In 1983, a 28-year-old Jobs deemed it necessary to recruit an experienced professional manager to Apple, and he brought on Pepsico’s John Sculley to run the business. By 1986, after conflicts with Sculley about the strategic direction of the company, Jobs resigned as Apple’s chairman, leaving to form NeXT to produce sophisticated computer workstations. A decade later, Apple acquired NeXT, which, as it turned out, had developed software that would be critical for Apple’s future. With the acquisition, Jobs rejoined Apple, first as a consultant, then in 1997 as interim CEO (with the company in the midst of sustaining huge losses), and in 2000 as permanent CEO.
Even then, with Jobs at the helm, Apple was struggling. It had just a small share of the computer market. In 2001 its sales of $5.3 billion were less than half what they had been six years earlier, and the company showed a small loss. But with the introduction of the iPod and the first Apple retail store in that year, Apple began to transform itself from a niche computer maker into a multimedia giant. In 2003 the online iTunes store debuted, giving a huge boost to iPod sales. In 2006, just before the launch of the iPhone, Apple had increased its total sales to $19.3 billion, with 50% coming from iPod and iTunes. Then came the iPhone in 2007, followed by the iPad in 2010. In the first nine months of fiscal 2011 iPhone sales were $36.1 billion and iPad sales $13.5 billion, accounting for 62% of Apple’s total revenues.