In 1985 Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple in a boardroom reshuffle. At the time, Apple was being challenged by IBM and the IBM clones which, cheaply produced, enabled many to enter the world of personal computing. For the next decade, Apple seemed to lose its way, headed as it was by a series of corporate 'suits' who lacked the passion and keenness for industrial design Jobs had possessed. A series of bland and poorly branded Macintoshes were released, culminating in Apple trying to claw back a decreasing market share by allowing its operating system software to be used on Apple clones made by a variety of PC manufacturers. Cloning had given rise to the eventual domination of Microsoft's Windows operating system, while Apple's Macintosh operating system struggled to improve. Jobs went on to start another computer company called NeXT and purchased motion picture company, Pixar. In 1996, Jobs was invited to return to Apple, and in the next year, convinced Apple's Board of Directors to purchase NeXT. NeXT had developed an operating system that was then used by Apple to form the basis of the Macintosh operating system OSX.

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