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1he said.
2“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot back, “no fucking idea what it’s like to be me.”
3
4Thirty Years Old
5
6Turning thirty is a milestone for most people, especially those of the generation that proclaimed it would never trust anyone over that age. To celebrate his own thirtieth, in February 1985, Jobs threw a lavishly formal but also playful—black tie and tennis shoes—party for one thousand in the ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read, “There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.”
7One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had old friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman dressed in a tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and wore floppy tennis shoes, which made it all the more memorable when they danced to the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
8Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob Dylan had declined. She sang mainly from her standard repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like “The Girl from Ipanema” to be about the boy from Cupertino. When she asked for some requests, Jobs called out a few. She concluded with a slow rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
9Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to “technology’s foremost visionary.” Wozniak also came up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the Zaltair hoax from the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple II had been introduced. The venture capitalist Don Valentine marveled at the change in the decade since that time. “He went from being a Ho Chi Minh look-alike, who said never trust anyone over thirty, to a person who gives himself a fabulous thirtieth birthday with Ella Fitzgerald,” he said.
10Many people had picked out special gifts for a person who was not easy to shop for. Debi Coleman, for example, found a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. But Jobs, in an act that was odd yet not out of character, left all of the gifts in a hotel room. Wozniak and some of the Apple veterans, who did not take to the goat cheese and salmon mousse that was served, met after the party and went out to eat at a Denny’s.
11“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing,” Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who
12published a long and intimate interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. “Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.” The interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs’s most poignant ruminations were about growing old and facing the future:
13Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
14I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. . . .
15If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
16The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
17With each of those statements, Jobs seemed to have a premonition that his life would soon be changing. Perhaps the thread of his life would indeed weave in and out of the thread of Apple’s. Perhaps it was time to throw away some of what he had been. Perhaps it was time to say “Bye, I have to go,” and then reemerge later, thinking differently.
18
19Exodus
20
21Andy Hertzfeld had taken a leave of absence after the Macintosh came out in 1984. He needed to recharge his batteries and get away from his supervisor, Bob Belleville, whom he didn’t like. One day he learned that Jobs had given out bonuses of up to $50,000 to engineers on the
22Macintosh team. So he went to Jobs to ask for one. Jobs responded that Belleville had decided not to give the bonuses to people who were on
23leave. Hertzfeld later heard that the decision had actually been made by Jobs, so he confronted him. At first Jobs equivocated, then he said, “Well, let’s assume what you are saying is true. How does that change things?” Hertzfeld said that if Jobs was withholding the bonus as a reason for him to come back, then he wouldn’t come back as a matter of principle. Jobs relented, but it left Hertzfeld with a bad taste.
24When his leave was coming to an end, Hertzfeld made an appointment to have dinner with Jobs, and they walked from his office to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away. “I really want to return,” he told Jobs. “But things seem really messed up right now.” Jobs was vaguely annoyed and distracted, but Hertzfeld plunged ahead. “The software team is completely demoralized and has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated that he won’t last to the end of the year.”
25At that point Jobs cut him off. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” he said. “The Macintosh team is doing great, and I’m having the best time of my life right now. You’re just completely out of touch.” His stare was withering, but he also tried to look amused at Hertzfeld’s assessment.
26“If you really believe that, I don’t think there’s any way that I can come back,” Hertzfeld replied glumly. “The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn’t even exist anymore.”
27“The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you,” Jobs replied. “I want you to come back, but if you don’t want to, that’s up to you. You don’t matter as much as you think you do, anyway.”
28Hertzfeld didn’t come back.
29By early 1985 Burrell Smith was also ready to leave. He had worried that it would be hard to quit if Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality distortion field was usually too strong for him to resist. So he plotted with Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. “I’ve got it!” he told Hertzfeld one day. “I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the reality distortion field. I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? It’s guaranteed to work.” The betting on the Mac team was that even brave Burrell Smith would not have the gumption to do that. When he finally decided he had to make his break, around the time of Jobs’s birthday bash, he made an appointment to see Jobs. He was surprised to find Jobs smiling broadly when he walked in. “Are you gonna do it? Are you really gonna do it?” Jobs asked. He had heard about the plan.
30Smith looked at him. “Do I have to? I’ll do it if I have to.” Jobs gave him a look, and Smith decided it wasn’t necessary. So he resigned less dramatically and walked out on good terms.
31He was quickly followed by another of the great Macintosh engineers, Bruce Horn. When Horn went in to say good-bye, Jobs told him, “Everything that’s wrong with the Mac is your fault.”
32Horn responded, “Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the Mac are my fault, and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in.” “You’re right,” admitted Jobs. “I’ll give you 15,000 shares to stay.” When Horn declined the offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. “Well, give me a
33hug,” he said. And so they hugged.
34But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its cofounder, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel engineer in the Apple II division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of the company and staying as far away from management and corporate politics as he could. He felt, with justification, that Jobs was not appreciative of the Apple II, which remained the cash cow of the company and accounted for 70% of its sales at Christmas 1984. “People in the Apple II group were being treated as very unimportant by the rest of the company,” he later said. “This was despite the fact that the Apple II was by far the largest-selling product in our company for ages, and would be for years to come.” He even roused himself to do something out of character; he picked up the phone one day and called Sculley, berating him for lavishing so much attention on Jobs and the Macintosh division.
35Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to start a new company that would make a universal remote control device he had invented. It would control your television, stereo, and other electronic devices with a simple set of buttons that you could easily program. He informed the head of engineering at the Apple II division, but he didn’t feel he was important enough to go out of channels and tell Jobs or Markkula. So Jobs first heard
36about it when the news leaked in the Wall Street Journal. In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly answered the reporter’s questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving short shrift to the Apple II division. “Apple’s direction has been horrendously wrong for five years,” he said.
37Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the White House, where Ronald Reagan presented them with the first National Medal of Technology. The president quoted what President Rutherford Hayes had said when first shown a telephone—“An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?”—and then quipped, “I thought at the time that he might be mistaken.” Because of the awkward situation surrounding Wozniak’s departure, Apple did not throw a celebratory dinner. So Jobs and Wozniak went for a walk afterward and ate at a sandwich shop. They chatted amiably, Wozniak recalled, and avoided any discussion of their disagreements.
38Wozniak wanted to make the parting amicable. It was his style. So he agreed to stay on as a part-time Apple employee at a $20,000 salary and represent the company at events and trade shows. That could have been a graceful way to drift apart. But Jobs could not leave well enough alone. One Saturday, a few weeks after they had visited Washington together, Jobs went to the new Palo Alto studios of Hartmut Esslinger, whose company frogdesign had moved there to handle its design work for Apple. There he happened to see sketches that the firm had made for Wozniak’s new remote control device, and he flew into a rage. Apple had a clause in its contract that gave it the right to bar frogdesign from working on other computer-related projects, and Jobs invoked it. “I informed them,” he recalled, “that working with Woz wouldn’t be acceptable to us.”
39When the Wall Street Journal heard what happened, it got in touch with Wozniak, who, as usual, was open and honest. He said that Jobs was punishing him. “Steve Jobs has a hate for me, probably because of the things I said about Apple,” he told the reporter. Jobs’s action was remarkably petty, but it was also partly caused by the fact that he understood, in ways that others did not, that the look and style of a product served to brand it. A device that had Wozniak’s name on it and used the same design language as Apple’s products might be mistaken for something that Apple had produced. “It’s not personal,” Jobs told the newspaper, explaining that he wanted to make sure that Wozniak’s remote wouldn’t look like something made by Apple. “We don’t want to see our design language used on other products. Woz has to find his own resources. He can’t leverage off Apple’s resources; we can’t treat him specially.”
