Why Steve Jobs and IBM’s alliance of the century fell apart at the last minute

The case in which Steve Jobs, who was forced out of Apple in 1985, founded NeXT and pursued an “alliance of the century” with Big Blue IBM, only for it to fall apart at the last minute, is already well known.

The core of the alliance was that IBM would take a licence for NeXT’s operating system, NeXTSTEP, and install it in its PC and engineering workstation product lines.

For NeXT, which was short of cash, an alliance with IBM, which dominated the corporate market, was a prime opportunity to improve its financial structure and take on Microsoft head-to-head. The big deal collapsed at the last minute because of Jobs.

Brent Schlender (브렌트 슐렌터), a former Wall Street Journal and Fortune reporter and author of the Steve Jobs book “Becoming Steve Jobs”, wrote that Jobs at the time…