EARLY ADOPTERS

In 1981, Inc. became the first national magazine to put Steve Jobs on its cover. But we got the headline dead wrong: Jobs did not change business forever.

At the time, Apple users were disparagingly labeled the “3 percenters,” in reference to the company’s market share. It was IBM that created widespread consumer adoption of PCs. Even today, Apple owns less than 25 percent of the U.S. enterprise PC market.

Still, our reporter, Steve Ditlea, sensed this guy was special. He couldn’t have known that Jobs’s management style—his relentless pursuit of unreasonable goals and terrible treatment of employees— would get him exiled from Apple, or that his true success would come from that failure.

When Jobs returned to a rotting Apple, he found traction with consumer products that

have ended up changing our lives forever. Maybe Jobs’s time away helped him understand which categories could benefit from his obsessive nature.