40Jobs volunteered to pay for the work that frogdesign had already done for Wozniak, but even so the executives at the firm were taken aback. When Jobs demanded that they send him the drawings done for Wozniak or destroy them, they refused. Jobs had to send them a letter invoking Apple’s contractual right. Herbert Pfeifer, the design director of the firm, risked Jobs’s wrath by publicly dismissing his claim that the dispute with
41Wozniak was not personal. “It’s a power play,” Pfeifer told the Journal. “They have personal problems between them.”
42Hertzfeld was outraged when he heard what Jobs had done. He lived about twelve blocks from Jobs, who sometimes would drop by on his walks.
43“I got so furious about the Wozniak remote episode that when Steve next came over, I wouldn’t let him in the house,” Hertzfeld recalled. “He knew he was wrong, but he tried to rationalize, and maybe in his distorted reality he was able to.” Wozniak, always a teddy bear even when annoyed, hired another design firm and even agreed to stay on Apple’s retainer as a spokesman.
44
45Showdown, Spring 1985
46
47There were many reasons for the rift between Jobs and Sculley in the spring of 1985. Some were merely business disagreements, such as Sculley’s attempt to maximize profits by keeping the Macintosh price high when Jobs wanted to make it more affordable. Others were weirdly psychological and stemmed from the torrid and unlikely infatuation they initially had with each other. Sculley had painfully craved Jobs’s affection, Jobs had eagerly sought a father figure and mentor, and when the ardor began to cool there was an emotional backwash. But at its core, the growing breach had two fundamental causes, one on each side.
48For Jobs, the problem was that Sculley never became a product person. He didn’t make the effort, or show the capacity, to understand the fine points of what they were making. On the contrary, he found Jobs’s passion for tiny technical tweaks and design details to be obsessive and counterproductive. He had spent his career selling sodas and snacks whose recipes were largely irrelevant to him. He wasn’t naturally passionate about products, which was among the most damning sins that Jobs could imagine. “I tried to educate him about the details of engineering,” Jobs recalled, “but he had no idea how products are created, and after a while it just turned into arguments. But I learned that my perspective was right. Products are everything.” He came to see Sculley as clueless, and his contempt was exacerbated by Sculley’s hunger for his affection and delusions that they were very similar.
49For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or manipulative mode, was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people. He found Jobs’s boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s lack of passion for product details. Sculley was kind, caring, and polite to a fault. At one point they were planning to meet with Xerox’s vice chair Bill Glavin, and Sculley begged Jobs to behave. But as soon as they sat down, Jobs told Glavin, “You guys don’t have any clue what you’re doing,” and the meeting broke up. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help myself,” Jobs told Sculley. It was one of many such cases. As Atari’s Al Alcorn later observed, “Sculley believed in keeping people happy and worrying about relationships. Steve didn’t give a shit about that. But he did care about the product in a way that Sculley never could, and he was able to avoid having too many bozos working at Apple by insulting anyone who wasn’t an A player.”
50The board became increasingly alarmed at the turmoil, and in early 1985 Arthur Rock and some other disgruntled directors delivered a stern lecture to both. They told Sculley that he was supposed to be running the company, and he should start doing so with more authority and less eagerness to be pals with Jobs. They told Jobs that he was supposed to be fixing the mess at the Macintosh division and not telling other divisions how to do their job. Afterward Jobs retreated to his office and typed on his Macintosh, “I will not criticize the rest of the organization, I will not criticize the rest of the organization . . .”
51As the Macintosh continued to disappoint—sales in March 1985 were only 10% of the budget forecast—Jobs holed up in his office fuming or wandered the halls berating everyone else for the problems. His mood swings became worse, and so did his abuse of those around him. Middle- level managers began to rise up against him. The marketing chief Mike Murray sought a private meeting with Sculley at an industry conference. As they were going up to Sculley’s hotel room, Jobs spotted them and asked to come along. Murray asked him not to. He told Sculley that Jobs was wreaking havoc and had to be removed from managing the Macintosh division. Sculley replied that he was not yet resigned to having a showdown with Jobs. Murray later sent a memo directly to Jobs criticizing the way he treated colleagues and denouncing “management by character assassination.”
52For a few weeks it seemed as if there might be a solution to the turmoil. Jobs became fascinated by a flat-screen technology developed by a firm near Palo Alto called Woodside Design, run by an eccentric engineer named Steve Kitchen. He also was impressed by another startup that made a touchscreen display that could be controlled by your finger, so you didn’t need a mouse. Together these might help fulfill Jobs’s vision of creating a “Mac in a book.” On a walk with Kitchen, Jobs spotted a building in nearby Menlo Park and declared that they should open a skunkworks facility to work on these ideas. It could be called AppleLabs and Jobs could run it, going back to the joy of having a small team and developing a great new product.
53Sculley was thrilled by the possibility. It would solve most of his management issues, moving Jobs back to what he did best and getting rid of his disruptive presence in Cupertino. Sculley also had a candidate to replace Jobs as manager of the Macintosh division: Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s chief in France, who had suffered through Jobs’s visit there. Gassée flew to Cupertino and said he would take the job if he got a guarantee that he would run the division rather than work under Jobs. One of the board members, Phil Schlein of Macy’s, tried to convince Jobs that he would be better off thinking up new products and inspiring a passionate little team.
54But after some reflection, Jobs decided that was not the path he wanted. He declined to cede control to Gassée, who wisely went back to Paris to avoid the power clash that was becoming inevitable. For the rest of the spring, Jobs vacillated. There were times when he wanted to assert himself as a corporate manager, even writing a memo urging cost savings by eliminating free beverages and first-class air travel, and other times when he agreed with those who were encouraging him to go off and run a new AppleLabs R&D group.
55In March Murray let loose with another memo that he marked “Do not circulate” but gave to multiple colleagues. “In my three years at Apple, I’ve never observed so much confusion, fear, and dysfunction as in the past 90 days,” he began. “We are perceived by the rank and file as a boat without a rudder, drifting away into foggy oblivion.” Murray had been on both sides of the fence; at times he conspired with Jobs to undermine
56Sculley, but in this memo he laid the blame on Jobs. “Whether the cause of or because of the dysfunction, Steve Jobs now controls a seemingly impenetrable power base.”
57At the end of that month, Sculley finally worked up the nerve to tell Jobs that he should give up running the Macintosh division. He walked over to Jobs’s office one evening and brought the human resources manager, Jay Elliot, to make the confrontation more formal. “There is no one who admires your brilliance and vision more than I do,” Sculley began. He had uttered such flatteries before, but this time it was clear that there would be a brutal “but” punctuating the thought. And there was. “But this is really not going to work,” he declared. The flatteries punctured by “buts” continued. “We have developed a great friendship with each other,” he said, “but I have lost confidence in your ability to run the Macintosh division.” He also berated Jobs for badmouthing him as a bozo behind his back.
58Jobs looked stunned and countered with an odd challenge, that Sculley should help and coach him more: “You’ve got to spend more time with me.” Then he lashed back. He told Sculley he knew nothing about computers, was doing a terrible job running the company, and had disappointed Jobs ever since coming to Apple. Then he began to cry. Sculley sat there biting his fingernails.
59“I’m going to bring this up with the board,” Sculley declared. “I’m going to recommend that you step down from your operating position of running the Macintosh division. I want you to know that.” He urged Jobs not to resist and to agree instead to work on developing new technologies and products.
60Jobs jumped from his seat and turned his intense stare on Sculley. “I don’t believe you’re going to do that,” he said. “If you do that, you’re going to destroy the company.”
