Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is doing what he did best: turning a competitive history lesson into a morality play about creativity. On the surface, it is a neat little timeline: Microsoft chased the Mac, then chased Lotus 1-2-3, and won. The sting is in the last line, where victory becomes evidence of failure. "Completely lost" isn’t a market diagnosis so much as a cultural verdict.

The intent is strategic and theatrical. Jobs is staking Apple’s identity on authorship, not optimization. By framing Microsoft’s decade as a pair of copying projects, he implies their competence is reactive: they’re brilliant at executing someone else’s idea, but uneasy when the brief is blank. The subtext is a warning about what happens when a company’s north star is "beat the other guy" rather than "make the next thing". Once you’ve successfully imitated the best interfaces and dominated the killer app category, what’s left to chase?

Context matters: this is Jobs speaking from the worldview of a product absolutist, in an era when Microsoft looked invincible but also lumbering, tied to Windows and Office, surrounded by committees and backward compatibility. He’s also rewriting history in a way that flatters his narrative. Microsoft didn’t only copy; it also invented, standardized, and scaled. Jobs knows that. The line works because it’s less an objective scorecard than a weaponized contrast: Apple as the restless auteur, Microsoft as the talented cover band that, after topping the charts, can’t write its own next single.