GrayGrantham1

I think if you read Woz's recent article about Steve wanting not only to change the world but to receive the historical legacy that goes along with being a visionary, it puts the 2nd coming of Steve Jobs in an interesting perspective. Steve didn't return to Apple to save it.  He returned to Apple because he saw in Apple his only opportunity to achieve true greatness.  NeXT was a fortuitous choice for Jobs when he left Apple (or more accurately was driven out by John Sculley).  Apple was locked into the Classic Macitosh OS and that wasn't going to change.  While Apple had a virtual lock on the graphic arts industry due to its relationship with Adobe and QuarkXPress,  the inability of Macintosh to achieve pre-emptive multitasking while Windows NT had done exactly that made it difficult to take Macintsoh serious as a Corporate workstation.

In 1984 Apple released Macintosh.  Huey Lewis release a song in 1986 "I Like things that don't change, the more something changes the more it stays the same"   why do I mention that?  Prior to Windows and Macintosh the only alternative to huge mainframes was UNIX.  There is a lot of history surrounding the evolution of UNIX and unix derivatives (LINUX is not one of them)  NeXT was based on Berkley Software Distribution Free BSD (Unix)  As of 2020 Windows 10 is the only supported corporate workstation Operating System in the world that is not a Unix or Unix Like (Linux) Operating system.  Apple's OS X is so similar to Linux in many respect that there are actually Linux Distros that appear and act much like OS X.

The point of all that was that as Huey Lewis mentioned in 1986 the more something changes (time, evolution) the more it stays the same (OS convergences on Unix/Unix Like OSes)  The Brilliance of Steve Jobs was not a computer and not even technology really.  It was his visionary approach to divining consumer demand and giving them what they want.  The essence of Steve Jobs is displayed in a YouTube Clip where he is answering a former Open Doc developer who tells him in front of the world "you clearly don't know what you are talking about"  The response is priceless, it is timeless, it is the quintessential Steve Jobs