However, it's easy to forget that Jobs, who died Wednesday at 56, invested an important part of his life into two other companies: NeXT and Pixar.
After Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985, he founded NeXT, a company focused on creating powerful computers for business and educational purposes. The company wasn't as successful as Jobs would have wanted -- it ultimately sold about 50,000 computers -- but it was very influential.
Tim Berners-Lee famously used a NeXTcube workstation to lay down the foundation of the first web server and web browser software. John Carmack wrote Wolfenstein 3D and Doom -- which rank highly on the "most influential games of all time" list -- on that same computer.
Perhaps even more importantly, the folding of NeXT into Apple showed that Jobs was a clever businessman who knew how to sell a company that wasn't very successful. Jobs sold NeXT in 1997 to his other favorite company, Apple Computer, for $429 million in cash, which went to other investors, and $1.5 million in Apple shares that went to himself.
Back then, Apple shares were hovering around $6. Today, one Apple share is worth $378.25.
Despite relatively low sales, NeXT was no failure, and parts of its operating system Nextstep still live on in Mac OS X. But Pixar -- Jobs's other project which he invested in while he was absent from Apple -- turned out to be an amazing success and one of the most important companies in entertainment today.
The numbers tell half of the story. Jobs acquired Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1986 for $5 million (he invested another $5 million of his own money) and sold it to Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $7.4 billion in a transaction that made Jobs the single largest shareholder of Disney stock.
However, Jobs originally intended for Pixar to be a high-end computer hardware company that would sell its Pixar Image Computer to agencies and corporations. One of those corporations was Disney, who in 1990 commissioned Pixar to create three computer-generated animated films. And the first of those was Toy Story, the first ever feature film to be created entirely with CGI.
Toy Story grossed $360 million worldwide, and subsequent Pixar films did well at the box office, too. Loved by critics and viewers alike, its 12 animated movies have grossed a staggering $7.2 billion worldwide.
After selling NeXT to Apple, Jobs returned to the company he loved the most, and shortly after continued as CEO, bringing the company to profitability and helping it become the most valuable company in the world. But his success in his other ventures shows that the success story of Jobs and Apple was not a pure coincidence. The man simply had the touch.
Image from Flickr, Steve Jobs
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