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Actually he bought Pixar to turn it into a hardware company. John Lasseter is probably the bigger reason why it became such a successful animation company. Of course, thanks to Steve the company survived long enough to discover its true purpose and thanks to Steve got such a great deal with Disney for marketing the initial movies.

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It almost died because of Steve as well. In 1994 (shortly before the release of Toy Story) he very nearly sold the company because it was losing so much money.

John Lasseter and Ed Catmull did more to save the company than Jobs ever did ... most accounts I've read of him paint his contributions as "not screwing up quite enough to ruin the company".

Yeah, if you read "The Pixar Touch" you get a good picture of what Jobs hoped to achieve with Pixar (focusing on selling the hardware to consumers). His main contribution was money. I think it was only after Toy Story did he truly "get" how good the computer animated films could be.

It's funny because in the book they describe the brief period where Pixar was owned by George Lucas, and he too did not have faith in computer animated films.

I remember reading something along the lines of 'Jobs saw Pixar as the next SGI' - which matches a lot of what has been said in Pixar biographies

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