Newton could be considered a failure, too. Although Jobs can't be blamed for that one; he was on his long "sabbatical" from the company at that time.

The Lisa wasn't Apple's worst failure. In fact, many of the ideas from the Lisa - and some of its software - made it into the Mac.

If you want to talk about a REAL road-Apple; the Apple /// wins the prize. It sold poorly - it was unreliable, and it wasn't Apple's perfect chance to take the business market before the IBM PC could establish dominance. Talk about a missed opportunity. Unfortunately, it had a reliability problem related to heat - the chips would often work their way out of the sockets and the machine wouldn't power up. One way to fix it was to pick up the machine and drop it onto a desk which sometimes would reseat the chips.

Was that circular iMouse his idea?

Don't forget their nascent game platform, the Pippin! Or the Anniversary Mac cube.

Now I can't remember if the Pippin was on Jobs' watch or off, but I know that Mac cube was his.

Twiggy drive. Steve still flinches at the mention of it. It was supposed to replace the floppy drive.

Yeah, and Babe Ruth must've been a terrible ball player because he struck out so much. This is good inspiration for up-and-coming leaders: don't try to excel at anything, because you might have a few duds in your resume and blogs will make fun of you.

Failure is wrong. War is good. Heroes should be popular and have good skin. And critics are the experts.

JR, you didn't get the article, did you? He wasn't criticizing Apple. He was pointing out that even the most successful companies hit a few rough patches on their way to the top.

Ummm, a little oversimplification. Lisa did not get "rebranded" as Macintosh. Lisa and the Mac had their own separate and competing development teams, although there was obviously much sharing and communication between the two groups.

For one thing, the Mac was always designed to be a $1500 computer from the start (until Apple marketing jacked the plan and raised the price to $2500 just before launch), which would have made it truly a low-cost computer for its time.

It's also true that they shared enough hardware that an intance of re-branding DID occur, when Apple introduced the Mac XL or the "Fat Mac" - which was a rebranded Lisa running the Mac ROM and OS.

But no, the Mac had its own self-contained development team within Apple, and the history shows Steve quickly abaonded Lisa and devoted all his energies on the Mac when he realized Lisa was going nowhere.

More first-hand accounts can be had at Andy Hertzfeld's site folklore.org

BTW, going back on topic, here are some things can be considered "Steve's failures."

* The Mac Cube - great design, but Steve badly miscalculated how much people would be willing to pay for great design. $1799 at intro was clearly to much and led to Apple canceling the Cube at a great loss less than a year later. If it'd come out at $1299, it probably would have sold like hotcakes.

* iTools - a mishmash of online services that Apple killed, and then re-released as a pay-to-play .Mac. .Mac is still around with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers so it can't be considered a failure, but iTools definitely was.

* iPod Photo - the first iPod with a color screen that had an astronomical price of $599. No one bought it. Apple quietly discontinued it, learned its lessons, and later released color screens and photo capabilities as standard features, not paid extras as with the iPod photo. The failure of the iPod photo is why the current video-capable iPods are not called "iPod video" but simply "iPod," i.e. to emphasize the point that you are not paying extra for the photo/video capability.

* Apple mini stores - an experimental retail store with small square footage that would carry little to no inventory. Apple opened up only one or two and they were pretty much failures in retail.

* Rhapsody - this was the project that would supercede System 7 after the Copland effort collapsed and Apple bought NeXT. Rhapsody was basically NeXT Step. Apple worked on it for a couple of years, and then pretty much decided to completely shift gears. Somewhere in the process, the Rhapsody model got dumped and OS X was born. This was a good failure because Steve killed it early rather than pour more resources to try and make Rhapsody work. I think we can pretty much say that this was the correct decision.

All in all, Steve still has one of the most impressive track records of any visionary!

Hey Paul you forgot the Newton!

I ran a web server on Rhapsody, or the "First" OS X Server software. Although it was pretty much NeXT Step, it had a number of features that are still in OS X and OS X Server today.

I fail to see how iTools is a failure? It was the forerunner for the .Mac service, as you say. iTools did the job they were meant to do.

Paul, since this is a list of Jobs' missteps, not Apple missteps, you've got to take Rhapsody off the list. It was the failure of Rhapsody that prompted the purchase of NeXT and Jobs immediately canceled Rhapsody to focus on NeXTSTEP/Mac OS X.

The iPod photo is not really a failure, either; similar to iTools, it was a test which did reasonably well and was later rolled out into something else. Namely, all iPods since! The iPod photo was only discontinued when the next version of the iPod was released, which brought the iPod photo functionality into the main iPod line.

Which takes us down to the cube, which I mentioned above, and the mini stores. I'm not sure about the mini stores, either, actually. Did they not lead to the Apple stores we have now?

The cube was a big failure, and the iPod boombox small one, but Jobs' record is looking better the more I look at it.