Steve Wozniak

It was because of the ecosystem that had grown around those eight expansion slots Wozniak had fought so hard to include.

Third-party companies kept building expansion cards.

Software developers kept writing programs.

Tech magazines were full of Apple II advertisements, none from Apple itself.

The open architecture had created a virtuous circle that reinforced itself.

By 1983, the Apple II would become the first computer to sell a million units.

Meanwhile, Apple forced everyone in the company to have an Apple III on their desk.

When Wozniak traveled the country giving speeches to computer groups, he saw the same thing everywhere.

90 people with Apple IIs, 3 people with Apple IIIs.

The company was pretending to be an Apple III company when it was actually an Apple II company.

Almost every ad Apple ran showed the Apple III.

They never showed the machine that was actually paying everyone salaries.

In today's money, they'd lost at least a billion dollars on the Apple III, all of it subsidized by the Apple II's success.

The ecosystem Wozniak had fought Steve Jobs to create was now funding the failure of Jobs' closed system vision.

Apple was becoming a big company with underperformers as well.

Two months after the IPO on February 25th, 1981, Mike Scott unilaterally fired 40 employees.

Scott called a meeting with the remaining employees.

He was blunt.

The company had grown too fast, made poor hiring decisions, and lost its startup hustle.

Then he delivered a line that became infamous.