61Over the next few weeks Jobs’s behavior fluctuated wildly. At one moment he would be talking about going off to run AppleLabs, but in the next moment he would be enlisting support to have Sculley ousted. He would reach out to Sculley, then lash out at him behind his back, sometimes on
62the same night. One night at 9 he called Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat to say he was losing confidence in Sculley and needed his help
63convincing the board to fire him; at 11 the same night, he phoned Sculley to say, “You’re terrific, and I just want you to know I love working with you.” At the board meeting on April 11, Sculley officially reported that he wanted to ask Jobs to step down as the head of the Macintosh division and
64focus instead on new product development. Arthur Rock, the most crusty and independent of the board members, then spoke. He was fed up with both of them: with Sculley for not having the guts to take command over the past year, and with Jobs for “acting like a petulant brat.” The board needed to get this dispute behind them, and to do so it should meet privately with each of them.
65Sculley left the room so that Jobs could present first. Jobs insisted that Sculley was the problem because he had no understanding of computers. Rock responded by berating Jobs. In his growling voice, he said that Jobs had been behaving foolishly for a year and had no right to be managing a division. Even Jobs’s strongest supporter, Phil Schlein, tried to talk him into stepping aside gracefully to run a research lab for the company.
66When it was Sculley’s turn to meet privately with the board, he gave an ultimatum: “You can back me, and then I take responsibility for running the company, or we can do nothing, and you’re going to have to find yourselves a new CEO.” If given the authority, he said, he would not move abruptly, but would ease Jobs into the new role over the next few months. The board unanimously sided with Sculley. He was given the authority to remove Jobs whenever he felt the timing was right. As Jobs waited outside the boardroom, knowing full well that he was losing, he saw Del Yocam, a longtime colleague, and hugged him.
67After the board made its decision, Sculley tried to be conciliatory. Jobs asked that the transition occur slowly, over the next few months, and Sculley agreed. Later that evening Sculley’s executive assistant, Nanette Buckhout, called Jobs to see how he was doing. He was still in his office, shell-shocked. Sculley had already left, and Jobs came over to talk to her. Once again he began oscillating wildly in his attitude toward Sculley. “Why did John do this to me?” he said. “He betrayed me.” Then he swung the other way. Perhaps he should take some time away to work on restoring his relationship with Sculley, he said. “John’s friendship is more important than anything else, and I think maybe that’s what I should do, concentrate on our friendship.”
68
69Plotting a Coup
70
71Jobs was not good at taking no for an answer. He went to Sculley’s office in early May 1985 and asked for more time to show that he could manage the Macintosh division. He would prove himself as an operations guy, he promised. Sculley didn’t back down. Jobs next tried a direct challenge: He asked Sculley to resign. “I think you really lost your stride,” Jobs told him. “You were really great the first year, and everything went wonderful. But something happened.” Sculley, who generally was even-tempered, lashed back, pointing out that Jobs had been unable to get Macintosh software developed, come up with new models, or win customers. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match about who was the worse manager. After Jobs stalked out, Sculley turned away from the glass wall of his office, where others had been looking in on the meeting, and wept.
72Matters began to come to a head on Tuesday, May 14, when the Macintosh team made its quarterly review presentation to Sculley and other Apple corporate leaders. Jobs still had not relinquished control of the division, and he was defiant when he arrived in the corporate boardroom with his team. He and Sculley began by clashing over what the division’s mission was. Jobs said it was to sell more Macintosh machines. Sculley said it was to serve the interests of the Apple company as a whole. As usual there was little cooperation among the divisions; for one thing, the Macintosh team was planning new disk drives that were different from those being developed by the Apple II division. The debate, according to the minutes, took a full hour.
73Jobs then described the projects under way: a more powerful Mac, which would take the place of the discontinued Lisa; and software called FileServer, which would allow Macintosh users to share files on a network. Sculley learned for the first time that these projects were going to be late. He gave a cold critique of Murray’s marketing record, Belleville’s missed engineering deadlines, and Jobs’s overall management. Despite all this, Jobs ended the meeting with a plea to Sculley, in front of all the others there, to be given one more chance to prove he could run a division. Sculley refused.
74That night Jobs took his Macintosh team out to dinner at Nina’s Café in Woodside. Jean-Louis Gassée was in town because Sculley wanted him to prepare to take over the Macintosh division, and Jobs invited him to join them. Belleville proposed a toast “to those of us who really understand what the world according to Steve Jobs is all about.” That phrase—“the world according to Steve”—had been used dismissively by others at Apple who belittled the reality warp he created. After the others left, Belleville sat with Jobs in his Mercedes and urged him to organize a battle to the death with Sculley.
75Months earlier, Apple had gotten the right to export computers to China, and Jobs had been invited to sign a deal in the Great Hall of the People over the 1985 Memorial Day weekend. He had told Sculley, who decided he wanted to go himself, which was just fine with Jobs. Jobs decided to use Sculley’s absence to execute his coup. Throughout the week leading up to Memorial Day, he took a lot of people on walks to share his plans. “I’m going to launch a coup while John is in China,” he told Mike Murray.
76
77Seven Days in May
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79Thursday, May 23: At his regular Thursday meeting with his top lieutenants in the Macintosh division, Jobs told his inner circle about his plan to oust Sculley. He also confided in the corporate human resources director, Jay Elliot, who told him bluntly that the proposed rebellion wouldn’t work. Elliot had talked to some board members and urged them to stand up for Jobs, but he discovered that most of the board was with Sculley, as were most members of Apple’s senior staff. Yet Jobs barreled ahead. He even revealed his plans to Gassée on a walk around the parking lot, despite the fact that Gassée had come from Paris to take his job. “I made the mistake of telling Gassée,” Jobs wryly conceded years later.
80
81That evening Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat had a small barbecue at his home for Sculley, Gassée, and their wives. When Gassée told Eisenstat what Jobs was plotting, he recommended that Gassée inform Sculley. “Steve was trying to raise a cabal and have a coup to get rid of John,” Gassée recalled. “In the den of Al Eisenstat’s house, I put my index finger lightly on John’s breastbone and said, ‘If you leave tomorrow for China, you could be ousted. Steve’s plotting to get rid of you.’”
82
83Friday, May 24: Sculley canceled his trip and decided to confront Jobs at the executive staff meeting on Friday morning. Jobs arrived late, and he saw that his usual seat next to Sculley, who sat at the head of the table, was taken. He sat instead at the far end. He was dressed in a well-tailored suit and looked energized. Sculley looked pale. He announced that he was dispensing with the agenda to confront the issue on everyone’s mind. “It’s come to my attention that you’d like to throw me out of the company,” he said, looking directly at Jobs. “I’d like to ask you if that’s true.”
84
85Jobs was not expecting this. But he was never shy about indulging in brutal honesty. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed Sculley with his unblinking stare. “I think you’re bad for Apple, and I think you’re the wrong person to run the company,” he replied, coldly and slowly. “You really should leave this company. You don’t know how to operate and never have.” He accused Sculley of not understanding the product development process, and then he added a self-centered swipe: “I wanted you here to help me grow, and you’ve been ineffective in helping me.”
86As the rest of the room sat frozen, Sculley finally lost his temper. A childhood stutter that had not afflicted him for twenty years started to return. “I
87don’t trust you, and I won’t tolerate a lack of trust,” he stammered. When Jobs claimed that he would be better than Sculley at running the company, Sculley took a gamble. He decided to poll the room on that question. “He pulled off this clever maneuver,” Jobs recalled, still smarting thirty-five years later. “It was at the executive committee meeting, and he said, ‘It’s me or Steve, who do you vote for?’ He set the whole thing up so that you’d kind of have to be an idiot to vote for me.”
