Geoffrey Cain

And he regretted that.

I mean, later on, he looked back on that and he said that was a big mistake.

He was still the same person.

So don't get me wrong.

It's not like he walked.

He did go through a transformation during these wilderness years, but the transformation was not him coming out with a new vision and a new personality.

It was him learning the practical steps about what it takes to realize his vision.

What he realized is that, you know, you cannot go into a room and yell at people and, you know, alienate them and alienate your partners and expect that the world is still going to beat down a door to you.

He learned the pragmatic side of this.

So...

Just to give one example, the vision of the unified software and hardware ecosystem, that was always his dream.

That goes back to the original Macintosh of 1984.

He did not want software being ported to other machines, and he only made that decision out of the need for survival when Next Computer had hit rock bottom.

But it was through this period that he realized just how winding the road is to achieve that vision.

It's not as simple as you have a great idea, you're a brilliant visionary, you show up, you're a bit of a jerk and people fall in line.

It took 30 to 40 years for Steve Jobs to build the software and the hardware that allowed him to eventually get to the iPhone

It would have been about 20 to 30 years.

That's how long that road is.

And so what he learned during these years is that there's lots of infrastructure.

There's lots of enterprise software that you have to build, different layers of the software, a lot of which is still in use today.