Which kind of affirms the grandparent poster's point. Corporate turnarounds like Jobs's return to Apple are one in a million.
If Jobs hadn't been available, who could have saved Apple in 1997? I can't imagine a non-founder CEO up to the task.
Nokia had been fatally wounded by the short-sighted strategy of Elop's predecessors. He took a risk -- jumped off the famous "burning platform" and drowned. But the platform was already going down in flames.
I have sometimes wondered if the people at Microsoft in charge of that move have since regretted it.
IIRC, they did it mostly, because they were under investigation for antitrust charges (and very nearly were broken up), so they could show the DOJ they had an actual competitor.
If that is true, they seem to have gotten a little more than they bargained for (the stock they bought must be worth a fortune today, though).
San Francisco Canyon Company was hired by Apple to port QuickTime to Windows, later it was hired by Intel to do some work on Indeo. Intel and Microsoft used the work done by San Francisco Canyon Company to jointly to improve Video for Windows performance, but San Francisco Canyon Company allegedly included QuickTime code and proprietary information without Apple's permission.
Things got nasty but Jobs opted to use this leverage to give Apple some credibility when it had suffered a serious blow from the Copland wreck.
Jobs set the terms: Apple and Microsoft agreed to cross-license each others patents, current and prospective lawsuits were dropped, Apple agreed to make IE the default browser, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Microsoft Office for Mac for 5 years and Microsoft would announce the purchase $150 million in non-voting stock.
It wasn't done out of pity, Microsoft's lawyers likely believed they would lose the case and this was a sweetheart deal which it would have been stupid to refuse.
Apple was saved by their founder. Usually the only people who can really turn a company around are their founders and even then stories of that are rare.
I would buy stock in MS if Gates ever came back, but I don't expect it.