88Suddenly the frozen onlookers began to squirm. Del Yocam had to go first. He said he loved Jobs, wanted him to continue to play some role in the company, but he worked up the nerve to conclude, with Jobs staring at him, that he “respected” Sculley and would support him to run the company. Eisenstat faced Jobs directly and said much the same thing: He liked Jobs but was supporting Sculley. Regis McKenna, who sat in on senior staff meetings as an outside consultant, was more direct. He looked at Jobs and told him he was not yet ready to run the company, something he had told him before. Others sided with Sculley as well. For Bill Campbell, it was particularly tough. He was fond of Jobs and didn’t particularly like Sculley. His voice quavered a bit as he told Jobs he had decided to support Sculley, and he urged the two of them to work it out and find some role for Jobs to play in the company. “You can’t let Steve leave this company,” he told Sculley.
89Jobs looked shattered. “I guess I know where things stand,” he said, and bolted out of the room. No one followed.
90He went back to his office, gathered his longtime loyalists on the Macintosh staff, and started to cry. He would have to leave Apple, he said. As he started to walk out the door, Debi Coleman restrained him. She and the others urged him to settle down and not do anything hasty. He should take the weekend to regroup. Perhaps there was a way to prevent the company from being torn apart.
91Sculley was devastated by his victory. Like a wounded warrior, he retreated to Eisenstat’s office and asked the corporate counsel to go for a ride. When they got into Eisenstat’s Porsche, Sculley lamented, “I don’t know whether I can go through with this.” When Eisenstat asked what he meant, Sculley responded, “I think I’m going to resign.”
92“You can’t,” Eisenstat protested. “Apple will fall apart.”
93“I’m going to resign,” Sculley declared. “I don’t think I’m right for the company.”
94“I think you’re copping out,” Eisenstat replied. “You’ve got to stand up to him.” Then he drove Sculley home.
95Sculley’s wife was surprised to see him back in the middle of the day. “I’ve failed,” he said to her forlornly. She was a volatile woman who had never liked Jobs or appreciated her husband’s infatuation with him. So when she heard what had happened, she jumped into her car and sped over to Jobs’s office. Informed that he had gone to the Good Earth restaurant, she marched over there and confronted him in the parking lot as he was coming out with loyalists on his Macintosh team.
96“Steve, can I talk to you?” she said. His jaw dropped. “Do you have any idea what a privilege it has been even to know someone as fine as John Sculley?” she demanded. He averted his gaze. “Can’t you look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you?” she asked. But when Jobs did so—giving her his practiced, unblinking stare—she recoiled. “Never mind, don’t look at me,” she said. “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.” Then she walked away.
97
98Saturday, May 25: Mike Murray drove to Jobs’s house in Woodside to offer some advice: He should consider accepting the role of being a new product visionary, starting AppleLabs, and getting away from headquarters. Jobs seemed willing to consider it. But first he would have to restore peace with Sculley. So he picked up the telephone and surprised Sculley with an olive branch. Could they meet the following afternoon, Jobs asked, and take a walk together in the hills above Stanford University. They had walked there in the past, in happier times, and maybe on such a walk they could work things out.
99
100Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn’t matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.
101If Jobs was prepping for conciliation, it didn’t show in the choice of movie he wanted to see with Murray that night. He picked Patton, the epic of the never-surrender general. But he had lent his copy of the tape to his father, who had once ferried troops for the general, so he drove to his childhood home with Murray to retrieve it. His parents weren’t there, and he didn’t have a key. They walked around the back, checked for unlocked
102doors or windows, and finally gave up. The video store didn’t have a copy of Patton in stock, so in the end he had to settle for watching the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.
103
104Sunday, May 26: As planned, Jobs and Sculley met in back of the Stanford campus on Sunday afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling hills and horse pastures. Jobs reiterated his plea that he should have an operational role at Apple. This time Sculley stood firm. It won’t work, he kept saying. Sculley urged him to take the role of being a product visionary with a lab of his own, but Jobs rejected this as making him into a mere “figurehead.” Defying all connection to reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley give up control of the entire company to him. “Why don’t you become chairman and I’ll become president and chief executive officer?” he suggested. Sculley was struck by how earnest he seemed.
105
106“Steve, that doesn’t make any sense,” Sculley replied. Jobs then proposed that they split the duties of running the company, with him handling the product side and Sculley handling marketing and business. But the board had not only emboldened Sculley, it had ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. “One person has got to run the company,” he replied. “I’ve got the support and you don’t.”
107On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike Markkula’s house. He wasn’t there, so Jobs left a message asking him to come to dinner the following evening. He would also invite the core of loyalists from his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could persuade Markkula of the folly of siding with Sculley.
108
109Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm. The Macintosh team loyalists—Debi Coleman, Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Belleville—got to Jobs’s Woodside home an hour before the scheduled dinner so they could plot strategy. Sitting on the patio as the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should accept Sculley’s offer to be a product visionary and help start up AppleLabs. Of all the inner circle, Coleman was the most willing to be realistic. In the new organization plan, Sculley had tapped her to run the manufacturing division because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple and not just to Jobs. Some of the others were more hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.
110
111When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen with one proviso: Jobs had to keep quiet. “I seriously wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not watch Jobs enlist them in a rebellion,” he recalled. As it turned cooler, they went inside the sparsely furnished mansion and sat by a fireplace. Instead of letting it turn into a gripe session, Markkula made them focus on very specific management issues, such as what had caused the problem in producing the FileServer software and why the Macintosh distribution system had not responded well to the change in demand. When they were finished, Markkula bluntly declined to back Jobs. “I said I wouldn’t support his plan, and that was the end of that,” Markkula recalled. “Sculley was the boss. They were mad and emotional and putting together a revolt, but that’s not how you do things.”
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113Tuesday, May 28: His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs’s office on Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out. Then he drove to Markkula’s house, where he gave a presentation of his reorganization plans. Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave Sculley his blessing. When he got back to his office, Sculley called the other members of the board, just to make sure he still had their backing. He did.
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115At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given final approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week. Gassée would take over control of Jobs’s beloved Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no other division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay on with the title of board chairman and be a product visionary with no operational duties. But by this point, even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no longer on the table.
116It finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the reality. He broke down in tears and started making phone calls—to Bill Campbell, Jay Elliot, Mike Murray, and others. Murray’s wife, Joyce, was on an overseas call when Jobs phoned, and the operator broke in saying it was an emergency. It better be important, she told the operator. “It is,” she heard Jobs say. When her husband got on the phone, Jobs was crying. “It’s over,” he said. Then he hung up.
117Murray was worried that Jobs was so despondent he might do something rash, so he called back. There was no answer, so he drove to Woodside. No one came to the door when he knocked, so he went around back and climbed up some exterior steps and looked in the bedroom. Jobs was lying there on a mattress in his unfurnished room. He let Murray in and they talked until almost dawn.
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119Wednesday, May 29: Jobs finally got hold of a tape of Patton, which he watched Wednesday evening, but Murray prevented him from getting stoked up for another battle. Instead he urged Jobs to come in on Friday for Sculley’s announcement of the reorganization plan. There was no option left other than to play the good soldier rather than the renegade commander.
120
121Like a Rolling Stone
122
123Jobs slipped quietly into the back row of the auditorium to listen to Sculley explain to the troops the new order of battle. There were a lot of sideways glances, but few people acknowledged him and none came over to provide public displays of affection. He stared without blinking at Sculley, who would remember “Steve’s look of contempt” years later. “It’s unyielding,” Sculley recalled, “like an X-ray boring inside your bones, down to where you’re soft and destructibly mortal.” For a moment, standing onstage while pretending not to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year earlier to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land. He had been dethroned from the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in disgust, “All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him.” Now, Sculley reflected, he was taking Jobs’s company away from him.
124As Sculley went over the organizational chart, he introduced Gassée as the new head of a combined Macintosh and Apple II product group. On the chart was a small box labeled “chairman” with no lines connecting to it, not to Sculley or to anyone else. Sculley briefly noted that in that role, Jobs would play the part of “global visionary.” But he didn’t acknowledge Jobs’s presence. There was a smattering of awkward applause.
