[gabrielroth]

He's a product guy. He would have run some kind of company making some kind of consumer-electronics item that would attempt to be the best in its class. Without the talent, resources, brand, and exposure of Apple to work with, he might or might not have been successful.

[thought_alarm]

I'm not so sure.

Immediately prior to Apple he was selling Corba, OLE, Web Objects, and other enterprisey middleware, and with the exact same fervor that he would later sell iMacs and iPods.

Here [1] is a rather surreal Jobs' keynote/demo in 1995, showing Interface Builder and "Distributed OLE" on Windows NT 3.51, among other things.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu-jvAWTZ9o