That's when Steve started doing a decent chunk of Apple's marketing, because at that point he trusted marketing people as much as a rusty bicycle chain and he knew enough about marketing to call the shots.

Even then he would spend as much time as he could making or overseeing the creation of intuitive user interfaces, as the vision he had driving his work was to make products anyone could understand how to use.

And he did a pretty good job at it. A big part of the reason Apple seems less innovative now is that they did a good enough job on most of their products the first time around that any big changes kind of feels like reinventing the wheel. As a result Apple's engineers are kind of fumbling around with incremental features as they try to figure out what their next big thing is going to be.

I hope that rambling made sense. I'm going to stop here so I don't keep rambling all night.

Steve Jobs started out as a hardware guy, albeit the hardware guy who knew how to market stuff when the company was still too small to have a marketing department. When the company got big enough to have its own marketing department Steve turned his focus onto making intuitive user interfaces. Steve wanted to keep doing hardware/U.I. stuff, so he hired John Sculley (a marketing guy from pepsi) to be the CEO so he wouldn't have to do that job.

Shortly after the original Macintosh was created internal drama at Apple caused Sculley to assign Jobs a position that responsibilities could be summarized as 'sit there and look pretty, don't touch anything.' Jobs couldn't let that stand, so he tried to hatch a plan to oust Sculley. Sculley got word of this plan and convinced the Board of Directors to fire Jobs.

Continued….