Excellent question and one I already touched on in a sister reply before I saw your post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43722230

Apple is indeed an extraordinary outlier (as is Jobs). If you look into the history of Apple's Gil Amelio days, very near-death and Steve's return, it was IMHO, a remarkable example of a series of fortunate miracles coinciding to allow Steve to brilliantly save the company when it had been only weeks away from death. Jobs calling Bill Gates and convincing him to quickly loan $400M to Apple averted disaster potentially by a matter of days. And Gates only did that because MSFT was being sued for anti-trust by the Justice Dept and needed Apple to survive as an example that Wintel still had some competition. Apple's survival in that period is the closest close thing I think the industry has ever seen.

To answer your last question, Jobs was undoubtedly incredibly brilliant but it took every ounce of that brilliance AND some crazy good luck for Apple to survive. Ultimately, it was Jobs plus flukes, so no, just Jobs without the flukes wouldn't have changed anything at Atari or Commodore. Even on its death bed Apple had a much better brand, distribution, market potential and talent than Atari or Commodore ever did. Plus Steve had his hand-picked entrepreneurial team from Next with him. The situations at Atari and Commodore were just much weaker in every way, so I don't think any single super hero, no matter how super, could have saved them.