125Jobs stayed home for the next few days, blinds drawn, his answering machine on, seeing only his girlfriend, Tina Redse. For hours on end he sat there playing his Bob Dylan tapes, especially “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” He had recited the second verse the day he unveiled the Macintosh to the Apple shareholders sixteen months earlier. That verse ended nicely: “For the loser now / Will be later to win. . . .”
126A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse arrived to dispel the gloom on Sunday night, led by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to answer their knock, and then he led them to a room next to the kitchen that was one of the few places with any furniture. With Redse’s help, he served some vegetarian food he had ordered. “So what really happened?” Hertzfeld asked. “Is it really as bad as it looks?”
127“No, it’s worse.” Jobs grimaced. “It’s much worse than you can imagine.” He blamed Sculley for betraying him, and said that Apple would not be able to manage without him. His role as chairman, he complained, was completely ceremonial. He was being ejected from his Bandley 3 office to a small and almost empty building he nicknamed “Siberia.” Hertzfeld turned the topic to happier days, and they began to reminisce about the past.
128Earlier that week, Dylan had released a new album, Empire Burlesque, and Hertzfeld brought a copy that they played on Jobs’s high-tech turntable. The most notable track, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” with its apocalyptic message, seemed appropriate for the evening,
129but Jobs didn’t like it. It sounded almost disco, and he gloomily argued that Dylan had been going downhill since Blood on the Tracks. So Hertzfeld moved the needle to the last song on the album, “Dark Eyes,” which was a simple acoustic number featuring Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica. It was slow and mournful and, Hertzfeld hoped, would remind Jobs of the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved. But Jobs didn’t like that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of the album.
130Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned him. “It gets back to the deep feeling of being rejected at an early age,” his friend and lawyer George Riley later said. “It’s a deep part of his own mythology, and it defines to himself who he is.” Jobs recalled years later, “I felt like I’d been punched, the air knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe.”
131Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially painful. “Arthur had been like a father to me,” Jobs said. “He took me under his wing.” Rock had taught him about opera, and he and his wife, Toni, had been his hosts in San Francisco and Aspen. “I remember driving into San Francisco one time, and I said to him, ‘God, that Bank of America building is ugly,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s the best,’ and he proceeded to lecture me, and he was right of course.” Years later Jobs’s eyes welled with tears as he recounted the story: “He chose Sculley over me. That really threw me for a loop. I never thought he would abandon me.”
132Making matters worse was that his beloved company was now in the hands of a man he considered a bozo. “The board felt that I couldn’t run a company, and that was their decision to make,” he said. “But they made one mistake. They should have separated the decision of what to do with me and what to do with Sculley. They should have fired Sculley, even if they didn’t think I was ready to run Apple.” Even as his personal gloom slowly lifted, his anger at Sculley, his feeling of betrayal, deepened.
133The situation worsened when Sculley told a group of analysts that he considered Jobs irrelevant to the company, despite his title as chairman. “From an operations standpoint, there is no role either today or in the future for Steve Jobs,” he said. “I don’t know what he’ll do.” The blunt comment shocked the group, and a gasp went through the auditorium.
134Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs thought. So in June he went to Paris, where he spoke at an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice President George H. W. Bush. From there he went to Italy, where he drove the hills of Tuscany with Redse and bought a bike so he could spend time riding by himself. In Florence he soaked in the architecture of the city and the texture of the building materials. Particularly memorable were the paving stones, which came from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. They were a calming bluish gray. Twenty years later he would decide that the floors of most major Apple stores would be made of this sandstone.
135The Apple II was just going on sale in Russia, so Jobs headed off to Moscow, where he met up with Al Eisenstat. Because there was a problem
136getting Washington’s approval for some of the required export licenses, they visited the commercial attaché at the American embassy in Moscow,
137Mike Merwin. He warned them that there were strict laws against sharing technology with the Soviets. Jobs was annoyed. At the Paris trade show, Vice President Bush had encouraged him to get computers into Russia in order to “foment revolution from below.” Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs continued his rant. “How could you suggest this violates American law when it so obviously benefits our interests?” he asked Merwin. “By putting Macs in the hands of Russians, they could print all their newspapers.”
138Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by insisting on talking about Trotsky, the charismatic revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered assassinated by Stalin. At one point the KGB agent assigned to him suggested he tone down his fervor. “You don’t want to talk about Trotsky,” he said. “Our historians have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a great man anymore.” That didn’t help. When they got to the state university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising Trotsky. He was a revolutionary Jobs could identify with.
139Jobs and Eisenstat attended the July Fourth party at the American embassy, and in his thank-you letter to Ambassador Arthur Hartman, Eisenstat noted that Jobs planned to pursue Apple’s ventures in Russia more vigorously in the coming year. “We are tentatively planning on returning to Moscow in September.” For a moment it looked as if Sculley’s hope that Jobs would turn into a “global visionary” for the company might come to pass. But it was not to be. Something much different was in store for September.
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141CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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143
144
145NeXT
146
147Prometheus Unbound
148
149The Pirates Abandon Ship
150
151Upon his return from Europe in August 1985, while he was casting about for what to do next, Jobs called the Stanford biochemist Paul Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks to nurture an experiment and get a result. “Why don’t you simulate them on a computer?” Jobs asked. Berg replied that computers with such capacities were too expensive for university labs. “Suddenly, he was excited about the possibilities,” Berg recalled. “He had it in his mind to start a new company. He was young and rich, and had to find something to do with the rest of his life.”
152Jobs had already been canvassing academics to ask what their workstation needs were. It was something he had been interested in since 1983, when he had visited the computer science department at Brown to show off the Macintosh, only to be told that it would take a far more powerful machine to do anything useful in a university lab. The dream of academic researchers was to have a workstation that was both powerful and personal. As head of the Macintosh division, Jobs had launched a project to build such a machine, which was dubbed the Big Mac. It would have a UNIX operating system but with the friendly Macintosh interface. But after Jobs was ousted from the Macintosh division, his replacement, Jean- Louis Gassée, canceled the Big Mac.
153When that happened, Jobs got a distressed call from Rich Page, who had been engineering the Big Mac’s chip set. It was the latest in a series of conversations that Jobs was having with disgruntled Apple employees urging him to start a new company and rescue them. Plans to do so began to jell over Labor Day weekend, when Jobs spoke to Bud Tribble, the original Macintosh software chief, and floated the idea of starting a company to build a powerful but personal workstation. He also enlisted two other Macintosh division employees who had been talking about leaving, the engineer George Crow and the controller Susan Barnes.
154That left one key vacancy on the team: a person who could market the new product to universities. The obvious candidate was Dan’l Lewin, who at Apple had organized a consortium of universities to buy Macintosh computers in bulk. Besides missing two letters in his first name, Lewin had the chiseled good looks of Clark Kent and a Princetonian’s polish. He and Jobs shared a bond: Lewin had written a Princeton thesis on Bob Dylan and charismatic leadership, and Jobs knew something about both of those topics.
155Lewin’s university consortium had been a godsend to the Macintosh group, but he had become frustrated after Jobs left and Bill Campbell had reorganized marketing in a way that reduced the role of direct sales to universities. He had been meaning to call Jobs when, that Labor Day weekend, Jobs called first. He drove to Jobs’s unfurnished mansion, and they walked the grounds while discussing the possibility of creating a new company. Lewin was excited, but not ready to commit. He was going to Austin with Campbell the following week, and he wanted to wait until then to decide. Upon his return, he gave his answer: He was in. The news came just in time for the September 13 Apple board meeting.
