For the good of the company? Five Apple products Steve Jobs killed

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When Steven P. Jobs returned to Apple 1997, he returned to a slew of ill-conceived product lines. Some were excessive, and some were downright silly, but many were ultimately killed off for their poor alignment with consumer needs and wants. Still, even with Jobs’ discerning eye, he wasn’t immune to having to deal with a few bad product decisions. Here are four products Jobs rightfully discontinued, and one misstep of his own.


http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/08/five-apple-products-steve-jobs-killed-for-the-good-of-the-company.ars

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1. I think he was right in all five cases.

I don't think it was a mistake for him to kill the cube. It didn't sell. And they have sort of resurrected it in a subtle way with the Mac Mini anyway. During his time away from Apple, the Apple product line spiraled out of control and buying a Mac in the mid-1990s was a very confusing process, with way too many models to choose from. The CEOs during the time he was away from Apple had no idea what they were doing. He was right to pare down the line to just the best examples of each type. The whole clone thing was a good idea in theory, to bring down the cost of ownership of a computer running Mac OS, but the clones were badly designed by the third party companies and Jobs was right to kill the program - though at the time he did it, I was worried it would mean Macs would go way up in price. But they didn't. I think he has made the right decisions for the company's sake, though not necessarily for the customers' sake. I'm still ticked off at him for not allowing SuperDrives to be sold separately or a SuperDrive upgrade to a Mac when they first came out - thus forcing many people to buy whole new Macs instead of just buying a SuperDrive retrofit. I won't forgive him for that, but I'm sure I'll buy another Mac one of these days anyway.