintosh—and I had just turned thirty. And then they fired me. How can they fire you from the company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought had the talent to run the company with me. During the first years everything went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually drifted apart. When that happened, our board stood behind him. So I was fired at 30," Jobs said at the time.
Sculley himself later rejected Jobs's version and described the event from his own perspective, while his view is more similar to the newly presented version of Wozniak. “This was after Apple's board asked Steve to step down from the Macintosh division because he was too disruptive in the company. (…) Steve was never fired. He took time off and was still chairman of the board. Jobs left and no one pushed him to do so. But he was cut off from Mac, who was his business. He never forgave me," Sculley said a year ago.
As for evaluating the quality of the latest Jobs film, Wozniak praises that it struck a nice balance between entertainment and factual accuracy. "The movie does a good job of being accurate, although the scenes with me and Andy Hertzfeld talking to Jobs never happened. The issues around were real and happened, albeit in a different time. (…) The acting is very good compared to other films about Jobs. The film doesn't try to be another adaptation of a story we all know. He tries to make you feel what it was like for Jobs and the people around him.”
Movie Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender will debut on October 3rd at the New York Film Festival. It will then reach the rest of North America on October 9. In Czech cinemas we will see for the first time on November 12.
Source: apple insider
I understand Jobs that he called it that, they wanted to get rid of him and they just didn't have the time to formally and completely fire him as the founder. He was basically fired even though he formally left on his own.
Without wanting to take any side, it strikes me that it is written everywhere (in the Czech Republic and abroad) how Wozniak praises the factual accuracy of the film Steve Jobs by Sony, without mentioning that he worked for the film as an expert advisor. So he basically commends the film for sticking to what he himself told them about the events.
I don't know what happened, but I'm just fantasizing. If they agreed and Jobs saw that there was no other way out, he behaved as most people would, he just cut it off.
I'm the only one surprised by Woz's statements, even if Jobs didn't behave like a good person (which I say very politely and inaccurately), at least when he said something, he stood by it and it didn't matter if it pissed off the person. Woz will weigh in on Jobs only after death... I prefer a person who behaves like a pig and says what he thinks, than a person who just nods and then "slanders" when the other person can't react...