156Although Jobs was still nominally the board’s chairman, he had not been to any meetings since he lost power. He called Sculley, said he was going to attend, and asked that an item be added to the end of the agenda for a “chairman’s report.” He didn’t say what it was about, and Sculley assumed it would be a criticism of the latest reorganization. Instead, when his turn came to speak, Jobs described to the board his plans to start a new company. “I’ve been thinking a lot, and it’s time for me to get on with my life,” he began. “It’s obvious that I’ve got to do something. I’m thirty years old.” Then he referred to some prepared notes to describe his plan to create a computer for the higher education market. The new company would not be competitive with Apple, he promised, and he would take with him only a handful of non-key personnel. He offered to resign as chairman of Apple, but he expressed hope that they could work together. Perhaps Apple would want to buy the distribution rights to his product, he suggested, or license Macintosh software to it.
157Mike Markkula rankled at the possibility that Jobs would hire anyone from Apple. “Why would you take anyone at all?” he asked.
158“Don’t get upset,” Jobs assured him and the rest of the board. “These are very low-level people that you won’t miss, and they will be leaving anyway.”
159The board initially seemed disposed to wish Jobs well in his venture. After a private discussion, the directors even proposed that Apple take a
16010% stake in the new company and that Jobs remain on the board.
161That night Jobs and his five renegades met again at his house for dinner. He was in favor of taking the Apple investment, but the others convinced him it was unwise. They also agreed that it would be best if they resigned all at once, right away. Then they could make a clean break.
162So Jobs wrote a formal letter telling Sculley the names of the five who would be leaving, signed it in his spidery lowercase signature, and drove to
163Apple the next morning to hand it to him before his 7:30 staff meeting. “Steve, these are not low-level people,” Sculley said.
164“Well, these people were going to resign anyway,” Jobs replied. “They are going to be handing in their resignations by nine this morning.”
165From Jobs’s perspective, he had been honest. The five were not division managers or members of Sculley’s top team. They had all felt diminished, in fact, by the company’s new organization. But from Sculley’s perspective, these were important players; Page was an Apple Fellow, and Lewin was a key to the higher education market. In addition, they knew about the plans for Big Mac; even though it had been shelved, this was still proprietary information. Nevertheless Sculley was sanguine. Instead of pushing the point, he asked Jobs to remain on the board. Jobs replied that he would think about it.
166But when Sculley walked into his 7:30 staff meeting and told his top lieutenants who was leaving, there was an uproar. Most of them felt that Jobs had breached his duties as chairman and displayed stunning disloyalty to the company. “We should expose him for the fraud that he is so that people here stop regarding him as a messiah,” Campbell shouted, according to Sculley.
167Campbell admitted that, although he later became a great Jobs defender and supportive board member, he was ballistic that morning. “I was fucking furious, especially about him taking Dan’l Lewin,” he recalled. “Dan’l had built the relationships with the universities. He was always muttering about how hard it was to work with Steve, and then he left.” Campbell was so angry that he walked out of the meeting to call Lewin at home. When his wife said he was in the shower, Campbell said, “I’ll wait.” A few minutes later, when she said he was still in the shower, Campbell again said, “I’ll wait.” When Lewin finally came on the phone, Campbell asked him if it was true. Lewin acknowledged it was. Campbell hung up
168without saying another word.
169After hearing the fury of his senior staff, Sculley surveyed the members of the board. They likewise felt that Jobs had misled them with his pledge that he would not raid important employees. Arthur Rock was especially angry. Even though he had sided with Sculley during the Memorial Day showdown, he had been able to repair his paternal relationship with Jobs. Just the week before, he had invited Jobs to bring his girlfriend up to San Francisco so that he and his wife could meet her, and the four had a nice dinner in Rock’s Pacific Heights home. Jobs had not mentioned the new company he was forming, so Rock felt betrayed when he heard about it from Sculley. “He came to the board and lied to us,” Rock growled later. “He told us he was thinking of forming a company when in fact he had already formed it. He said he was going to take a few middle-level people. It turned out to be five senior people.” Markkula, in his subdued way, was also offended. “He took some top executives he had secretly lined up before he left. That’s not the way you do things. It was ungentlemanly.”
170Over the weekend both the board and the executive staff convinced Sculley that Apple would have to declare war on its cofounder. Markkula issued a formal statement accusing Jobs of acting “in direct contradiction to his statements that he wouldn’t recruit any key Apple personnel for his
171company.” He added ominously, “We are evaluating what possible actions should be taken.” Campbell was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying he “was stunned and shocked” by Jobs’s behavior.
172Jobs had left his meeting with Sculley thinking that things might proceed smoothly, so he had kept quiet. But after reading the newspapers, he felt that he had to respond. He phoned a few favored reporters and invited them to his home for private briefings the next day. Then he called Andy Cunningham, who had handled his publicity at Regis McKenna. “I went over to his unfurnished mansiony place in Woodside,” she recalled, “and I found him huddled in the kitchen with his five colleagues and a few reporters hanging outside on the lawn.” Jobs told her that he was going to do a full-fledged press conference and started spewing some of the derogatory things he was going to say. Cunningham was appalled. “This is going to reflect badly on you,” she told him. Finally he backed down. He decided that he would give the reporters a copy of the resignation letter and limit any on-the-record comments to a few bland statements.
173Jobs had considered just mailing in his letter of resignation, but Susan Barnes convinced him that this would be too contemptuous. Instead he drove it to Markkula’s house, where he also found Al Eisenstat. There was a tense conversation for about fifteen minutes; then Barnes, who had been waiting outside, came to the door to retrieve him before he said anything he would regret. He left behind the letter, which he had composed on a Macintosh and printed on the new LaserWriter:
174
175Dear Mike:
176
177September 17, 1985
178
179This morning’s papers carried suggestions that Apple is considering removing me as Chairman. I don’t knowthe source of these reports
180
181but they are both misleading to the public and unfair to me.
182
183You will recall that at last Thursday’s Board meeting I stated I had decided to start a new venture and I tendered my resignation as
184
185Chairman.
186
187The Board declined to accept my resignation and asked me to defer it for a week. I agreed to do so in light of the encouragement the
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189Board offered with regard to the proposed new venture and the indications that Apple would invest in it. On Friday, after I told John Sculley
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191who would be joining me, he confirmed Apple’s willingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration between Apple and my newventure.
192
193Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture toward me and the newventure. Accordingly, I must insist upon the
194
195immediate acceptance of my resignation. . . .
196
197As you know, the company’s recent reorganization left me with no work to do and no access even to regular management reports. I am
198
199but 30 and want still to contribute and achieve.
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201After what we have accomplished together, I would wish our parting to be both amicable and dignified.
202
203Yours sincerely, steven p. jobs
204
205When a guy from the facilities team went to Jobs’s office to pack up his belongings, he saw a picture frame on the floor. It contained a photograph of Jobs and Sculley in warm conversation, with an inscription from seven months earlier: “Here’s to Great Ideas, Great Experiences, and a Great Friendship! John.” The glass frame was shattered. Jobs had hurled it across the room before leaving. From that day, he never spoke to Sculley again.
206Apple’s stock went up a full point, or almost 7%, when Jobs’s resignation was announced. “East Coast stockholders always worried about California flakes running the company,” explained the editor of a tech stock newsletter. “Now with both Wozniak and Jobs out, those shareholders are relieved.” But Nolan Bushnell, the Atari founder who had been an amused mentor ten years earlier, told Time that Jobs would be badly missed. “Where is Apple’s inspiration going to come from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new brand of Pepsi?”
207After a few days of failed efforts to reach a settlement with Jobs, Sculley and the Apple board decided to sue him “for breaches of fiduciary obligations.” The suit spelled out his alleged transgressions:
208Notwithstanding his fiduciary obligations to Apple, Jobs, while serving as the Chairman of Apple’s Board of Directors and an officer of Apple and pretending loyalty to the interests of Apple . . .
