Veteran PR executive Charlie Agatep wrote a first-person article, “The man who fired Steve Jobs,” that came out in the November 5, 2011 issue of the
Philippine Daily Inquirer. The story is anchored on Charlie’s excited purchase of the then newly released MacPlus computer in Daly City, California, in the spring of 1985—the very day when news came out that Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and creator of the MacPlus, had just been fired by John Sculley, ex-marketing VP of Pepsi Cola who had been hired by Jobs himself to become CEO of Apple.
“How could they fire Steve Jobs, what did he do?” Charlie recalls having groaned as he walked out of the mall carrying his prized MacPlus. “Didn’t they recognize his genius for creating the Macintosh? How did they fire him, unceremoniously after a shouting match? And how did Steve Jobs take it, pained and bitterly disappointed, [perhaps] like the way Juan Manuel Marquez felt after losing to Manny Pacquiao by a split decision in their second fight?”
Charlie then wonders how the world of computing might be entirely different today if Steve Jobs, who died of pancreatic cancer last October 6 at the age of 56, hadn’t been booted out of Apple when he was a 30-year-old brat—a jolting experience that gave Steve the driving force to redeem himself by creating NeXT, Pixar, the Toy Story, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
This afternoon, Charlie sent me a clipping of his story and I thought of sharing it with Forum members by providing a link to the full article in the
Inquirer’s online edition.
Read Charlie Agatep’s “The man who fired Steve Jobs” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer now!
