Eric Schmidt on Steve Jobs
The Google executive chairman admired Jobs's passion, courage, and smarts — Everyone knows the transaction where the board sided with John Sculley and Steve left Apple. Steve sold all of his Apple stock, kept one share, and founded NeXT. Typical Steve maneuver.
Context & Ripple Effects
Eric Schmidt's tribute carries weight because the two men share a documented history: Business Week reported in August 2009 that Schmidt served on Apple's board without taking a salary, and Gizmodo ran photos of the pair together again in March 2010 even as Google and Apple competed directly. His eulogy of Jobs's 'passion, courage, and smarts' lands the day after Jobs's death, alongside Schmidt's retelling of the defining episode — the board siding with John Sculley, Jobs selling all but one share of his Apple stock, and founding NeXT.
The pickup pattern is unusually broad for a single executive's remembrance: the same-day wave includes the W3C blog, Adobe, Stephen Wolfram, Richard Branson's Virgin, Larry Brilliant via the L.A. Times, and — most pointedly — John Sculley himself praising Jobs at Digits. When the man who won the 1985 board fight joins the chorus, the memorial becomes a collective rewriting of Apple's origin conflict.
First-order effects
- Schmidt's statement joins a same-day cascade of first-person tributes from W3C, Adobe, Wolfram, Virgin, and Larry Brilliant, making executive reminiscence rather than product news the dominant tech story of October 6, 2011.
- John Sculley's public praise of Jobs forces the 1985 boardroom split back into the narrative, with the winning side of that fight now framing itself as an admirer.
Second-order effects
- The one-share detail and the NeXT founding give outlets a ready-made redemption arc, pulling attention toward how Apple's later success traces through Jobs's exile company rather than treating his career as unbroken.
- Competing executives' tributes become soft positioning: each remembrance implicitly stakes a claim on which company inherits the 'visionary founder' mantle Jobs leaves vacant.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the ousted-founder-returns arc — board coup, stock sale, NeXT, comeback — hardens into Silicon Valley's canonical template, shaping how boards and investors weigh founder departures and whether exiles deserve a second act.
- The breadth of institutional mourning, from standards bodies like the W3C to corporate blogs like Adobe's, signals the industry absorbing Jobs as shared infrastructure rather than a competitor.
The trend: The tech industry is metabolizing Steve Jobs's death through a wave of personal tributes that double as competing histories of its founding rivalries.