Geoffrey Cain

It showed his high standards, but the flip side of that is that Steve Jobs could not focus and could not set priorities, another major lesson he had to learn.

It's just, you know, this is what really blew me away.

We always think of Steve Jobs as a guy who was intensively focused.

It's like one of the Steve Jobs cliches.

You learn focus by studying Apple and their products.

But this is the opposite.

During this time at Next Computer, he got so carried away with different aspects of his vision that he just wanted everything to be perfect.

So like one example...

The night before the product launch, he was arguing with his staff about the color green, the shade of green that was going to be behind him when he revealed this new NeXT computer.

Meanwhile, the operating system was breaking down.

It was crashing.

Somebody had made last minute changes to the software that was just causing bugs.

The audio system, which was going to be top of the line, top in the world at the time,

It didn't even work.

I mean, they had to salvage it really quickly.

And there's Steve Jobs, like, okay, so what color green are we using?

Intense focus, yes.

A very careful focus on design and color and arts.

That's classic Steve, but you can't do that at the expense of the technology itself.

And he had to learn that, look, your typical customer doesn't care about the shade of green.