209(a) secretly planned the formation of an enterprise to compete with Apple;
210(b) secretly schemed that his competing enterprise would wrongfully take advantage of and utilize Apple’s plan to design, develop and market the Next Generation Product . . .
211(c) secretly lured away key employees of Apple.
212At the time, Jobs owned 6.5 million shares of Apple stock, 11% of the company, worth more than $100 million. He began to sell his shares, and within five months had dumped them all, retaining only one share so he could attend shareholder meetings if he wanted. He was furious, and that was reflected in his passion to start what was, no matter how he spun it, a rival company. “He was angry at Apple,” said Joanna Hoffman, who briefly went to work for the new company. “Aiming at the educational market, where Apple was strong, was simply Steve being vengeful. He was doing it for revenge.”
213Jobs, of course, didn’t see it that way. “I haven’t got any sort of odd chip on my shoulder,” he told Newsweek. Once again he invited his favorite
214reporters over to his Woodside home, and this time he did not have Andy Cunningham there urging him to be circumspect. He dismissed the
215allegation that he had improperly lured the five colleagues from Apple. “These people all called me,” he told the gaggle of journalists who were milling around in his unfurnished living room. “They were thinking of leaving the company. Apple has a way of neglecting people.”
216He decided to cooperate with a Newsweek cover in order to get his version of the story out, and the interview he gave was revealing. “What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them,” he told the magazine. He said that he would always harbor affection for Apple. “I’ll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he’s fallen in love with.” But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. “When someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond.” Apple’s threat to sue him was outrageous. It was also sad. It showed that Apple was no longer a confident, rebellious company. “It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 employees couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans.”
217To try to counter Jobs’s spin, Sculley called Wozniak and urged him to speak out. “Steve can be an insulting and hurtful guy,” he told Time that week. He revealed that Jobs had asked him to join his new firm—it would have been a sly way to land another blow against Apple’s current management—but he wanted no part of such games and had not returned Jobs’s phone call. To the San Francisco Chronicle, he recounted how Jobs had blocked frogdesign from working on his remote control under the pretense that it might compete with Apple products. “I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust,” Wozniak said.
218
219To Be on Your Own
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221“The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost,” Arthur Rock later said. The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love made him wiser and more mature. But it’s not that simple. At the company he founded after being ousted from Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a series of spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. This was the true learning experience. What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II.
222The first instinct that he indulged was his passion for design. The name he chose for his new company was rather straightforward: Next. In order to make it more distinctive, he decided he needed a world-class logo. So he courted the dean of corporate logos, Paul Rand. At seventy-one, the Brooklyn-born graphic designer had already created some of the best-known logos in business, including those of Esquire, IBM, Westinghouse, ABC, and UPS. He was under contract to IBM, and his supervisors there said that it would obviously be a conflict for him to create a logo for another computer company. So Jobs picked up the phone and called IBM’s CEO, John Akers. Akers was out of town, but Jobs was so persistent that he was finally put through to Vice Chairman Paul Rizzo. After two days, Rizzo concluded that it was futile to resist Jobs, and he gave permission for Rand to do the work.
223Rand flew out to Palo Alto and spent time walking with Jobs and listening to his vision. The computer would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that shape. It was perfect and simple. So Rand decided that the logo should be a cube as well, one that was tilted at a 28° angle. When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.”
224Jobs admired that kind of thinking, so he made what was quite a gamble. The company would pay an astonishing $100,000 flat fee to get one design. “There was a clarity in our relationship,” Jobs said. “He had a purity as an artist, but he was astute at solving business problems. He had a tough exterior, and had perfected the image of a curmudgeon, but he was a teddy bear inside.” It was one of Jobs’s highest praises: purity as an artist.
225It took Rand just two weeks. He flew back to deliver the result to Jobs at his Woodside house. First they had dinner, then Rand handed him an elegant and vibrant booklet that described his thought process. On the final spread, Rand presented the logo he had chosen. “In its design, color arrangement, and orientation, the logo is a study in contrasts,” his booklet proclaimed. “Tipped at a jaunty angle, it brims with the informality, friendliness, and spontaneity of a Christmas seal and the authority of a rubber stamp.” The word “next” was split into two lines to fill the square face of the cube, with only the “e” in lowercase. That letter stood out, Rand’s booklet explained, to connote “education, excellence . . . e = mc2.”
226It was often hard to predict how Jobs would react to a presentation. He could label it shitty or brilliant; one never knew which way he might go. But with a legendary designer such as Rand, the chances were that Jobs would embrace the proposal. He stared at the final spread, looked up at Rand, and then hugged him. They had one minor disagreement: Rand had used a dark yellow for the “e” in the logo, and Jobs wanted him to change it to a brighter and more traditional yellow. Rand banged his fist on the table and declared, “I’ve been doing this for fifty years, and I know what I’m doing.” Jobs relented.
227The company had not only a new logo, but a new name. No longer was it Next. It was NeXT. Others might not have understood the need to obsess over a logo, much less pay $100,000 for one. But for Jobs it meant that NeXT was starting life with a world-class feel and identity, even if it hadn’t yet designed its first product. As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.
228As a bonus, Rand agreed to design a personal calling card for Jobs. He came up with a colorful type treatment, which Jobs liked, but they ended up having a lengthy and heated disagreement about the placement of the period after the “P” in Steven P. Jobs. Rand had placed the period to the right of the “P.”, as it would appear if set in lead type. Steve preferred the period to be nudged to the left, under the curve of the “P.”, as is possible with digital typography. “It was a fairly large argument about something relatively small,” Susan Kare recalled. On this one Jobs prevailed.
229In order to translate the NeXT logo into the look of real products, Jobs needed an industrial designer he trusted. He talked to a few possibilities, but none of them impressed him as much as the wild Bavarian he had imported to Apple: Hartmut Esslinger, whose frogdesign had set up shop in Silicon Valley and who, thanks to Jobs, had a lucrative contract with Apple. Getting IBM to permit Paul Rand to do work for NeXT was a small miracle willed into existence by Jobs’s belief that reality can be distorted. But that was a snap compared to the likelihood that he could convince Apple to permit Esslinger to work for NeXT.
230This did not keep Jobs from trying. At the beginning of November 1985, just five weeks after Apple filed suit against him, Jobs wrote to Eisenstat and asked for a dispensation. “I spoke with Hartmut Esslinger this weekend and he suggested I write you a note expressing why I wish to work with him and frogdesign on the new products for NeXT,” he said. Astonishingly, Jobs’s argument was that he did not know what Apple had in the works, but Esslinger did. “NeXT has no knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s product designs, nor do other design firms we might deal with, so it is possible to inadvertently design similar looking products. It is in both Apple’s and NeXT’s best interest to rely on Hartmut’s professionalism to make sure this does not occur.” Eisenstat recalled being flabbergasted by Jobs’s audacity, and he replied curtly. “I have previously expressed my concern on behalf of Apple that you are engaged in a business course which involves your utilization of Apple’s confidential business information,” he wrote. “Your letter does not alleviate my concern in any way. In fact it heightens my concern because it states that you have ‘no knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s product designs,’ a statement which is not true.” What made the
231request all the more astonishing to Eisenstat was that it was Jobs who, just a year earlier, had forced frogdesign to abandon its work on Wozniak’s
232remote control device.
233Jobs realized that in order to work with Esslinger (and for a variety of other reasons), it would be necessary to resolve the lawsuit that Apple had filed. Fortunately Sculley was willing. In January 1986 they reached an out-of-court agreement involving no financial damages. In return for Apple’s dropping its suit, NeXT agreed to a variety of restrictions: Its product would be marketed as a high-end workstation, it would be sold directly to colleges and universities, and it would not ship before March 1987. Apple also insisted that the NeXT machine “not use an operating system compatible with the Macintosh,” though it could be argued that Apple would have been better served by insisting on just the opposite.
