'Technically Steve Jobs was not fired' - Wozniak

"One of the things we know about Steve Jobs is that “At 30, Steve Jobs was wildly successful, fabulously wealthy and a global celebrity. And then he was fired by Apple.”

The CEO of Apple at that time was John Sculley and we always called him “the man who fired Steve Jobs.” As CEO, Sculley was thought to have control issues with Jobs — who founded the company alongside Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976 — which later metamorphosed into the sacking of the former by the Apple board at that time. - BestMobs

Steve lost the confidence of the board of directors because of his personal feud with John Scully which Jobs himself hired from CEO position at PepsiCo.

Jobs thought if he hired Scully that he could turn Apple around against Microsoft/IBM because he was failing to do so himself and was under pressure to do something, so hiring one's own potential successor seemed to be a better option than being kicked out the door and the board hiring someone new.

So Jobs was already on his way out at Apple before he hired Scully, he just prolonged the process and Scully saw what time it was and conferred with the board once he was up to speed. Scully actually made Apple lots of money, however innovation and new markets for tech products wasn't being pursued with Scully and then the resulting fleet of new CEO's of Apple during the "dark years".

Later Steve Jobs pitched the board for his job back saying "If I was running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."

The lesson learned is a company need both stability and innovation to grow, not just one or the other.

Steve Jobs returned and started innovating as tech was about 20 years behind with those old clunky PC boxes, nobody was doing anything new. So we do have to credit him for that, however he also introduced closed hardware/software and rampant spying as the NSA got their way with Apple and everything they wanted to do to spy and control our information as everything the NSA wanted to do went first went into Apple's hardware.

When Apple did the deal with AT&T with the iPhone, I knew it was the beginning of the end for privacy for our computing/tech products and it's been getting worse ever since. Steve Jobs had to deal with the NSA because he needed the evil carriers to make Apple succeed with smartphones.