234After the settlement Jobs continued to court Esslinger until the designer decided to wind down his contract with Apple. That allowed frogdesign to work with NeXT at the end of 1986. Esslinger insisted on having free rein, just as Paul Rand had. “Sometimes you have to use a big stick with Steve,” he said. Like Rand, Esslinger was an artist, so Jobs was willing to grant him indulgences he denied other mortals.
235Jobs decreed that the computer should be an absolutely perfect cube, with each side exactly a foot long and every angle precisely 90 degrees. He liked cubes. They had gravitas but also the slight whiff of a toy. But the NeXT cube was a Jobsian example of design desires trumping engineering considerations. The circuit boards, which fitted nicely into the traditional pizza-box shape, had to be reconfigured and stacked in order to nestle into a cube.
236Even worse, the perfection of the cube made it hard to manufacture. Most parts that are cast in molds have angles that are slightly greater than pure 90 degrees, so that it’s easier to get them out of the mold (just as it is easier to get a cake out of a pan that has angles slightly greater than 90 degrees). But Esslinger dictated, and Jobs enthusiastically agreed, that there would be no such “draft angles” that would ruin the purity and perfection of the cube. So the sides had to be produced separately, using molds that cost $650,000, at a specialty machine shop in Chicago. Jobs’s passion for perfection was out of control. When he noticed a tiny line in the chassis caused by the molds, something that any other computer maker would accept as unavoidable, he flew to Chicago and convinced the die caster to start over and do it perfectly. “Not a lot of die casters expect a celebrity to fly in,” noted one of the engineers. Jobs also had the company buy a $150,000 sanding machine to remove all lines where the mold faces met and insisted that the magnesium case be a matte black, which made it more susceptible to showing blemishes.
237Jobs had always indulged his obsession that the unseen parts of a product should be crafted as beautifully as its façade, just as his father had taught him when they were building a fence. This too he took to extremes when he found himself unfettered at NeXT. He made sure that the screws inside the machine had expensive plating. He even insisted that the matte black finish be coated onto the inside of the cube’s case, even though only repairmen would see it.
238Joe Nocera, then writing for Esquire, captured Jobs’s intensity at a NeXT staff meeting:
239It’s not quite right to say that he is sitting through this staff meeting, because Jobs doesn’t sit through much of anything; one of the ways he dominates is through sheer movement. One moment he’s kneeling in his chair; the next minute he’s slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him. He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in constant motion.
240What particularly struck Nocera was Jobs’s “almost willful lack of tact.” It was more than just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter. When Dan’l Lewin handed out an organization chart, for example, Jobs rolled his eyes. “These charts are bullshit,” he interjected. Yet his moods still swung wildly, as at Apple. A finance person came into the meeting and Jobs lavished praise on him for a “really, really great job on this”; the previous day Jobs had told him, “This deal is crap.”
241One of NeXT’s first ten employees was an interior designer for the company’s first headquarters, in Palo Alto. Even though Jobs had leased a building that was new and nicely designed, he had it completely gutted and rebuilt. Walls were replaced by glass, the carpets were replaced by light hardwood flooring. The process was repeated when NeXT moved to a bigger space in Redwood City in 1989. Even though the building was brand-new, Jobs insisted that the elevators be moved so that the entrance lobby would be more dramatic. As a centerpiece, Jobs commissioned I. M. Pei to design a grand staircase that seemed to float in the air. The contractor said it couldn’t be built. Jobs said it could, and it was. Years later Jobs would make such staircases a feature at Apple’s signature stores.
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243The Computer
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245During the early months of NeXT, Jobs and Dan’l Lewin went on the road, often accompanied by a few colleagues, to visit campuses and solicit opinions. At Harvard they met with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of Lotus software, over dinner at Harvest restaurant. When Kapor began slathering butter on his bread, Jobs asked him, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Kapor responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your personality.” It was meant humorously, but as Kapor later commented, “Human relationships were not his strong suit.” Lotus agreed to write a spreadsheet program for the NeXT operating system.
246Jobs wanted to bundle useful content with the machine, so Michael Hawley, one of the engineers, developed a digital dictionary. He learned that a friend of his at Oxford University Press had been involved in the typesetting of a new edition of Shakespeare’s works. That meant that there was probably a computer tape he could get his hands on and, if so, incorporate it into the NeXT’s memory. “So I called up Steve, and he said that would be awesome, and we flew over to Oxford together.” On a beautiful spring day in 1986, they met in the publishing house’s grand building in the heart of Oxford, where Jobs made an offer of $2,000 plus 74 cents for every computer sold in order to have the rights to Oxford’s edition of Shakespeare. “It will be all gravy to you,” he argued. “You will be ahead of the parade. It’s never been done before.” They agreed in principle and then went out to play skittles over beer at a nearby pub where Lord Byron used to drink. By the time it launched, the NeXT would also include a dictionary, a
247thesaurus, and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, making it one of the pioneers of the concept of searchable electronic books.
248Instead of using off-the-shelf chips for the NeXT, Jobs had his engineers design custom ones that integrated a variety of functions on one chip.
249That would have been hard enough, but Jobs made it almost impossible by continually revising the functions he wanted it to do. After a year it became clear that this would be a major source of delay.
250He also insisted on building his own fully automated and futuristic factory, just as he had for the Macintosh; he had not been chastened by that experience. This time too he made the same mistakes, only more excessively. Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme. The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase, just as in the corporate headquarters. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the
251viewing gallery. Empty circuit boards were fed in at one end and twenty minutes later, untouched by humans, came out the other end as completed
252boards. The process followed the Japanese principle known as kanban, in which each machine performs its task only when the next machine is ready to receive another part.
253Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. “He applied charm or public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective,” Tribble recalled. But sometimes it wasn’t. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the first ten months at NeXT.
254He quit when “Steve walked in one Friday afternoon and told us how unimpressed he was with what we were doing.” When Business Week asked him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of field trips, visits by akido masters, and off-site retreats. And he still exuded the pirate flag spunkiness. When Apple fired Chiat/Day, the ad firm that had done the
255“1984” ad and taken out the newspaper ad saying “Welcome IBM—seriously,” Jobs took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming, “Congratulations Chiat/Day—Seriously . . . Because I can guarantee you: there is life after Apple.”
256Perhaps the greatest similarity to his days at Apple was that Jobs brought with him his reality distortion field. It was on display at the company’s first retreat at Pebble Beach in late 1985. There Jobs pronounced that the first NeXT computer would be shipped in just eighteen months. It was already clear that this date was impossible, but he blew off a suggestion from one engineer that they be realistic and plan on shipping in 1988. “If we do that, the world isn’t standing still, the technology window passes us by, and all the work we’ve done we have to throw down the toilet,” he argued.
257Joanna Hoffman, the veteran of the Macintosh team who was among those willing to challenge Jobs, did so. “Reality distortion has motivational value, and I think that’s fine,” she said as Jobs stood at a whiteboard. “However, when it comes to setting a date in a way that affects the design of the product, then we get into real deep shit.” Jobs didn’t agree: “I think we have to drive a stake in the ground somewhere, and I think if we miss this window, then our credibility starts to erode.” What he did not say, even though it was suspected by all, was that if their targets slipped they might run out of money. Jobs had pledged $7 million of his own funds, but at their current burn rate that would run out in eighteen months if they didn’t start getting some revenue from shipped products.
258Three months later, when they returned to Pebble Beach for their next retreat, Jobs began his list of maxims with “The honeymoon is over.” By the time of the third retreat, in Sonoma in September 1986, the timetable was gone, and it looked as though the company would hit a financial wall.
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260Perot to the Rescue